Reading Hurricane Katrina: Information Sources and Decision‐making in Response to a Natural Disaster

Abstract

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face‐to‐face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people’s decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm‐related information from a variety of sources, including media reports and (in many cases) other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” (a concept borrowed from sociology) to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm’s main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition.

Keywords:

• Disaster Communication
• Evacuation Decisions
• Deficit Model
• Interpersonal Communication
• Social Networks
• Weak Ties

Acknowledgements

The authors especially wish to thank the University of South Carolina for their generous funding of this study, as well as the many faculty and graduate students who participated in the interview process in Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina (other interviews in Texas having been conducted by Karen Taylor). The authors are also particularly grateful to University of South Carolina PhD student Jessica Leu, who first suggested the relevance of the literature on “weak ties” to our investigation.

Notes

[1] This early estimate was reported by Mayor Lyda Thompson of Galveston Island on 16 September 2008, less than one week after Hurricane Ike’s landfall.

[2] This estimate was cited by Governor Kathleen Blanco as her official summary in testimony to Congress in December 2006, three months after Katrina’s landfall.

[3] Interviewees received an incentive with a value of $50. In South Carolina, this incentive was paid in cash; elsewhere, in the form of a discount store gift certificate.

[4] All proportions reported here are based only on interviews for which the demographic item in question was available; in other words, in each case the proportions exclude missing values from the analysis.

[5] Data in this paragraph should be considered rough estimates and are based on subjective evaluation (not measurement) summarizing answers to multiple questions and probes.

[6] The importance of “small media” such as radios, cell phones and even Twitter under emergency conditions like those found in New Orleans during Katrina and among New Orleans evacuees elsewhere should not be underestimated; these options “prop up” and serve to illustrate communications among “ordinary” social networks.