Never Waste a Crisis: How COVID-19 Lockdowns and Message Sources Affect Household Emergency Preparedness
Publication: Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23, Issue 3
Abstract
Public institutions are facing natural and manmade hazards of increasing frequency and severity. While the costs of disasters can be greatly reduced when individuals prepare, successfully encouraging preparation is difficult for governments, given the low salience of such risks. We examine whether the increased salience of other types of risks can influence individual willingness to prepare for natural and manmade hazards, and whether message impact varies with recipients’ levels of trust in their source. We capitalize upon a rare policy experiment—the staged rollout of COVID-19 lockdowns in California—to assess if increases in the salience of the pandemic were associated with greater willingness to store water for earthquake-induced system outages. We find that experiences of a disaster in a different domain (public health) and higher levels of trust in message source both increase willingness to store water. This suggests that public agencies should encourage preparedness during actual emergencies, or “not let a crisis go to waste.”
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study are available in a repository online in accordance with funder data retention policies and can be found at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/GT8VK9.
Acknowledgments
This research was generously funded by the Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) at the University of California, Berkeley, as part of a larger project on infrastructural resilience to cyberattacks and other threats. The CLTC played no role in the conceptualization or design of this study, or in the data analysis or preparation of the manuscript. We are also grateful for comments and suggestions from a variety of individuals at the EBMUD, as well as those from Mark Buntaine, Marti Hearst, Tanu Kumar, Gabriel Lenz, Katerina Linos, Isha Ray, Kenichi Soga, and Laura Stoker. The data analysis strategy for this project was pre-registered with EGAP: http://egap.org/registration/6583.
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Published In
Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23 • Issue 3 • August 2022
Copyright
© 2022 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 12, 2021
Accepted: Jan 20, 2022
Published online: Apr 23, 2022
Published in print: Aug 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Sep 23, 2022
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