Poll: Residents Would Not Evacuate For Hurricane

MIAMI (AP) -- A survey finds about one in three people living in Southern coastal areas say they'd ignore hurricane evacuation orders if a storm threatened their area.<br/><br/>That's up from about

Tuesday, July 24th 2007, 5:24 am

By: News On 6

MIAMI (AP) -- A survey finds about one in three people living in Southern coastal areas say they'd ignore hurricane evacuation orders if a storm threatened their area.

That's up from about one in four last year.

The survey of people in eight states, including Texas, found the most common reasons for not evacuating were the same ones that topped last year's Harvard poll:

They are:

-- people believe their homes are safe and well-built

-- roads would be too crowded

-- and that fleeing would be dangerous.

Slightly more than one in four also said they'd be reluctant to leave behind a pet.

Parts of the Gulf coast are still recovering from two deadly 2005 hurricanes -- Katrina and Rita.

Harvard professor Robert Blendon noted the mild 2006 Atlantic hurricane season.

Blendon says it just shows how people can become complacent if they're not immediately threatened.

...

The poll by telephone involved more than 5,000 people 18 or older in coastal areas of Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina.

All participants lived within 20 miles of the coast.

The study -- funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- was done between June 18th and July tenth by International Communications Research of Media, Pennsylvania.

It has a sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.