Hurricane Emergency Evacuation Study for Coastal Regions of Rhode Island

• Main Author: Campbell, Alolade Oyinlola
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@URI 2016
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/oa_diss/470; https://doi.org/10.23860/diss-campbell-alolade-2016; https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/context/oa_diss/article/1489/viewcontent/Campbell_uri_0186A_11369.pdf

Hurricane landfalls have great potential to cause human injuries, loss of lives and loss or damage of properties. Currently, the prediction of a hurricane hit at a given location has significantly improved owing to the advancements in meteorology and other contributing technologies such as satellite sensing systems among others. In spite of the developments in hurricane track forecast, the most common risk aversion strategy in response to hurricanes still remains the emergency evacuation of the flood zones under the direction and coordination of government officials. Rhode Island, known as the Ocean State, is the smallest state within the continental United States of America. Nonetheless, it boasts about 384 coastal miles along the Atlantic Ocean. Past history indicates a non-negligible risk posed by hurricanes to the coastal regions of Rhode Island with yearly frequencies of a hurricane hit within 75 nautical miles of central Providence, RI, at 5%, 6% and 2% for categories 1, 2, and 3, respectively as derived from the “Tropical Cyclones of the North Atlantic Basin from 1851 to 2001” database from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Given the devastating effect of hurricane Katrina, 2005, Campbell et al, 2007, conducted a hurricane risk assessment study for the state of Rhode Island using selected socio-economic factors, which pointed to Warwick, Newport, Barrington, Narragansett and Providence as the towns most potentially vulnerable to storm surges. To further the previous work, hypotheses are put forward in this study to query the association between the household socioeconomic and demographic attributes, the decision to evacuate, the behavior at evacuation and the evacuation preparedness level for a sample of earlier mentioned towns as well as Jamestown. The aim is to apprehend the data necessary to the calibration of a hurricane evacuation model rooted in the anticipated behavior of evacuating households. To this end, the study 1) probes heads of households using a survey instrument 2) ...