Rush Limbaugh downplaying hurricane Irma may have decreased evacuations

Enlarge / Hurricane Irma as it strikes Florida. (credit: NASA EO)

Before Hurricane Irma hit Florida in 2017, radio entertainer (and Florida resident) Rush Limbaugh falsely ranted that landfalling hurricanes are never as strong as they're reported," claiming that life-saving forecasts are exaggerated to advance this climate change agenda." Beyond his radio audience, the comments generated a fair amount of news coverage. Yet Limbaugh evacuated his beachfront mansion a few days later.

Given the cultural polarization about certain scientific facts, it's fair to wonder if these irresponsible falsehoods had a discernible impact on evacuations. UCLA's Elisa Long, Keith Chen, and Ryne Rohla used a phone-location dataset to find out. They compared evacuations for Irma to those in Texas for Hurricane Harvey and to Florida's 2016 Hurricane Matthew.

The dataset includes anonymized locations from millions of phones, so it requires some simplified processing. Each phone's home location is defined by its most common location in the week previous to the first hurricane alert. Then, for a window of time around the hurricane, evacuations are determined by a change in location that lasts at least 24 hours.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments