Natural Hazards, Disasters, and Demographic Change: The Case of Severe Tornadoes in the United States, 1980-2010.

Natural hazards and disasters distress populations and inflict damage on the built environment, but existing studies yielded mixed results regarding their lasting demographic implications. I leverage variation across three decades of block group exposure to an exogenous and acute natural hazard-severe tornadoes-to focus conceptually on social vulnerability and to empirically assess local net demographic change. Using matching techniques and a difference-in-difference estimator, I find that severe tornadoes result in no net change in local population size but lead to compositional changes, whereby affected neighborhoods become more White and socioeconomically advantaged. Moderation models show that the effects are exacerbated for wealthier communities and that a federal disaster declaration does not mitigate the effects. I interpret the empirical findings as evidence of a displacement process by which economically disadvantaged residents are forcibly mobile, and economically advantaged and White locals rebuild rather than relocate. To make sense of demographic change after natural hazards, I advance an unequal replacement of social vulnerability framework that considers hazard attributes, geographic scale, and impacted local context. I conclude that the natural environment is consequential for the sociospatial organization of communities and that a disaster declaration has little impact on mitigating this driver of neighborhood inequality.

Social media usage patterns during natural hazards.

Natural hazards are becoming increasingly expensive as climate change and development are exposing communities to greater risks. Preparation and recovery are critical for climate change resilience, and social media are being used more and more to communicate before, during, and after disasters. While there is a growing body of research aimed at understanding how people use social media surrounding disaster events, most existing work has focused on a single disaster case study. In the present study, we analyze five of the costliest disasters in the last decade in the United States (Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, two sets of tornado outbreaks, and flooding in Louisiana) through the lens of Twitter. In particular, we explore the frequency of both generic and specific food-security related terms, and quantify the relationship between network size and Twitter activity during disasters. We find differences in tweet volume for keywords depending on disaster type, with people using Twitter more frequently in preparation for Hurricanes, and for real-time or recovery information for tornado and flooding events. Further, we find that people share a host of general disaster and specific preparation and recovery terms during these events. Finally, we find that among all account types, individuals with "average" sized networks are most likely to share information during these disasters, and in most cases, do so more frequently than normal. This suggests that around disasters, an ideal form of social contagion is being engaged in which average people rather than outsized influentials are key to communication. These results provide important context for the type of disaster information and target audiences that may be most useful for disaster communication during varying extreme events.

Place attachment among retirees in Greensburg, Kansas.

On 4 May 2007 an ef-5 tornado leveled 95 percent of Greensburg, Kansas. Because city leaders encouraged everyone to use "green" building techniques as they rebuilt their homes and businesses, not only has the return to normalcy been exceedingly slow, but some of the town's older residents feel that officials have overlooked their needs. These minor episodes of discord enabled us to learn what features are most important to people in retirement. The features include identifiable landmarks, a space in which to socialize, and age-specific businesses. We assert that the lessons learned in Greensburg are applicable to other communities with a sizable older population. As baby boomers rapidly enter retirement they will seek places to live that are elder friendly and enable them to effectively bond with place. As previous research attests, people who have a strong attachment to place commonly have a good quality of life.