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“The Weather Service keeps saying, ’If we can give people more warning, they’ll have more time to react.’ But not if they’re not going to react in the first place,“ Montz said. “People are getting more and more weather information. But they don’t understand it any better.“
Essentially, Montz would like to see less bravado and more focus on what she calls “rebuilding with intelligence.“ That would mean acknowledging that parts of New Orleans are so prone to flooding that they should not be rebuilt.
“The officials involved need to understand the rebuilding process and have better, more equitable rules,“ she said, “so that the most vulnerable populations don’t get put in the most vulnerable areas by default.“ Montz traces her interest in hurricanes back to the experience her family went through in the wake of Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Their home, like thousands of others in northeast Pennsylvania, was flooded when the Susquehanna River spilled over its banks. A summer was lost to cleanup efforts, and Montz has not forgotten how much worse many of her family’s neighbors fared.
Today, technology such as geographic information systems (GIS) and even Google Earth helps Montz and other researchers in her field document changing land use. But the technology can’t yet provide a human context for those changes.
Montz now wants to look for new methods to help predict how, when and why people decide whether to return to their homes after a natural disaster. She’s working with a Binghamton systems scientist, Associate Professor Sarah Lam, as well as geographers Graham Tobin of the University of South Florida and Brent Yarnal of Penn State University and anthropologist Linda Whiteford of the University of South Florida to build a decision model that reflects the dynamics of post-disaster decision making. As part of that project, the researchers plan to examine the importance of a social network as well as people’s perceptions of natural hazards and risks.
One thing about the study is already certain: The need to better understand how people perceive and respond to hurricanes and related natural disasters isn’t likely to blow over any time soon.
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