Communicating Risk to Reduce Human Loss in Large-Scale Disasters

Abstract

TM2-O-06 Introduction: Risk communication is vital to saving lives in disasters as recent catastrophes have shown. Risk communication is difficult to categorize, since it is complex and multidimensional and its effectiveness is often dependent on context. This paper identifies, assembles, and categorizes indicators of human behavior toward communication in the face of large-scale disasters. Indicators are then applied to a disaster scenario to craft messages to achieve desired behaviors that minimize loss of life and injury. Methods: An extensive risk communication empirical literature covering numerous disciplines and cases of major catastrophes was reviewed involving natural hazards and acts of terrorism. Cases covered incidents involving biologic and chemical agents and physical disruption for both natural hazards and terrorist attacks. Two criteria were used to categorize indicators: 1) effectiveness of reaching recipients further subdivided into communication technology, information source, and message form, and 2) effectiveness of recipient comprehension of messages in terms of trust and personal attributes. The core research involved applying these indicators to a Sarin attack scenario in a confined transportation system environment. A timeline, patterned after the Tokyo Sarin attack, was constructed, and actual and desired behavior was distributed over time for affected individuals (fatalities, injured, exposed, and off-site), emergency responders, service operators, the media, managers, and political leaders. Messages were then designed for combinations of message senders and recipients over time to achieve desired life-saving behaviors. Results: Indicators of human behavior toward communication in catastrophes provide the theoretical basis for designing messages for catastrophes. Severe obstacles to effectiveness of reaching recipients include unclear communication pathways between senders and recipients, difficulty in identifying recipients and their locations, and technologic limitations. Effectiveness of recipient comprehension of messages is framed by numerous social-psychologic factors and ways people react to communication that need to be an explicit part of the design of messages. Discussion/Conclusions: The development of indicators of behavior toward communication is critical to the diagnosis and design of risk communication in large scale catastrophes to reduce the loss of human life. It is an ongoing process of synthesis and meta-analyses, and the model presented provides an important contribution to this effort. Supported by New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response, through its U.S. Department of Homeland Security Grant No. 2004-GT_TX-0001. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. This work greatly benefited from the overall Large Scale Emergency Readiness (LaSER) project under the leadership of the NYU School of Medicine under the directorship of Dr. Lewis Goldfrank.