RAPID: Understanding Evacuation, Sheltering, and Reentry Decisions During the Dual Threat of Hurricane and the COVID-19 Pandemic

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This Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID) project will study emergency mangers’ and households’ evacuation decisions and their sheltering considerations during Hurricane Laura as individuals cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. It is important for the scientific community, policymakers, and emergency managers to understand how the simultaneous threats of a hurricane and a pandemic affect individual and household decisions about protecting themselves during these events. The findings from this project will help emergency managers and policymakers develop appropriate public health and population protection strategies to help communities be prepared for future events. With a better understating of the determinants of hurricane and pandemic protective actions (e.g. evacuation, social distancing, sheltering) compliance, emergency managers can develop better evacuation plans and warning messages to help reduce the impact of both the pandemic and hurricane, as well as to advance national health and welfare. More specifically, the scientific progress generated by this research will increase understanding of differences between emergency mangers’ and citizens’ concerns regarding the maintenance of shelters, sheltering locations (public shelters, hotels, friends’, and relatives’ house), evacuation routing, and evacuation modeling during a pandemic. Emergency managers will be able to better design and locate shelters and encourage households to take appropriate protective actions in the future when facing similar threats. This project will advance the state of science about households’ and emergency mangers’ protective action decision-making processes by using a sequential mixed methods design. This study will use survey and interview methodologies to collect both quantitative and qualitative data from emergency managers and households in the Hurricane Laura risk areas in Texas and Louisiana. Because of the complexity of the event, this project requires the integration of variables in both the Protection Motivation Theory and the Protective Action Decision Model. The results of this study will build a new theoretical model that captures individuals’ protective action decision-making process in a dual hazard environment (hurricane and pandemic). This project will contribute to emerging research on pandemics and disasters in the United States, but with a focus on how the pandemic is shaping protective action decision-making, which has generalizability to other compound events.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.