Study Says Many Will Not Flee Hurricanes

As experts predict a particularly strong hurricane season a year after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, a study by the Harvard School of Public Health predicts that one in four residents of hurricane-prone areas would not heed government-issued storm evacuation orders.

Another nine percent of respondents to the survey, which polled 2,029 individuals in high-risk hurricane areas across eight Southern states, said they were unsure if they would evacuate.

Sixty-eight percent of those would said they would not or might not evacuate said they thought they would safe at home. Another thirty-six percent said they might not leave because they thought evacuation would be a dangerous process.

The study is the 24th in a series sponsored by the school’s Project on the Public and Biological Security.

Professor of Health Policy and Political Analysis Robert J. Blendon, who directs the project, said the findings are disconcerting because many residents have a false sense of safety in staying at home.

“They’re convinced their homes are different from everybody else’s,” Blendon said. “They’re going to be hard to move.”

An estimated eighty percent of New Orleans residents heeded calls to evacuate in the days before Hurricane Katrina, according to the Associated Press.

Two-thirds of respondents were confident that they would be rescued if they could not evacuate or were stranded. The survey’s question did not specify whether the government or a local charitable group would coordinate the rescue.

A full 75 percent of respondents who said they would not evacuate said they were confident they would be rescued.

Blendon said researchers were also surprised that fewer African American than white respondents said they would stay at home. Forty-one percent of whites said they would stay, compared to 21 percent of blacks.

But although the most common reason to stay home for both groups was that they thought their homes would be safe, African-American respondents were almost three times as likely to cite lack of financial resources or a physical or medical condition as a reason for not evacuating.

“For those [African-Americans] who would stay, they’re actually at much higher risk than the white population,” Blendon said.

He added that he was surprised that many respondents were still unprepared for a hurricane, one year after Katrina.

“We thought [residents] would have worked out a lot of the issues,” he said. “For many of them they had not.”

Blendon added that one of these unresolved issues for 49 percent of respondents was finding a contact number to call if family members are separated.

Many respondents also had a negative view of emergency shelters—two-thirds of respondents were concerned about their conditions and security measures, with the most prevalent concerns being unsanitary conditions, a lack of clean drinking water, and susceptibility to violence.

Blendon said that when Katrina struck, the Red Cross did not have shelters in the New Orleans area, and that the image that remains in everyone’s minds is that of an overcrowded Superdome.

“[Respondents] see these [shelters] as pretty dangerous places, which is not a very healthy thing,” he said. “Some people will avoid going there.”

The study was released before hurricane season this year to better prepare media outlets, public officials, and residents in hurricane regions, Blendon said.

He suggested that media and public authorities inform people of the consequences of not evacuating and of the efforts made to ensure that shelters are safe. He also said that government officials and residents must work more carefully on evacuation plans.

“We’re ringing a warning bell,” Blendon said. “Katrina isn’t going to be just one picture we see.”

—Staff writer Katherine M. Gray can be reached at kmgray@fas.harvard.edu.