Analysis of child pick‐up during daily routines and for daytime no‐notice evacuations

In a no‐notice disaster (e.g., nuclear explosion, terrorist attack, or hazardous materials release), an evacuation may start immediately after the disaster strikes. When a no‐notice evacuation occurs during the daytime, household members are scattered throughout the regional network, and some family members (e.g., children) may need to be picked up. This household pick‐up and gathering behavior was seldom investigated in previous work due to insufficient data; this gap in our understanding about who within families handles child‐gathering is addressed here. Three hundred fifteen interviews were conducted in the Chicago metropolitan area to ascertain how respondents planned their response to hypothetical no‐notice emergency evacuation orders. This paper presents the influencing factors that affect household pick‐up and gathering behavior/expectations and the logistic regression models developed to predict the probability that parents pick up a child in three situations: a normal weekday and two hypothetical emergency scenarios. The results showed that both mothers and fathers were more likely to pick up a child under emergency conditions than they were on a normal weekday. For a normal weekday, increasing the distance between parents and children decreased the probability of parents picking up children; in other words, the farther parents are from their children, the less likely they will pick them up. In an emergency, effects of distance on pick‐up behavior were significant for women, but not significant for men; that is, increasing the distance between parents and children decreased the probability that mothers pick up a child, but had a less significant effect on the fathers’ probability. Another significant factor affecting child pick‐up behavior/expectations was household income when controlling for distance. The results of this study confirm that parents expect to gather children under emergency conditions, which needs to be accounted for in evacuation planning; failure to do so could cause difficulties in executing the pick‐ups, lead to considerable queuing and rerouting, and extend the time citizens are exposed to high levels of risk.