Documenting Social Factors and Evacuation Vulnerability: Pinellas County, Florida
Document Type
Presentation
Publication Date
10-2016
Abstract
To reduce the exposure to any emergencies, effective mass evacuation management can be vital. Evacuation decisions by people at risk, is certainly depended on some social factors which can define the success and failure of such practices. Most of the previous studies have identified the role of individual social factors pertinent to evacuation decision, but in reality, these factors act in a holistic way. Measuring the roles of individual factors and combining them can help detect areas most in need of evacuation assistance by the emergency managers. This research has identified those areas of high evacuation assistance need for the Pinellas County by indexing the social factors of evacuation from the census block data. From the final index, three zones have been identified. The North Greenwood and Highpoint areas are vulnerable due to high poverty levels, low vehicle ownership, and large numbers of mobile homes. The Gandy area is vulnerable because of mobile homes, dense housing networks, anda large number of children under age of five. The third zone, South St. Petersburg, has a high proportion of individuals with special evacuation needs. These results can be used by emergency managers in each phase of emergency management, resource allocation, risk reduction and providing special service. With this effective index, an evacuation should be more successful by improving response times.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Presented at the Applied Geography Conference in October 2016 in Louisville, KY
Scholar Commons Citation
Tanim, Shakhawat H. and Tobin, Graham A., "Documenting Social Factors and Evacuation Vulnerability: Pinellas County, Florida" (2016). School of Geosciences Faculty and Staff Publications. 2095.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/geo_facpub/2095
