A new survey will gather information about coastal residents' attitudes and behaviors regarding hurricane evacuations. For the next month, local and state emergency officials will be conducting phone interviews to find out how residents react to evacuations and how to better implement emergency practices, like transportation and sheltering decisions. The study is being conducted for North Carolina Emergency Management and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Wilmington District.
“Our primary mission is to get people out of harm’s way and keep them safe,” said Department of Public Safety Secretary Kieran Shanahan in a statement. “Understanding how coastal residents receive evacuation information and then decide what to do with that knowledge will help us better plan for each storm and determine how best to coordinate and allocate our resources.”
Results from the study are expected to be ready in September. A similar effort took place in 2003, but the state's population has increased by 15 percent since then.