9/11. Tornadoes. Emergency preparedness. Whether explaining parts per million to a community exposed to contaminated groundwater or launching a campaign to encourage home carbon monoxide testing, an effective message is paramount to the desired result: an increased understanding of health risk.   Communicating Environmental Risk in Multiethnic Communities is the first book to address the theory and practice of disseminating disaster warnings and hazard education messages to multiethnic communities. Authors Michael K. Lindell and Ronald W. Perry introduce theory-based reasoning as a basis for understanding warning dissemination and public education, devoting specific attention to the community context of emergency warning delivery and response. Through these principles of human behavior, readers can apply risk communication information to virtually any specific disaster agent with which they may be concerned.   This volume is recommended for practitioners in private emergency management and federal, state, and local governments, as well as students studying risk communication, health communication, emergency management, and environmental policy and management.   

Disaster Warnings as Risk Communication

Disaster warnings as risk communication

In this chapter we will address the implications of the PADM for disaster warnings, examine the degree to which the model fits the empirical literature on human response to warnings, and discuss the implications of this model for the practice of warning multiethnic populations about environmental threats. As noted earlier, two features of disaster warnings set them apart from other kinds of risk communication. First, there is the issue of urgency. Disaster warnings are used when a threat is imminent, so there are only minutes or possibly hours before disaster impact. The amount of time available is a function of the state of forecast technology for a given hazard, and this varies from one hazard agent ...

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