How people move after a natural disaster is key to understanding how to best deploy resources to assist those affected or displaced. While attempts have been made previously to gather this information via surveys or interviews, this information is often incomplete, or suffering from self-reporting biases, according to an article in EHS Daily Advisor. With the increased availability of mobile devices, however, there are opportunities to improve the completeness of these data sets. Rather than using individual information, large batches of anonymized data can be gathered and studies for bulk movements of groups and allowing regional leaders better insights into how people are reacting after a disaster hits.
Such data was used in the aftermath of the 2019 Kincade Fire in Sonoma County, California, by researchers from the University of Florida Transportation Institute, to model movement patterns by residents before, during, and after the fire. This analysis allowed for separation of residents into categories of evacuees and non-evacuees, and identification of areas that saw large influxes of displaced people. In the future, such information and analysis could help emergency managers to better plan their responses, and deployment of resources.
