Flood warning signs work—but not how you’d expect.
In our new study of over 1,000 Texas drivers, we found that simply having seen a “Turn Around Don’t Drown” road sign in the past made drivers almost twice as likely to turn their car around during flooding emergencies. Seeing a “Low Water Crossing” sign had a different effect, and it appears people may not understand that sign as a warning.
What’s surprising about these findings? Previous exposure to the flood warning sign, “Turn Around Don’t Drown” predicts people’s behavior more than if they understand the sign.
Researchers refer to this as “mere exposure”—the idea that repeated encounters with a message builds familiarity and shapes decision-making even without deep comprehension. It’s worth noting that prior flood experience, age, and emotional risk responses were even stronger predictors of turning around, suggesting that signs matter most when they reinforce lived experience and risk awareness.
In disaster situations like floods, split-second decisions matter. Vehicle-related drownings account for the majority of flood deaths in Texas and across the U.S., and our findings suggest that increasing the public’s familiarity with flood warning signs is a key step toward prevention.
Yet, two-thirds of our study respondents reported receiving few or no flood safety messages. The findings concerning the sign, “Low Water Crossing,” were a bit different. Here, understanding did have a small effect, and our focus groups suggested that many people thought this sign meant there was a low amount of water on the road and it was safe to cross. We need to study this more and see if we can find clearer messages.
Read the full study in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, authored by Keri K. Stephens, Ph.D., Mir Rabby, & Matthew McGlone in the Moody College of Communication, Technology and Information Policy Institute (UT-Austin). The article is open access.
Learn more our research on flood communication in Texas: explore this video on flood message developed for Texas, see our research on Disaster Communication at the Technology & Information Policy Institute website, and understand more about the difficulty of warning people about floods, in our article in The Conversation.