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What information do people use, trust, and find useful during a disaster? Evidence from five large wildfires

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Abstract

The communication system through which information flows during a disaster can be conceived of as a set of relationships among sources and recipients who are concerned about key information characteristics. The recipient perspective is often neglected within this system. In this article, we explore recipient perspectives related to what information was used, useful, and trustworthy in a wildfire context. Using a survey (n = 873) on five large wildfires in 2009 and 2010, we found significant gaps between the sources that were used by the most respondents and those that that they rated as useful or trustworthy. The sources that were used most before the fires were highly correlated with the sources that were used most during the fire.

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Notes

  1. While newspapers are increasingly less popular as a source of information among the mass public, at the time the research was carried out, newspapers were still in circulation and used as information sources during our wildfire events. Consequently, we continue to use newspapers as an important source of information in this work.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Joint Fire Science Program Grant Number 8-1-2 4-01, the USFS Northern Research Station, the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, and the National Fire Protection Association. All views expressed in this article are those of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, 329 Kirk Hall, 117 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7H 2J5, Canada

    Toddi A. Steelman

  2. Northern Research Station USDA Forest Service, 1033 University Place, #360, Evanston, IL, 60626, USA

    Sarah M. McCaffrey

  3. Department of Public Administration, School of Public and International Affairs, North Carolina State University, Campus Box 8102, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Anne-Lise Knox Velez

  4. Washington, DC, USA

    Jason Alexander Briefel

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  1. Toddi A. Steelman
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  2. Sarah M. McCaffrey
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  4. Jason Alexander Briefel
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Correspondence to Toddi A. Steelman.

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Steelman, T.A., McCaffrey, S.M., Velez, AL.K. et al. What information do people use, trust, and find useful during a disaster? Evidence from five large wildfires. Nat Hazards 76, 615–634 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1512-x

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