Tornado warning awareness, information needs and the barriers to protective action of individuals who are blind

Abstract

Individuals with disabilities are often vulnerable to the impacts of weather hazards, such as tornadoes. This is especially true in the Southeast where vulnerability to tornadoes is already heightened due to both physical and socioeconomic factors. To better understand and possibly reduce this vulnerability, we conducted interviews with 25 residents of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi who are legally blind. The goal of the interviews was to understand how people who are blind receive and respond to tornado warnings. Participants were asked to discuss the sources they use for severe weather information, their likes and dislikes about the current warning system, warning elements that allow them to personalize the risk, and barriers in their ability to obtain warning information, assess risk, or respond to it. Results suggest that good verbal description or the lack of detailed verbal description were of the greatest importance in our participants’ ability to effectively use warning information and act on it. This included audio for television warning crawls, and the level of description provided during severe weather coverage. Ample geographic description was important in their ability to personalize the threat. The greatest number of barriers were associated with the risk assessment phase; however, the single most common barrier mentioned by participants was that they would have no safe place to go during a tornado.