Disaster Experiences

This document contains the summary statistics of the disaster experiences of participants in the Assessments of social, community, and psychological impacts of flood/hurricane victims project.

Index Flood/Hurricane

Participants were asked to choose one flood/hurricane experienced in the past 10 years to be their "most influential natural disaster". Below are the disasters participants named.

Participants' Most Influential Flood/Hurricane
Frequency Percentage
2002 Hurricane Lily 12 1.2
2005 Hurricane Katrina 434 42.7
2005 Hurricane Rita 28 2.8
2008 Hurricane Gustav 103 10.1
2016 Louisiana Flood 331 32.5
2017 Hurricane Harvey 48 4.7
Low Frequency 21 2.1
None 6 0.6
Unidentifiable 34 3.3
Note: Although we asked participants to recall only the past 15 years, some stated events that were older. Low Frequency refers to disasters that were named less than 10 times. These include 1969 Hurricane Camille (1), 1979 Hurricane Frederic (1), 1992 Hurricane Andrew (1), 2001 Hurricane Allison (1), 2004 Hurricane Ivan(2), 2005 Hurricane Wilma (1), 2004 Hurricane Frances (1), 2008 Hurricane Ike(1), 2012 Hurricane Sandy(2), 2012 Hurricane Isaac (9), 2017 Hurricane Maria(1). None refers to responses that indicated no disasters were influential. Unidentifiable refers to responses that were not identifiable, e.g., major typos, general reference to ''hurricane'' or ''flood'' without naming the storm.

Loss

Participants were asked to indicate the kind of loss they experienced in the index disaster. The table below shows the breakdown of the frequencies and percentages of the loss experiences identified by the participants.

Loss Experiences by Survey Participants N = 1,0171
Death of a family member or a friend 41 (4.2%)
Major injury of self 1 (0.1%)
Minor injury of self 24 (2.5%)
Major injury of family/friend 54 (5.6%)
Minor injury of family/friend 138 (14%)
Major destruction of home 312 (32%)
Minor destruction of home 387 (40%)
Other destruction of property 415 (43%)
Loss of job 25 (2.6%)
Not able to go to work for a period of time 183 (19%)
Others 181 (19%)

1 n (%)