Staying at Home or Getting Together? Hurricane Evacuation Compliance and Policy Tools Under Public Health Risk

ABSTRACT

The COVID‐19 pandemic introduced a distinctive challenge for crisis management during hurricane evacuations. In this dual‐risk context, emergency officials confronted competing imperatives: mandatory evacuation orders called for population movement, while public health guidance emphasized minimizing social contact and maintaining physical distance. These overlapping risks complicated residents' decision environments, particularly given longstanding evidence that evacuation behavior is often marked by bounded rationality under uncertainty and time pressure. Drawing on unique survey data collected in Florida during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, this study examines how perceptions of policy tools moderate the influence of property‐related concern on intentions to comply with mandatory evacuation orders. The analysis focuses on two tools relevant to shelter decision‐making: contracted shelter options and crowd‐sourced shelter recommendations. The findings suggest that the influence of the concerns about protecting their property can be lower among residents who prefers crowd‐sourced shelter recommendations. By locating the influence of policy tools on evacuation decision‐making within a compound emergency, this study extends crisis management scholarship on compliance under overlapping hazards. It also contributes to research on crisis governance by showing that information‐oriented policy tools are closely tied to how target populations interpret and respond to competing risk signals during disasters.