Risk and Recovery: Understanding Flood Risk Perceptions in a Postdisaster City--The Case of New Orleans.

Flood hazards are a serious and growing threat to the health and welfare of residents in cities and rural areas around the world. This cross-sectional study uses a sample of 383 residents living in seven New Orleans, Louisiana, neighborhoods to examine the effect of experiential, sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors on flood risk perceptions. Findings suggest that respondents judge the level of flood risk to be lower than other types of risk. Results from ordinal logistic regression analyses show that flood risk perception is influenced by flood experience, income, race, gender, homeownership status and years residing in New Orleans. Our findings support extant scholarship showing that African Americans tend to have higher perceptions of risk than whites and that low-income people and women have higher risk perceptions than higher income residents and men. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for risk management planning in coastal cities like New Orleans that face omnipresent flood threats associated with climate-change-driven sea level rise and increased frequency and destructiveness of storms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]