Behavioral Model to Understand Household-Level Hurricane Evacuation Decision Making

Abstract

Hurricanes are one of the most costly natural disasters in the United States and have increased in frequency in the last few years. The critical role of evacuation, particularly for the vulnerable communities, has been realized from some disastrous evacuation experiences in recent hurricanes (for example, Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005). Therefore, a thorough understanding of the determinants of evacuation behavior is needed to protect the loss of lives, especially in the vulnerable communities. However, a household’s decision-making process under a hurricane risk is a very complex process influenced by many factors. This paper presents a model of household hurricane evacuation behavior accounting for households’ heterogeneous behavior in decision making by using original data from Hurricane Ivan. It develops a mixed logit (also known as random-parameters logit) model of hurricane evacuation decision, where random parameters reflect the heterogeneous responses of households caused by a hurricane. We report several factors consistent with some of the previous findings, which are important for understanding household-level evacuation decision making. We also explain the varied influences of some of the determining variables on the hurricane evacuation decision.