![]() ![]() Percentage of people who sought rescues during Harvey, b). We also calculated the percentage of high-risk flood zones (A and V zones in FEMA’s flood map) in each zip code.Ī). In addition, we included level of income, unemployment rate, and crime rate at the zip code level. The percentage of people living in poverty, percentage of people who speak limited English, percentage of people without a car, percentage of people with disabilities are extracted from 2009-2013 American Community Survey (ACS). The variables include percentages of young people (65), and male population from the 2010 Census. These criteria were considered based on both the social vulnerability literature and the descriptions supplied by those seeking rescues. We considered several variables to indicate social vulnerability across the study area. The eastern part of Houston - Harris County, Montgomery County, and Chambers County - has the highest percentages. 1a demonstrates the geographic distribution of people seeking rescues during Harvey. In each zip code, this variable is defined as: (number of individuals requesting rescues)/(population). Our variable of interest is percentage of people seeking rescues during Harvey. To note, this resolution ensures data such as rescue request and demographic data to be available at the same geographic scale, although this resolution ignores variations of local flood conditions within a zip code. The basic geographic unit of our analysis is neighborhood defined by zip code. A group of people may request for rescue together, and in total, there were 40280 people requesting for rescue. From Aug 27 to 30, there are 7453 requests after duplicate, mis-located and empty data are cleaned. A requestor’s location, age, water/food/electricity availability and whether they were in danger of life are all included in the dataset (data summary shown in Table 1). This site led to approximately ~7,600 active rescues (13% of total rescues). When volunteers discovered nearby rescue requests on the website, they tried to rescue people by car, boat, canoe, or kayak. In addition to giving rescuers a real-time glimpse of needs around the city, pins may be colored to indicate urgency and removed after the rescue. Users could place a pin on a Google map to alert rescuers. Thus, the Red Cross created this website and posted rescue requests online to solicit public assistance. During Hurricane Harvey, the local administration was overwhelmed with rescue requests. In this study, we focus on the Hurricane Harvey rescue data that came from the Red Cross website (Houston American Red Cross 2017). In this study, our main research question is: how did four major contextual forces including social vulnerability, exposure to flooding, traffic accessibility and informed flood risk influence the spatial distribution of people who sought rescues during Harvey? Meanwhile, we also aim to test whether the distribution of rescue requests due to real-time flooding exposure is different from the distribution of informed flood risk through FEMA’s designated flood zone. The flooding during Harvey led to more than 60,000 rescues (FEMA 2017). Flood risk mitigation is a topic in need of urgent research (Shao, Feng, and Lin 2019).Įmergency rescue is the final approach to protect residents from hazards and swift water rescue saves lives (Chang, Tseng, and Chen 2007). Under climate change, the flood risk is predicted to significantly increase over the next century (Marsooli et al. ![]() Nearly 80,000 homes were inundated with 18 inches of floodwater (FEMA 2017). The storm induced 80 fatalities in the greater Houston area, and most were resulted from drowning (Jonkman et al. As a result, Harvey produced the largest rainfall event among all U.S. Harvey wandered around Galveston Bay for four days, three times in and two times out, pouring more than 19 trillion gallons of rainwater over Houston and its surrounding regions. The largest tropical rainstorm slammed into the Houston coast late that night and major parts of Houston were flooded overnight (Washington Post 2017). On August 25 of 2017, Hurricane Harvey churned toward the Texas coast. ![]()
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