Understanding Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity to Hurricane Irma–Related Power Failures

This presentation will showcase findings from fieldwork in Florida following Hurricane Irma, which struck the state in September of 2017. We completed 42 door-to-door interviews in Orange and Highlands counties, which are urban and rural respectively. Our sample of households represented a range of socioeconomic statuses, genders, ages, mobilities, lengths of residency, and places of birth, providing a rich description of diverse experiences. We discovered unique patterns of exposure to power loss; there were significant differences in both the risk of loss and length of loss by neighborhood characteristics. Nineteen of forty-two households used a generator at some point during the blackout. Rural residents and residents who identified as “white” were over two times as likely to report using a generator. Purchasing a generator for a future blackout was one of the most common resilience building strategies indicated by the 21 respondents who did not use one during Irma. At the same time, generator use, noise, air pollution, securing fuel, and mechanical problems were some of the most frequently mentioned issues people reported having during the blackout. The most dominant source of stress and discomfort from the hurricane was the loss of power — and the most significant source of stress and discomfort from the loss of power was the extreme heat. The interviews demonstrated varied sensitivity to both the heat and the loss of power, and revealed insights about how households were ultimately impacted differently. In addition, insights were gained about how individual psychology may interact with more typical measures of vulnerability (e.g. socioeconomic status, age, and gender), to better explain health and comfort outcomes. Initial results indicated statistically different average scores on both the State Hope Scale and the Perceived Stress Scale among different socioeconomic groups, with lower SES being associated with lower Hope scores and higher Stress scores. There were statistically different average scores on the State Hope Scale alone between urban vs. rural households, with urban households on average reporting higher levels of agency and pathways thinking. Our findings generally conform to established all-hazard vulnerability theory, while providing new evidence to support the generation of burgeoning blackout-specific vulnerability theory.