Suchergebnisse

The widely held premise that providing people with information and education on emergencies, such as natural disasters, will reduce losses is examined in this article. The results of an empirical study to ascertain the relationship between information, education, and knowledge about adaptive responses in a threatening situation are presented. These results indicate a poor statistical relationship between knowledge and a number of explanatory factors suggested by previous research. The study indicates that the process of acquiring information on hazards is variable among individuals and poorly understood. Overall, the ways in which people learn about hazards appear to be as fragmented as existing policies to disseminate hazard information.

Human response to environmental hazards and risks has been the subject of considerable research by social scientists. Work has traditionally focused on either individual response to the risks of an ongoing or future threat (hazards research), or group and organizational response to a specific disaster event (disaster research). As part of a larger investigation of the restart of the Unit 1 reactor at Three Mile Island (TMI), we examined the response of interest groups active in the restart issue to the continued threat of TMI and to future risks due to restart. After reviewing the restart issue in general, the paper examines the local dimensions of the restart issue from interest group perspectives. A method for defining appropriate issues at the community level is reviewed. We then discuss differences in the perceived local impacts of alternative decisions, and systems of beliefs associated with differing perceptions. Finally, we discuss the implications of interest group versus individual perceptions of local issues for decision making about TMI, in particular, and about technological hazards management, in general. Associated implications for determining socially acceptable risk levels are identified. Our research led us to three major conclusions: (1) in contrast to other types of hazards, interest groups are a critical unit of analysis for understanding how beliefs and behaviors form in response to the presence of technological hazards; (2) the divergence of positions between groups, even though they may have shared the same physical experience, is understandable if not always predictable, (3) the resolution of policy debates where risks are a major focus of the arguments should recognize the legitimacy of these divergent positions by allowing participation of the various interest groups in the decision process. Such participation helps ensure that the decision strategy is responsive to local concerns, thereby increasing the likelihood of acceptance of the ultimate decision and thus producing a publicly acceptable level of risk.

AbstractHurricane evacuation warnings from local officials are one of the most significant determinants of households' evacuation departure times. Consequently, it is important to know how long after the National Hurricane Center (NHC) issues a hurricane watch or warning that local officials wait to issue evacuation warnings. The distribution of local evacuation warning issuance delays determined from poststorm assessment data shows a wide range of warning issuance delay times over an 85-h time span, although the vast majority of times fall within a 40-h window. Nearly 30% of the jurisdictions issued evacuation warnings before an NHC hurricane warning. Only 5% delayed the decision for more than 25 h after the NHC hurricane warning. The curves for warning issuance delays, using both the NHC watch and NHC warning issuance times as reference points, are very different from the warning issuance curves observed for the rapid-onset events. The hurricane data exhibit much more of an "S shape" than the exponential shape that is seen for rapid-onset data. Instead, curves for three different types of storm tracks, defined by a perpendicular/parallel dimension and a straight/meandering dimension, follow three noticeably different logistic distributions. The data also indicate that warnings were issued significantly earlier for coastal counties than for inland counties. These results have direct practical value to analysts that are calculating evacuation time estimates for coastal jurisdictions. Moreover, they suggest directions for future research on the reasons for the timing of local officials' hurricane evacuation decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to pose and test a means to facilitate the comparative examination of interorganizational relations and behavior in emergency planning and response. Additionally we sought to define and ope rationalize the concept of inter and intraorganizational cohesion in emergencies,. The paper, following a review of literature on organizational behavior in disasters, describes an effort to define, and develop measures for twenty indicators of inter- and intraorganizational cohesion. Data on these indicators are collected for organizations in an emergency response network at a nuclear power plant. This is done for relationships in both pre-emergency planning and for an exercise of an emergency plan. Findings regarding cohesion are presented and the implications for refining emergency organizational theory are discussed. Overall it was found that internally organizations are fairly cohesive but that cohesiveness diminishes between organizations. Communications and lack of interaction clarity appear to be the chief reasons for decreases in cohesion. In order to understand why this occurs, it is necessary to investigate the antecedants of organizational behavior that lead to cohesion breakdowns.