Katrina lessons learned?

The front page story in the Raleigh News and Observer outlines a new study released by Harvard University.

The survey, released Thursday, was among the first to plumb attitudes toward disasters since Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans last year. It was conducted between July 5 and 11 and sampled residents of all counties within 50 miles of the coast in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas.

Less than a year after Katrina, the study found that many Southerners in coastal areas are still reluctant to prepare and evacuate their homes for hurricanes.

Despite more than 1,800 deaths from Hurricane Katrina last fall, more than three-quarters of Eastern North Carolinians polled by Harvard University said they hadn't done more this year to prepare for hurricanes. And about a third of those surveyed here and in the other seven states most vulnerable to hurricanes said they may not obey orders to evacuate.

A notable finding of the study was that attitudes toward evacuation differed drastically by race.

Most who were stranded in the city atop flooded houses and overpasses and in squalid shelters were black, and some claimed at the time that blacks were reluctant to evacuate. The survey, though, found that African-Americans were nearly twice as likely as whites to leave their homes in a mandatory evacuation, 41 percent versus 23 percent.

Hopefully, mother nature will us a break this year because it appears that many Southerners have failed to learn from the ordeal last fall.

…two-thirds of the respondents were confident they would be rescued if they couldn't evacuate and needed help… Because of Katrina, the team had expected a majority [of respondents] to say that they had prepared more for the storm season. Just 38 percent had.

Posted by James Hunter