The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder is funding two "Quick Response" studies in the aftermath of California's recent catastrophic wildfires.
One study will examine residents' evacuation behavior during the wildfires and the other will look at how politicians and the media interpret and assign responsibility for the fires.
The Quick Response studies were funded by the CU-Boulder Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center, in cooperation with the National Science Foundation.
"The Southern California wildfires once again highlight the point that human beings create the potential for major disasters through the decisions they make regarding where to live and where to concentrate development, as well as through the actions they take or fail to take to reduce potential losses," said sociology Professor Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center.
"Decisions to permit development in forested areas bordering cities and the growing population in areas that have significant wildfire risks mean that we can expect losses from those events to increase in the future," she said. "Like the Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991, the Southern California wildfires of 2003 point to the need for sustainable policies for growth and land development, wildfire hazard abatement programs and effective systems for disseminating emergency warnings and facilitating evacuations."
The wildfires also vividly illustrate why the United States must continue to support an emergency management system that is capable of dealing with disasters of all
types, whether caused by natural events, failures of technology or intentional acts of terrorism, she said. Without the nation's highly effective emergency system the toll in human life and property from the firestorms of 2003 would have been higher.
Tierney is a nationally recognized expert on the human and social dimensions of hazards, disaster and risk. She was the senior author on "Facing the Unexpected: Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States," a volume published in 2001 analyzing current theory and research on preparation for and response to disasters.
The California wildfire evacuation study will be conducted by Professor Thomas Cova of the University of Utah and will look at how and when people received information on the need to evacuate and their subsequent evacuation behavior. Results of the study will be used to improve models for understanding and predicting behavior during wildfire disasters.
A study on "The Political Construction of Extreme Events" will be conducted by Professor Vincent Gawronski at Birmingham Southern University in Alabama and by Professor Richard Olson of Florida International University. Their study will explore the processes through which political leaders and policymakers attempt to define, explain, and frame the wildfire disasters and how they attempt to set the stage for new legislation and other reforms that aim to mitigate future fire losses.
The CU-Boulder Natural Hazards Center has funded dozens of "Quick Response" studies in order to collect data that can be gathered only shortly after a disaster occurs. The results of 22 such studies conducted in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11 recently were published by the center in a 600-page book "Beyond September 11th: An Account of Post-Disaster Research."
The CU-Boulder Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center is the nation's leading repository of knowledge on human behavior in disasters. It is part of CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science and is funded by grants from NSF, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, other federal agencies and private-sector funders.
More information on the CU-Boulder Natural Hazards Center is posted on the center's Web site at .