Critical infrastructure industries have received increased attention for their susceptibility to domestic hazards, including natural, technological, and terrorism events. Critical infrastructure industries provide supportive resources for the U.S. economy, national security, public health and safety. In a crisis or disaster, a failure in one critical industry can have cascading effects on the others, hindering emergency response and community recovery. The challenge is to understand what factors motivate, facilitate, and hinder workplace adoption of disaster-protective behaviors. Effective workplace preparedness is more than a business continuity plan. An effective plan factors in the perceived hazard susceptibility, efficacy of risk-reduction measures, social network influences, and characteristics of management and employees. This study explores these factors within an occupational health and safety model to understand how social influences, threat appraisal, and decision making interact to influence the adoption of disaster-protective behaviors.
Data collection will include key informant interviews, and management and employee questionnaires with private, critical infrastructure industries in Southern California. Private industries, unlike the public sector, receive little federal assistance in workforce preparedness; therefore, implementing protective actions in the private sector are contingent upon corporate threat appraisal and decision making. The private sector also employs 76% of the U.S. workforce and, in a disaster, employee availability is critical to providing communities with the necessary goods, services, and revenue for recovery. This makes the private sector also an optimal environment to assess whether workplace protective measures influence employees? home-readiness plans with the potential of diffusing these preparedness behaviors into the greater community.
