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African Americans' decisions not to evacuate New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina: a qualitative study
Keith Elder1, Sudha Xirasagar, Nancy Miller
1Department of Health Services Policy and Management, Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208, USA. kelder@gwm.sc.edu
Objectives:
We examined the psychosocial and personal factors that influenced African Americans' decision not to evacuate New Orleans, La, before Hurricane Katrina's landfall.
Methods:
We conducted 6 focus groups with 53 African Americans from New Orleans who were evacuated to Columbia, SC, within 2 months of Hurricane Katrina.
Results:
The major themes identified related to participants' decision to not evacuate were as follows: (1) perceived susceptability, including optimism about the outcome because of riding out past hurricanes at home and religious faith; (2) perceived severity of the hurricane because of inconsistent evacuation orders; (3) barriers because of financial constraints and neighborhood crime; and (4) perceived racism and inequities.
Conclusions:
Federal, state, and local government disaster preparedness plans should specify criteria for timely evacuation orders, needed resources, and their allocation (including a decentralized distribution system for cash or vouchers for gas and incidentals during evacuation) and culturally sensitive logistic planning for the evacuation of minority, low-income, and underserved communities. Perceptions of racism and inequities warrant further investigation.
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