Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
July 22, 2005 Friday
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 665 words
HEADLINE: Hurricanes don’t scare most here, survey says;
Up to 60% would stay home for Category 3
BYLINE: By Mark Schleifstein, Staff writer
BODY:
As many as 60 percent of the residents of most southeast Louisiana parishes would remain in their homes if a Category 3 hurricane is approaching, according to a survey released Thursday by the University of New Orleans Survey Research Center and the Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Task Force.
That would be a dangerous decision, said task force president Jesse St. Amant, emergency preparedness director for Plaquemines Parish, because the state’s sinking coastline and levees no longer protect residents from a Category 3 storm, which can deliver winds of 130 mph and an 18-foot-high combination of storm surge and waves.
“The reality is that regardless of whether you lived through Betsy or remember Camille, though it hit somewhere else, if Ivan had happened here (last year), we would probably not be standing here talking about it in this (UNO) building,” St. Amant said. “We would still be recovering.”
In 2002, an official from the American Red Cross estimated that between 25,000 and 100,000 people would be killed if a major hurricane hit the New Orleans area.
If the new survey is accurate and significant numbers of people don’t evacuate, St. Amant said, the number of casualties would be “beyond comprehension.”
UNO political science professor Susan Howell, who directed the survey, said that although 60 percent of those asked at first said they would leave if public officials recommended an evacuation, on further questioning, only 34 percent of the residents of 12 coastal parishes would “definitely” leave. And in Jefferson Parish, that dropped to 27 percent.
She said the public doesn’t realize that areas of southeast Louisiana are no longer protected by levees from a slow-moving Category 3 hurricane.
The new message, to evacuate for most storms stronger than Category 2, “is counterintuitive,” she said. “It’s been 40 years since the last catastrophic hurricane hit the city, Betsy, so we’re asking them to believe the risk when they’ve never experienced anything like it.”
Howell said residents based their evacuation decisions on their perception of the risk they face in their location. And the two factors that weigh most heavily in that perception are past experiences with hurricanes and whether they feel their home is sturdily built.
And residents who lived more than 30 years in southeast Louisiana were least likely to evacuate, especially if their own home had never been damaged by a hurricane.
The survey also found that many people who evacuated during Hurricanes Georges in 1998, Lili in 2002 or Ivan last year might not have traveled far enough to escape danger.
At least 400 residents were interviewed in each of the 12 participating parishes. Not all results could be combined because of differences in evacuation problems or how far their populated areas are from the coast. The study began in the spring of 2004, and several parishes or parts of parishes weren’t completed until after Ivan hit in September.
The survey found that women are more likely than men to cooperate with an official evacuation recommendation, which is similar to results elsewhere in the country, and probably reflects that women are more likely to be responsible for children and the elderly, Howell said.
In six of nine parishes surveyed before Ivan, residents with lower incomes were more likely to evacuate than those with higher incomes.
The problems experienced by evacuees during Ivan, including delays of 10 hours or more in reaching their evacuation destinations, don’t seem to affect the willingness to evacuate, Howell said. An average of 86 percent of Ivan evacuees in four parishes said they would do the same thing under similar circumstances, about the same as those who evacuated for Georges and Lili.
Howell said those wishing to develop evacuation plans or find more information about how to respond to hurricanes should visit the American Red Cross Web site at www.arcno.org.