Risk perception and evacuation decisions of Florida tourists under hurricane threats: a stated preference analysis

Corene Matyas (), Sivaramakrishnan Srinivasan, Ignatius Cahyanto, Brijesh Thapa, Lori Pennington-Gray and Jorge Villegas

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2011, vol. 59, issue 2, 890 pages

Abstract: Though most hurricane evacuation studies have focused on residents, tourists are also a vulnerable population. To assess their perceptions of risk and evacuation likelihood under different hurricane conditions, we surveyed 448 tourists visiting central Florida. Respondents viewed four maps emulating track forecast cones produced by the National Hurricane Center and text information featuring variations of storm intensity, coast of landfall, centerline position relative to the survey site, time until landfall, and event duration. We performed chi-square tests to determine which hurricane conditions, and aspects of tourists such as their demographics and previous hurricane experience, most likely influenced their ratings of risk and evacuation likelihood for respondents located on Pinellas County beaches or inland near Orlando, FL. Highly rated scenarios featured a Category 4 hurricane making landfall along the Gulf Coast with the centerline passing over the sampling site. Overall, tourists that indicated the highest risk and evacuation ratings were not previously affected by a hurricane, had a trip duration of less than 6 days, and had checked for the possibility of a hurricane strike before departure. However, results for other tourist attributes differed between tourists in coastal and inland locations. We found that although somewhat knowledgeable about hurricanes, tourists misinterpreted the track forecast cone and hurricane conditions, which led to a lower perception of risk and subsequent likelihood to evacuate. Tourists, particularly those from outside of Florida, need to be better educated about the risks they face from hurricanes that make landfall. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Hurricanes; Tourists; Evacuation; Risk perception; Florida (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (25)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-011-9801-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:59:y:2011:i:2:p:871-890

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-011-9801-0

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().