Factors affecting the evacuation decisions of coastal households during Cyclone Aila in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT

Despite sincere efforts by concerned agencies and recent improvements in hazard warnings, thousands of at-risk people did not evacuate during Aila, a category-I tropical cyclone that struck southwestern coastal Bangladesh in 2009. This study investigated the responses of the people affected by Aila to cyclone warnings and associated evacuation orders, and unveiled behavioural aspects that explain why they did or did not comply with the evacuation orders. Utilising the primary data collected from 420 households living in the severely affected coastal sub-district Koyra, located in Khulna District, this study found that although more than 97% of the households had received cyclone warnings and evacuation orders before Aila's landfall, only around 26% had evacuated. We also examined this study's empirical findings for factors that had dissuaded people from complying with the evacuation orders. Relevant test statistics along with results from principal component analysis suggested that the significant and systematic absenteeism of households from disaster preparedness training appears to be one of the key determinants that affected their evacuation decisions, along with factors related to warning messages, the attributes of cyclone shelters, risk perception, and socioeconomic aspects. A number of recommendations are also presented in this study for people at risk to improve their evacuation rates in future emergencies, not only to save their own lives but also to save their livestock.

KEYWORDS:

• Coastal
• Bangladesh
• Cyclone Aila
• cyclone shelters
• warning
• evacuation decision

Acknowledgements

We thank Nahid Morshed for his help with map preparation. We are particularly grateful for support provided by the students of Economics Discipline of Khulna University Bangladesh during data collection. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve this article. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

The data collection was financially supported by the Executive Committee of Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

ORCID

Md. Nasif Ahsan http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8633-6303

Karina Vink http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1744-1609

Notes

1. Bangladesh received its independence from Pakistan on 16 December 1971 after a nine-month liberation war. At the time of Cyclone Bhola in 1970, Bangladesh was known as East Pakistan.

2. The lowest tier of local government in Bangladesh, which is a part of an upazilla (sub-district).

3. Within 50 km from the sea shore.

4. Within 51–75 km from the sea shore.

5. Within 76–100 km from the sea shore.

6. Beyond 100 km from the sea shore.

7. Sub-district.

8. Office of the lowest tier in local government.

9. Clusters.

10. Social elites comprise community leaders (e.g. teachers and the chief of the local mosque committee) and people with political power (e.g. village chairman and political leaders).

11. A number four danger signal implies that the concerned port is threatened by a storm (wind speed of 51–61 km/hour) but the danger does not yet appear sufficiently great to justify extreme precautionary measures.

12. The port will experience severe weather from a storm of light or moderate intensity (wind speed of 62–88 km/hour) that is expected to cross over or near the port.

13. This implies the power of repetitive-measures design. In this case, we divided the whole sample into two groups (evacuee and non-evacuee), where ‘systematically' refers to the effect size (i.e. power) of the repetitive measure, which is demonstrated by Point-Biserial (r). For a detailed explanation, see Field (2005).