Joseph Trainor

Rising to the Challenges of a Catastrophe: The Emergent and Prosocial Behavior following Hurricane Katrina

Using several data sources including an extensive database of media reports and a series of government documents, but relying primarily on the University of Delaware’s Disaster Research Center’s field research in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the authors describe the nontraditional behavior that emerged in that catastrophe. They also discuss the prosocial behavior (much of it emergent) that was by far the primary response to this event, despite widespread media reports of massive antisocial behavior. Their study focuses on individual and group reactions in Louisiana during the first three weeks following the hurricane. The authors limit their systematic analyses of emergent behavior to five groupings: hotels, hospitals, neighborhood groups, rescue teams, and the Joint Field Office. Their analysis shows that most of the improvisations undertaken helped in dealing with the various problems that continued to emerge following Katrina. The various social systems and the people in them rose to the demanding challenges of a catastrophe.

A Critical Evaluation of the Incident Command System and NIMS

This paper aims to draw a series of generalizable conclusions regarding the incident command system (ICS) as a management tool for structuring the activity of disaster response agencies at the site of disasters in the United States. It identifies the basic elements of the system and makes some observations regarding its range of applicability. The analysis is drawn from several sources of information regarding the use of ICS in nine different disasters in which Federal Emergency Management Agencys (FEMA) Urban Search and Rescue (US&R) Taskforces participated. Results suggest the applicability of ICS in a range of emergency response activities, but point to the importance of context as a largely un-examined precondition to effective ICS. Our findings indicate that ICS is a partial solution to the question of how to organize the societal response in the aftermath of disasters; the system is more or less effective depending on specific characteristics of the incident and the organizations in which it is used. It works best when those utilizing it are part of a community, when the demands being responded to are routine to them, and when social and cultural emergence is at a minimum. ICS does not create a universally applicable bureaucratic organization among responders but rather is a mechanism for inter-organizational coordination designed to impose order on certain dimensions of the chaotic organizational environments of disasters. We conclude by extending our observations from the USAR context to the reconstruction, recovery, and mitigation phases of disasters in order to illuminate the general limitations of the approach as an all-encompassing model for disaster-related organizational and inter-organizational functioning and coordination. Our final conclusions suggest that the present-day efforts in the National Incident Management System (NIMS) to use ICS as a comprehensive principle of disaster management probably will not succeed as intended.

A snapshot of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami: societal impacts and consequences

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the societal impacts and consequences of the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.Design/methodology/approach – One month after the tsunami, a group of social science researchers from the Disaster Research Center, University of Delaware, and the Emergency Administration and Planning Program, University of North Texas, participated in an Earthquake Engineering Research Institute reconnaissance team, which traveled to some of the most affected areas in India and Sri Lanka. Data were obtained through informal interviews, participant observation, and systematic document gathering.Findings – This research yielded important data and information on disaster preparedness, response, and recovery. A number of issues are identified that emerged from the field observations, including: tsunami education and awareness; the devastation and the loss; economic impact; mental health issues; irregularities and inequities in community based response and recovery efforts and...

Interdisciplinary Approach to Evacuation Modeling

Evacuations have long been studied within disciplinary boundaries, most frequently in the social sciences and in transportation engineering. Despite the common object of study, previous works integrating these fields’ perspectives are relatively sparse, sometimes leading to evacuation planning models that are divorced from social theory or that observed human behavior. However, a multidisciplinary solution is difficult because many social findings are not directly transferable to optimization formulations or simulation models. Most studies fail to recognize that human behavior and transportation systems are intertwined and that decisions depend not only on the disaster but also on the transportation conditions, options, sociodemographics, experiences, and risk perceptions. This paper reviews these two approaches to evacuation research and proposes a new interdisciplinary approach that merges the strengths of each. The process not only seeks to incorporate empirical and theoretical insights from the social sciences into transportation evacuation modeling but also calls for reexamination of some transportation modeling assumptions in order to improve their mapping in the real world. The result is a new five step modeling process.

The Social Impacts and Consequences of the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami: Observations from India and Sri Lanka

The 26 December 2004 tsunami is one of the most severe disasters of the last several decades. Less than one month after the disaster, a group of social science researchers from the University of Delaware and University of North Texas participated in an Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) reconnaissance team. This team traveled to some of the most heavily impacted areas in India and Sri Lanka. Focusing on the social impacts and consequences of the disaster, the team identified a number of emerging issues, including loss of life and destruction of property and infrastructure, impact on livelihoods, a persistent sense of uncertainty, variation in community-based response and recovery efforts, inequities in disaster relief distribution, gender and age vulnerability and capacities, temporary shelter and housing, and long-term relocation planning.

Tornadoes, Social Science, and the False Alarm Effect

AbstractDespite considerable interest in the weather enterprise, there is little focused research on the “false alarm effect.” Within the body of research that does exist, findings are mixed. Some studies suggest that the false alarm effect is overstated, while several recent efforts have provided evidence that FAR may be a significant determinate of behavior. This effort contributes to the understanding of FAR through a sociological analysis of public perceptions and behavioral responses to tornadoes. This analysis begins by addressing public definitions of FAR and then provides two statistical models, one focused on perception of FAR and one focused on behavioral response to tornado warnings. The authors’ approach incorporates a number of sociological and other social science concepts as predictors in both of these models. Findings provide a number of important insights. Most notably, it is found that 1) there is a wide degree of variation in public definitions of false alarm, 2) actual county FAR rates...

COPEWELL: A Conceptual Framework and System Dynamics Model for Predicting Community Functioning and Resilience After Disasters

OBJECTIVE Policy-makers and practitioners have a need to assess community resilience in disasters. Prior efforts conflated resilience with community functioning, combined resistance and recovery (the components of resilience), and relied on a static model for what is inherently a dynamic process. We sought to develop linked conceptual and computational models of community functioning and resilience after a disaster. METHODS We developed a system dynamics computational model that predicts community functioning after a disaster. The computational model outputted the time course of community functioning before, during, and after a disaster, which was used to calculate resistance, recovery, and resilience for all US counties. RESULTS The conceptual model explicitly separated resilience from community functioning and identified all key components for each, which were translated into a system dynamics computational model with connections and feedbacks. The components were represented by publicly available measures at the county level. Baseline community functioning, resistance, recovery, and resilience evidenced a range of values and geographic clustering, consistent with hypotheses based on the disaster literature. CONCLUSIONS The work is transparent, motivates ongoing refinements, and identifies areas for improved measurements. After validation, such a model can be used to identify effective investments to enhance community resilience. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2018;12:127-137).

Homeowner purchase of insurance for hurricane-induced wind and flood damage

Understanding the circumstances under which homeowners will purchase insurance is critical to creating an effective insurance market for hurricane wind and flood loss. This paper contributes to the empirical literature on the subject through an analysis of survey data for homeowners in North Carolina. We develop separate mixed logit models for flood insurance and wind insurance purchasing decisions. The analysis uses stated preference data on the influence of premium and deductible to address some limitations of revealed preference data in which it is difficult to fully decouple effects of premium, deductible, risk, and coverage limit, and mandatory purchase requirements. The results for flood insurance and wind insurance are similar. We find evidence that the following are all significant and associated with higher probability of purchasing insurance—lower premium, lower deductible, more recent previous hurricane experience, location in a floodplain or closer to the coast, higher income, and younger homeowners. However, demand is relatively inelastic with respect to premium and deductible, and the willingness to pay for a

Pre-Disaster Established Trust and Relationships: Two Major Factors Influencing the Effectiveness of Implementing the ICS

1 reduction in deductible varies throughout the population with some willing to pay more than

Managing volunteers: FEMA's Urban Search and Rescue programme and interactions with unaffiliated responders in disaster response

1, a behavioral anomaly. The recency of the last hurricane experience is more influential for homeowners who experienced damage than for homeowners who did not. Results suggest that insurance purchase and home retrofits are complements, not substitutes. Finally, the paper presents statistical models that can be used to predict insurance penetration rates for a region under different premium levels.