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Top2. Literature Review
When reviewing scholarship about disaster preparedness, the key factors of influence focus on previous disaster experience, higher trust in authority, greater perception of risk and consequences, smaller family size, and being geographically closer to an evacuation zone. All of which generally increase the likelihood for an individual to evacuate (Dash, 2002; Stein, Duenas-Osorio, & Subramanian, 2010; Wachinger, Renn, Begg, & Huhlick, 2013). However, while individuals may suggest their likelihood to evacuate if large storm presents itself in a hypothetical scenario, the effectiveness of evacuation warnings may not be that influential on people’s actual choices when severe weather hits (Baker, 1991). For example, Ruch and Schumann (1997) predicted an 89% evacuation rate in the Texas area, but in fact, only 29% of the population actually evacuated when Hurricane Bret struck Texas in 1999 (Prater, Wenger, & Grady, 2000).