Modeling evacuation behavior under hurricane conditions

The understanding of evacuation behavior is critical to establishing policies, procedures, and organizational structure for an effective response to emergencies. This study specifically investigated the evacuation behavioral responses under hurricane conditions. The study aimed to explore the association between contributing factors and the evacuation decision choices as well as evacuation destination choices. Unlike previous studies that modeled each response behavior separately, this study proposed to use the structural equation modeling approach to examine the inter relationship between response behaviors. A case study was performed with the data set from a survey conducted in New Jersey. With Bayesian estimation approaches, the proposed structural equation models were estimated, and the effect of each predictive variable was captured. An important finding is that individuals' preference to evacuate did not significantly affect their choices of evacuation destinations. In addition, other socioeconomic and demographic characteristics that affected evacuation behavior were identified.