Role of Information in the Judgment of Risks from Natural Hazards: Technical Description of Project and Results

摘要

The first section of the report describes the hazard sites and criteria used in their selection. The hazard of primary interest is the earthquake hazard in Whatcom County, Washington, a hazard likely to have low salience for most residents of the area. The comparison hazard is the water supply contamination hazard at Lake Samish, Washington. The second section describes the study design which is based on the collection of three waves of field data over a five month period. The longitudinal design enables estimation of the impact of hazard information on risk judgment and hazard mitigation variables.