Development of a Behavioral Model for Household Level Cyclone Evacuation Decision Making

Abstract

The critical role of evacuation, particularly for the communities in underdeveloped countries exposed to cyclone, has been perceived after some disastrous evacuation experiences in recent cyclones. A profound insight of the determining factors of evacuation behavior is therefore needed to reduce the loss of numerous lives especially in the cyclone vulnerable communities. The purpose of this research is to explore and determine the key factors influencing the households’ cyclone evacuation decision making process in developing economies. This research uses mixed logit model to explore households’ cyclone evacuation decision making process. The model is built using 19 variables and a relatively large sample data of 1991 collected from the coastal areas of Bangladesh as a post storm assessment to find out the impact of cyclone SIDR on the study area.

The study reveals that evacuees of developing economies like Bangladesh prefer nearby tall buildings as their shelter during cyclone due to the insufficient facilities provided by the public cyclone centers. Besides, in case of mandatory notice of evacuation and for temporary house owner, the decision to evacuation is more uniform. However, randomness in the households’ decision to evacuation is seen whenever they receive a voluntary notice and if their location of residence is sufficiently far from the sea shore. This study also found that only 45.2 percent households’ evacuate in case of a cyclone hit and only 5.4 percent of them are satisfied with the transportation facilities provided to evacuate them.

To estimate the influence of individual variables on households’ evacuation decision, this research also shows the effect of selected variables on households’ cyclone evacuation individually. The compendious list of the variables influencing the households’ cyclone evacuation decision making process will enable potential evacuees to better evaluate it against other factors they are considering and thus make a conclusion better informed about the timing as well as necessity of evacuating. It will also help emergency managers to decide on the timing and type of evacuation orders they need to give in order to reduce the causalities due to cyclone massacre.