Mitigation insights from emergency managers on working with stakeholders
Journal of Emergency Management2023
Emergency managers have the important responsibility of planning and implementing mitigation policies and programs to reduce losses to life and property. To accomplish these goals, they must use limited time and resources to ensure the communities they serve have adequately mitigated against potential disasters. As a result, it is common to collaborate and coordinate with a wide variety of partner agencies and community organizations. While it is well established that strengthening relationships and increasing familiarity improve coordination, this article advances that narrative by providing direct insights on the ways a select group of local, state, and federal emergency managers view relationships with other mitigation stakeholders. Using insights from a 1-day workshop hosted at the University of Delaware to gather information from mitigation stakeholders, this article provides a discussion of commonalities and challenges workshop participants identified with other stakeholder groups. These insights can inform other emergency managers about potential collaborators and coordination opportunities with similar stakeholders in their own communities.
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Modeling Evacuees’ Intended Responses to a Phased Hurricane Evacuation Order
Applied Sciences2023
Phased evacuation is an under-studied strategy, and relatively little is known about compliance with the phased process. This study modelled households’ responses to a phased evacuation order based on a household behavioral intention survey. About 66% of the evacuees reported that they would comply with a phased evacuation order. A latent class logit model sorted evacuees into two classes (“evacuation reluctant” and “evacuation keen”) by their stakeholder perceptions (i.e., whether government agencies have responsibility for the safety of individuals) and evacuation perceptions (i.e., whether evacuation is an effective protective action), while risk perception becomes non-significant in interpreting their compliance behavior to a phased evacuation order. Those that evacuate to the home of friends/relatives and/or bring more vehicles during evacuation are less likely to follow phased evacuation orders. “Evacuation reluctant” individuals with a longer housing tenure are more likely to follow phased evacuation orders. “Evacuation keen” individuals with a longer travel delay expectation are more likely to comply with phased evacuation orders. This study not only unveiled the impacts of incorporating three psychological perceptions (i.e., risk, stakeholder, and evacuation perceptions) in modeling compliance behavior (e.g., parameter sign/significance shift) but also provides insights of evacuees’ compliance behavior to phased evacuation orders.
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Dynamic modeling of public and private decision‐making for hurricane risk management including insurance, acquisition, and mitigation policy
Risk Management and Insurance Review2022
We develop a computational framework for the stochastic and dynamic modeling of regional natural catastrophe losses with an insurance industry to support government decision-making for hurricane risk management. The analysis captures the temporal changes in the building inventory due to the acquisition (buyouts) of high-risk properties and the vulnerability of the building stock due to retrofit mitigation decisions. The system is comprised of a set of interacting models to (1) simulate hazard events; (2) estimate regional hurricane-induced losses from each hazard event based on an evolving building inventory; (3) capture acquisition offer acceptance, retrofit implementation, and insurance purchase behaviors of homeowners; and (4) represent an insurance market sensitive to demand with strategically interrelated primary insurers. This framework is linked to a simulation-optimization model to optimize decision-making by a government entity whose objective is to minimize region-wide hurricane losses. We examine the effect of different policies on homeowner mitigation, insurance take-up rate, insurer profit, and solvency in a case study using data for eastern North Carolina. Our findings indicate that an approach that coordinates insurance, retrofits, and acquisition of high-risk properties effectively reduces total (uninsured and insured) losses.
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Regional county-level housing inventory predictions and the effects on hurricane risk
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences2022
Regional hurricane risk is often assessed assuming a static housing inventory, yet a region's housing inventory changes continually. Failing to include changes in the built environment in hurricane risk modeling can substantially underestimate expected losses. This study uses publicly available data and a long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model to forecast the annual number of housing units for each of 1000 individual counties in the southeastern United States over the next 20 years. When evaluated using testing data, the estimated number of housing units was almost always (97.3 % of the time), no more than 1 percentage point different than the observed number, predictive errors that are acceptable for most practical purposes. Comparisons suggest the LSTM outperforms the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) and simpler linear trend models. The housing unit projections can help facilitate a quantification of changes in future expected losses and other impacts caused by hurricanes. For example, this study finds that if a hurricane with characteristics similar to Hurricane Harvey were to impact southeastern Texas in 20 years, the residential property and flood losses would be nearly USD 4 billion (38 %) greater due to the expected increase of 1.3 million new housing units (41 %) in the region.
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‘Inspired to Action’: Immigrants’ Faith-Based Organizations’ Responses across Two Pandemics
Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies2022
Sources of disaster resilience represent important (but understudied) dimensions of the interplay between immigrants and disasters, as do immigrants’ disaster response activities. Using key informant interviews, we examine immigrant faith-based organizations’ (FBO) responses to two contemporary pandemics. Additionally, we assess for the presence of disaster-relevant social capital in immigrant FBOs. FBOs were found to possess key components of social capital and to actively engage in pandemic response activities, including provision of health risk communication, education, leadership, infection control measures, cash and in-kind contributions, advocacy, and psychosocial support. For immigrant communities, FBO-based social capital contributes to effective disaster and pandemic responses.
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