Associating Disaster Deaths with Risk Profiles

Summary

Publication Title: Associating Disaster Deaths with Risk Profiles

Series Title: NIST Technical Notes

Personal Author: Gilbert, Stanley W.

Publication Number: NIST tech note; NIST TN; 2115

Date Issued: 2020

Subject: Disasters
Resilience
Disaster casualties
Floods
Hurricanes
Hurricane Katrina, 2005
Tornadoes
Wildland fires
Wildfires
Disaster resilience
Disaster deaths

Government Author: Commerce Department, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) .

Category: Executive Agency Publications

SuDoc Class Number: C 13.

Abstract: In this paper we set out to identify which risk profiles contribute most to deaths in disasters. A risk profile represents an identifiable group of people who would be at risk of death in a disaster through some mechanism. Four risk profiles were considered in this report, Population (representing the overall population of a location), Frailty (representing people who are in some sense physically vulnerable to injury or illness), Mobile Homes residents, and Risk Takers (proxied by the population of heavy drinkers). Overall the single greatest contributor to deaths was the Mobile Home risk profile, although that varied by disaster event type. The prominence of the mobile-home risk profile suggests that in many cases it proxies for a larger group, possibly related to income or educational level. The risk profile associated with disaster fatalities depends on the type of event. For Katrina-type hurricanes and extreme-temperature events, frailty was the most important risk profile. For wind and flood events the Mobile Home population was overwhelmingly the most significant risk profile. For avalanche events the Risk-Taker profile was the most significant one. For all other event types (including non-Katrina hurricanes) fatalities were attributed to a mix of the Mobile Home and Frailty risk profiles. Disaster-related deaths do not appear to strike people at random from the population as a whole. Looking at the county-level results, there are identifiable spatial patterns to the risk profiles. High frailty clusters tend to be found around high population regions, while high mobile home clusters are in more rural areas. Much of the U.S., spatially, is in a moderate cluster both for frailty and mobile homes, while most major population centers are part of clusters of similar values for risk profile.