Hurricane Sandy mortality in the Caribbean and continental North America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose – Tropical storms pose a significant threat to population despite the noteworthy improvements in forecasting and emergency management. Following the effects of Hurricane Sandy in the continental North America (USA and Canada) and the Caribbean, the purpose of this paper is to examine the mortality caused by the hurricane, focussing on differences in human vulnerability between these two regions. Design/methodology/approach – The authors developed a database of 233 deaths, consisting of variables that provided a description of the circumstances under which the fatal incidents occurred and demographic details of the victims. Findings – Analysis of the database showed higher percentages of female and young victims in the Caribbean than in continental North America, where mortality increased progressively with age and the ratio of males to females was higher. The majority of deaths occurred outdoors especially during clean-up and in vehicle crashes related to the storm. Physical trauma and drowning were identified as the most common causes of death, followed by carbon monoxide poisoning, hypothermia and others, although substantially different percentages were recorded between the two regions. Overall, indirect deaths presented a higher percentage than direct ones. Among the latter, incidents caused by storm surge and tree falls showed the highest numbers. Power failure and car crashes were the most common cause of indirect incidents. Originality/value – The paper provides a thorough analysis of the circumstances under which fatal incidents occurred. It identifies parameters that affected the vulnerability of human life to the storm and discusses the differences between the Caribbean and continental North America.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".