from the coast. We found that age, income, and ethnicity all play small but significant roles in determining intention to migrate, but that more intangible elements such as changes in quality of life or lifestyle may be more important. Many residents indicated a preference for remaining close if they were to permanently leave their homes, and residents were more likely to indicate a preference for staying in place after Irma than after Matthew. Residents may have many reasons for becoming more reluctant to move – complacency borne out of repeated “near misses”, increased awareness of the likely costs and inconvenience of re-location, or the realization that specific impacts are highly variable—making responses by coastal planners and managers more challenging.

27:T534,

Institutional and personal timelines are constantly placed in tension by hurricanes, from decisions regarding preparedness and evacuation, to recovery and hazard mitigation decisions. Government timelines for evacuation, for example, must allow sufficient time for the large scale movement of a population; but, individually, evacuation timelines are impacted by a myriad of personal decisions including caregiving concerns and employment concerns, both of which tend to push the decision making window further out. Another example is in recovery, where institutional timelines for recovery assistance, spread out across several agencies and timescales, do not readily align with personal and family decision-making timelines in which returning to a sense of normalcy is prioritized highest. These varying timelines result in complications with the marrying of various sources of assistance and lead to both unnecessary confusion and also missed opportunities to maximize recovery assistance. In hazard mitigation, the fact that the majority of funds are available after damages have occurred already creates an inverted timeline in which preventative actions are taken after the fact, but the delays inherent to the management of the programs also create extensive delays to family recovery timelines.

28:T436,

As meteorological prediction and communication technologies have advanced, disaster outcomes following hurricanes have not shown matching progress. Through analysis of focus group conversations held with specific populations in New York City communities affected by Superstorm Sandy in 2012, we investigate how risk communication might help mediate societal vulnerability to hurricanes by influencing the information that people receive, their perceptions of approaching hurricane risks, and their behavioral responses. The focus group conversations illuminated both shared themes and important differences among the various populations who participated in the study. The findings illustrate the complexity behind the term vulnerability, particularly as it interacts with risk communication to influence outcomes. We propose that risk communication with diverse populations can be improved by incorporating understandings of unseen capacities as well as susceptibilities, therefore moving toward a more just and equitable hazard information system.

29:T529,

For more than four decades now, social scientists have understood disasters as temporally prolonged processes in which human practices enhance the socially disruptive and materially destructive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological “accidents,” and epidemics. This approach has come to be known as vulnerability theory in the realm of disaster risk management and it is closely related to the political-ecological analytical approach in the social sciences. Because of the analytical power of vulnerability theory and political ecology, some social scientists have gone so far as to call disasters “revelatory crises” that illuminate the political economic conditions that give catastrophes their form and magnitude. Although vulnerability theory and political ecology are certainly powerful analytical vantage points, they are not n