ABSTRACT
Emergencies such as fires and terrorist attacks pose risks of injuries and fatalities, which can be exacerbated by delayed, ill-informed, or unmanaged responses. Effective emergency communication strategies could be used to better inform people and reduce these risks. This research analyzes videos of real-world emergencies to: (a) identify people's observed behaviors that increase risk during evacuations, and (b) examine which emergency communication strategies might reduce risk behaviors. We analyzed 126 publicly available videos of emergency evacuations in different emergencies (e.g., fire, terror attack, evacuation alarm, perceived threat). We found evidence of three types of risk behaviors (delayed response, filming, running) and four emergency communication strategies (evacuation alarm, staff guiding people to exits, general prerecorded message, live announcement). Our analyses suggest that having staff guide people to exits is the most effective strategy for promoting faster and more effective responses. However, neither live announcements nor pre-recorded messages were associated with delayed responses, while evacuation alarms were associated with more delayed responses than other communication strategies. Although people filming the incident was unrelated to staff interactions, it occurred more with alarms sounding and prerecorded messages, suggesting that these emergency communications might not prevent filming. Compared to no communications, all emergency communication strategies reduced running during evacuations. We discuss the implications of this research for identifying effective emergency communication strategies and reducing risk-increasing evacuation behaviors.
ABSTRACT
Structures are currently designed and constructed in accordance with prescriptive and performance-based (PBD) methodologies to ensure a certain level of occupant safety during fire emergencies. The performance-based approach requires the quantification of both ASET (Available Safe Egress Time) and RSET (Required Safe Egress Time) to determine the degree of safety provided. This article focuses on the RSET side of the equation, for which a fire protection or fire safety engineer would use some type of egress modelling approach to estimate evacuation performance. Often, simple engineering equations are applied to estimate the RSET value. Over time, more sophisticated computational tools have appeared-that go beyond basic flow calculations; e.g. simulating individual agent movement. Irrespective of the approach adopted, appropriate and accurate representation of human behavior in response to fire within these approaches is limited, mainly due to the lack of a comprehensive conceptual model of evacuee decision-making and behavior during fire emergencies. This article initially presents the set of behavioral statements, or mini-theories, currently available from various fire and disaster studies, organized using the overarching theory of decision-making and human behavior in disasters. Once presented, guidance is provided on how these behavioral statements might be incorporated into an evacuation model, in order to better represent human behavior in fire within the safety analysis being performed. The intent here is to improve the accuracy of the results produced by performance-based calculations and analyses.
