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7 June 2024
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Featured FRI Magazine article: Using psychology to support building design/safety by Lenny Naidoo (FRI Vol 2 no 4)
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https://www.frimedia.org/uploads/1/2/2/7/122743954/vol2no4_final_lr.pdf
This week’s featured Fire and Rescue International magazine article is: Using psychology to support building design/safety written by Lenny Naidoo (FRI Vol 2 no 4). We will be sharing more technical/research/tactical articles from Fire and Rescue International magazine on a weekly basis with our readers to assist in technology transfer. This will hopefully create an increased awareness, providing you with hands-on advice and guidance. All our magazines are available free of charge in PDF format on our website and online at ISSUU. We also provide all technical articles as a free download in our article archive on our website.
Using psychology to support building design/safety
By Lenny Naidoo
Have you ever noticed the different ways people react in an emergency; some will cry, others will scream, some may just freeze, many will start to pray. The worst type of reaction is hysteria, which can spread to affect even calm people. Equally as bad is the element of selfishness that can originate when one’s life is threatened.
Emergencies in occupancies that have large numbers of people gathered, often lead to many casualties and deaths. This happens year after year despite all the advancements in fire safety/fire prevention and building design. Hotels, discos, sports stadiums etc are designed to ensure the safe evacuation of its occupants in an emergency yet, even small incidents result in loss of life.
For many years, fire safety engineers worked under a simple assumption: When a fire alarm rings, people will evacuate immediately. How quickly people manage to vacate a building, they believed, depends mainly on physical abilities, the location of the nearest exit and the behaviour of the fire.
This concept does not take into account the often-surprising behaviour of people during emergencies. In fact, research shows that as much as two-thirds of the time it takes occupants to exit a building after an alarm sounds, is start-up time; time spent milling about, looking for more information.
In 9/11's wake, researchers across fields are drawing on behavioural science to better understand people's reactions during fire-emergency evacuations; an effort they hope will lead to safer buildings.
Such findings have big implications for architects, engineers and emergency planners hoping to design safer buildings. Now, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this kind of human-based evacuation research is getting more attention and funding. Studying how occupants reacted as events unfolded and finding out what helped or hindered the evacuation efforts, could provide invaluable information for future high-rise designs, says Dr Robyn Gershon, a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who studies high-stress, high-risk work environments and is leading the study of the evacuation.
"This is going to impact high-rise emergency preparedness in a major way," says Dr Gershon, whose doctorate is in public health. "Just like the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire [in New York City in 1911] led to the first fire codes ever, this is going to be a turning point."
Designing escape routes
Reaction of the average human in an emergency
Psychologists have been studying how people react during fires for more than 25 years. The classic myth is that people exit immediately when they hear a fire alarm. That they don't, should be obvious to anyone who's ever taken part in a fire drill, says Dr Norman Groner, a professor in the department of public management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
"People's natural inclination is to want to define a situation before they respond," he explains "and an alarm bell is inherently ambiguous. You could say that people are too smart for their own good," Dr Groner says. "They understand that the probability that an alarm indicates a real fire and one that actually threatens them, is extremely low."
Using both of the most common research methods, observing evacuation drills through hidden cameras and interviewing fire disaster survivors, Dr Guyléne Proulx, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and an architectural planner by training (though she says that she's often mistaken for an environmental psychologist because of her interest in human behaviour) has found it takes people an average of three minutes to begin leaving a high-rise apartment building. Although that doesn't sound like much, during a real fire those three minutes could be deadly, she says, because fire develops so rapidly.
Myths about how people react
Researchers have discovered other tenets of people's behaviour during fires. Some examples include:
• People generally do not panic. There's still a myth in the public mind that people ‘panic’ in an emergency, but in fact panic is very rare, says Dr Groner. "Usually when people say they panicked, they just mean that they became fearful, not crazy or irrational," says Dr Proulx.
• People are often altruistic. In an emergency, strangers will often help each other out even when they put themselves at greater risk by doing so, says Dr Groner. Dr Gershon adds that altruism is also linked to familiarity. That is, people are even more likely to act in helpful ways when they know each other.
• Most people will try to exit through the door they entered. This is true even when emergency exit signs are well marked, says Dr Proulx. "When you think about it," she adds, "that makes sense. During an emergency occupants don't want to use an exit they have no experience with; they don't know where it will lead."
• People will move through smoke when necessary. Fire safety engineers used to believe that people would turn back when they encountered thick smoke. "In reality, researchers have found that people will move through terrible smoke if they feel they must in order to survive," Dr Groner says.
• People are inertial creatures. People don't like to stop what they're doing and often a fire alarm isn't enough of a cue to get them to drop their everyday tasks and exit a building. It's the accumulation of multiple cues, fire alarm, smoke odour, urging from co-workers and such that will finally convince them to do so.
Panic and human behaviour
‘Panic’ is usually defined as some sort of irrational behaviour. The word panic is frequently used by the media to describe the actions of survivors and victims. Victim’s deaths are loosely attributed to panic and sometimes this could be the scapegoat for the real reason such as poor building design.
The media is a great fan of the panic concept. Following the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in the USA in 1977, The Sun’s headline was “Panic kills 300,” the Daily Mail had “Panic and 300 stampede to death.
The cinema has used the concept of panic to its extreme, portraying hysterical occupants in a variety of emergencies, including fires. Many film enthusiasts will recall the 1974 Towering Inferno and the mad attempts of guests to escape in the stairs and on the roof.
What is frequently reported as ‘panic’ is behaviour with an unsuccessful outcome that was observed in other people. The term is also used by people to describe their own state of heightened anxiety, while the actions they report taking themselves are usually logical and appropriate. Indeed, it can be seen frequently in the media’s reporting of fires. There are many examples in the reporting of mass- casualty events, where the media has determined that the cause of the deaths was panic.
Station nightclub fire, USA, February 21 2003
In media reports of the fire at the Station nightclub in 2003, several survivors mentioned panic behaviour. A news video, shot inside the club as the fire and evacuation began, shows no evidence of panic. However, as conditions inside the club rapidly deteriorated, as in the Beverly Hills Supper Club, evacuees had to contend with two elements of panic: hope to escape through dwindling resources and aggressive concern about own safety. A review of media accounts that is currently underway has found several cases where evacuees describe aggressive behaviour, either their own or others but do not mention cases of irrational or illogical responses. Pushing to the exit, even to the point of trampling others, when flames and smoke had overtaken them and the only exit known to most occupants was blocked, cannot be considered irrational or illogical.
How do people react to the call for evacuation?
How people react to fire alarms have been studied in retrospect as well as in experiments. In studies, the choice of exit was examined with respect to the distance to exits and open or closed emergency exit. The second part covers the question on how the subjects think and react in a situation having a small fire in the escape route. The third part deals with some communication aspects regarding identification of signs. It is shown that the subjects prefer a familiar ordinary cash exit, even if the distance is longer to that exit than to the nearest emergency exit. However, if the emergency exit is open and the subjects can see the outside, the attractiveness becomes much higher for the emergency exit and most of the subjects choose the emergency exit.
The identification of alarm using a ring signal, perceives often as a general warning or some kind of a conventional ring signal such as a telephone or school ring signal and it is more seldom perceived as an evacuation signal. A spoken message, on the other hand, has a great impact on understanding what to do and gives a better and more appropriate behaviour for the evacuation of the building.
The understanding of signs, important in a fire evacuation situation, is very good for signs such as emergency exit but rather low for signs not so frequently used, such as a sign for radioactive material.
A fire in a nursing home (Edelman, Hertz and Bickman, 1980)
The staff led the patients, 85 patients, corresponding to 95% of the patients on that floor, down one staircase, although there were another three available. The staircase used was the one normally used by patients as well as personnel, as a route between the two floors. The other three staircases were emergency routes, fitted with entry alarms, and were therefore not used. These staircases had negative associations for both the patients and the staff and it was natural for them to use the normal staircase, even when evacuating the building. The evacuation, therefore, took longer time to perform than was expected by the building designer.
When dimensioning evacuation routes, one should already at the planning stage be aware of how the routes are to be used. People usually choose to leave a building the same way they came in, even if this is a poorer alternative than other available. Within the field of behavioural science, it is pointed out that people often choose the known before the unknown, which would explain the above behaviour. Dr Jonathan Sime has presented a study of the use of evacuation routes, in which he arrived at the conclusion that knowledge of and familiarity with routes, are important if they are to be used. According to Dr Sime, this is more important than the width or length of the routes.
When leaving the bar in a large building, most of the guests preferred to leave by the same door as they had entered, Figure 1 (Sime and Kimura, 1988).
The majority of the staff, however, chose to leave via the emergency exit, which they also had used to enter the hall. The fire had not reached the hall at this time. The location of exits is also important for their use. In an auditorium, it is better to have the emergency exits located at the front of the room so that they can be seen by the people sitting in the auditorium.
Proposed solutions
The key now, says Dr Groner, is to incorporate findings like these into buildings and building evacuation systems. Proposed solutions include:
• Vocal alarms. A vocal alarm that instructs building occupants to evacuate is more convincing than a simple bell, Dr Groner says. And, if that alarm were operated by a security desk or fire command centre that could monitor the course of the fire, a vocal alarm could even alert building occupants to the location of the fire in the building and recommend safer evacuation routes, he adds.
• Automatic exits. An alarm system might automatically open emergency exit doors, notes Dr Proulx, showing people those doors are safe to use.
• Comprehensive building orientations. In the World Trade Centre, many employees had never tried to walk down the emergency stairwells from their offices to the ground floor and had no idea whether they could do so or how long it would take, says Dr Gershon. New employee or new-tenant orientations in high-rises should include a comprehensive introduction to the building's emergency-exit system, she suggests.
Findings like have begun to convince even non psychologists of the importance of human behaviour in any study of fires. A case in point is mathematician Dr Ed Galea, who develops computer models that estimate how a fire would spread through a particular building and how its occupants would get out. Head of the fire safety engineering group at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, Dr Galea says he cannot create accurate models without understanding people's typical fire behaviour.
On the positive side, some recommendations are starting to make their way into legislation; it is now mandatory for high-rise buildings to conduct evacuation drills at least once a year in the United States.
This week’s featured Fire and Rescue International magazine article is: Using psychology to support building design/safety written by Lenny Naidoo (FRI Vol 2 no 4). We will be sharing more technical/research/tactical articles from Fire and Rescue International magazine on a weekly basis with our readers to assist in technology transfer. This will hopefully create an increased awareness, providing you with hands-on advice and guidance. All our magazines are available free of charge in PDF format on our website and online at ISSUU. We also provide all technical articles as a free download in our article archive on our website.
Using psychology to support building design/safety
By Lenny Naidoo
Have you ever noticed the different ways people react in an emergency; some will cry, others will scream, some may just freeze, many will start to pray. The worst type of reaction is hysteria, which can spread to affect even calm people. Equally as bad is the element of selfishness that can originate when one’s life is threatened.
Emergencies in occupancies that have large numbers of people gathered, often lead to many casualties and deaths. This happens year after year despite all the advancements in fire safety/fire prevention and building design. Hotels, discos, sports stadiums etc are designed to ensure the safe evacuation of its occupants in an emergency yet, even small incidents result in loss of life.
For many years, fire safety engineers worked under a simple assumption: When a fire alarm rings, people will evacuate immediately. How quickly people manage to vacate a building, they believed, depends mainly on physical abilities, the location of the nearest exit and the behaviour of the fire.
This concept does not take into account the often-surprising behaviour of people during emergencies. In fact, research shows that as much as two-thirds of the time it takes occupants to exit a building after an alarm sounds, is start-up time; time spent milling about, looking for more information.
In 9/11's wake, researchers across fields are drawing on behavioural science to better understand people's reactions during fire-emergency evacuations; an effort they hope will lead to safer buildings.
Such findings have big implications for architects, engineers and emergency planners hoping to design safer buildings. Now, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, this kind of human-based evacuation research is getting more attention and funding. Studying how occupants reacted as events unfolded and finding out what helped or hindered the evacuation efforts, could provide invaluable information for future high-rise designs, says Dr Robyn Gershon, a professor at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health who studies high-stress, high-risk work environments and is leading the study of the evacuation.
"This is going to impact high-rise emergency preparedness in a major way," says Dr Gershon, whose doctorate is in public health. "Just like the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire [in New York City in 1911] led to the first fire codes ever, this is going to be a turning point."
Designing escape routes
Reaction of the average human in an emergency
Psychologists have been studying how people react during fires for more than 25 years. The classic myth is that people exit immediately when they hear a fire alarm. That they don't, should be obvious to anyone who's ever taken part in a fire drill, says Dr Norman Groner, a professor in the department of public management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.
"People's natural inclination is to want to define a situation before they respond," he explains "and an alarm bell is inherently ambiguous. You could say that people are too smart for their own good," Dr Groner says. "They understand that the probability that an alarm indicates a real fire and one that actually threatens them, is extremely low."
Using both of the most common research methods, observing evacuation drills through hidden cameras and interviewing fire disaster survivors, Dr Guyléne Proulx, a senior researcher at the National Research Council of Canada and an architectural planner by training (though she says that she's often mistaken for an environmental psychologist because of her interest in human behaviour) has found it takes people an average of three minutes to begin leaving a high-rise apartment building. Although that doesn't sound like much, during a real fire those three minutes could be deadly, she says, because fire develops so rapidly.
Myths about how people react
Researchers have discovered other tenets of people's behaviour during fires. Some examples include:
• People generally do not panic. There's still a myth in the public mind that people ‘panic’ in an emergency, but in fact panic is very rare, says Dr Groner. "Usually when people say they panicked, they just mean that they became fearful, not crazy or irrational," says Dr Proulx.
• People are often altruistic. In an emergency, strangers will often help each other out even when they put themselves at greater risk by doing so, says Dr Groner. Dr Gershon adds that altruism is also linked to familiarity. That is, people are even more likely to act in helpful ways when they know each other.
• Most people will try to exit through the door they entered. This is true even when emergency exit signs are well marked, says Dr Proulx. "When you think about it," she adds, "that makes sense. During an emergency occupants don't want to use an exit they have no experience with; they don't know where it will lead."
• People will move through smoke when necessary. Fire safety engineers used to believe that people would turn back when they encountered thick smoke. "In reality, researchers have found that people will move through terrible smoke if they feel they must in order to survive," Dr Groner says.
• People are inertial creatures. People don't like to stop what they're doing and often a fire alarm isn't enough of a cue to get them to drop their everyday tasks and exit a building. It's the accumulation of multiple cues, fire alarm, smoke odour, urging from co-workers and such that will finally convince them to do so.
Panic and human behaviour
‘Panic’ is usually defined as some sort of irrational behaviour. The word panic is frequently used by the media to describe the actions of survivors and victims. Victim’s deaths are loosely attributed to panic and sometimes this could be the scapegoat for the real reason such as poor building design.
The media is a great fan of the panic concept. Following the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in the USA in 1977, The Sun’s headline was “Panic kills 300,” the Daily Mail had “Panic and 300 stampede to death.
The cinema has used the concept of panic to its extreme, portraying hysterical occupants in a variety of emergencies, including fires. Many film enthusiasts will recall the 1974 Towering Inferno and the mad attempts of guests to escape in the stairs and on the roof.
What is frequently reported as ‘panic’ is behaviour with an unsuccessful outcome that was observed in other people. The term is also used by people to describe their own state of heightened anxiety, while the actions they report taking themselves are usually logical and appropriate. Indeed, it can be seen frequently in the media’s reporting of fires. There are many examples in the reporting of mass- casualty events, where the media has determined that the cause of the deaths was panic.
Station nightclub fire, USA, February 21 2003
In media reports of the fire at the Station nightclub in 2003, several survivors mentioned panic behaviour. A news video, shot inside the club as the fire and evacuation began, shows no evidence of panic. However, as conditions inside the club rapidly deteriorated, as in the Beverly Hills Supper Club, evacuees had to contend with two elements of panic: hope to escape through dwindling resources and aggressive concern about own safety. A review of media accounts that is currently underway has found several cases where evacuees describe aggressive behaviour, either their own or others but do not mention cases of irrational or illogical responses. Pushing to the exit, even to the point of trampling others, when flames and smoke had overtaken them and the only exit known to most occupants was blocked, cannot be considered irrational or illogical.
How do people react to the call for evacuation?
How people react to fire alarms have been studied in retrospect as well as in experiments. In studies, the choice of exit was examined with respect to the distance to exits and open or closed emergency exit. The second part covers the question on how the subjects think and react in a situation having a small fire in the escape route. The third part deals with some communication aspects regarding identification of signs. It is shown that the subjects prefer a familiar ordinary cash exit, even if the distance is longer to that exit than to the nearest emergency exit. However, if the emergency exit is open and the subjects can see the outside, the attractiveness becomes much higher for the emergency exit and most of the subjects choose the emergency exit.
The identification of alarm using a ring signal, perceives often as a general warning or some kind of a conventional ring signal such as a telephone or school ring signal and it is more seldom perceived as an evacuation signal. A spoken message, on the other hand, has a great impact on understanding what to do and gives a better and more appropriate behaviour for the evacuation of the building.
The understanding of signs, important in a fire evacuation situation, is very good for signs such as emergency exit but rather low for signs not so frequently used, such as a sign for radioactive material.
A fire in a nursing home (Edelman, Hertz and Bickman, 1980)
The staff led the patients, 85 patients, corresponding to 95% of the patients on that floor, down one staircase, although there were another three available. The staircase used was the one normally used by patients as well as personnel, as a route between the two floors. The other three staircases were emergency routes, fitted with entry alarms, and were therefore not used. These staircases had negative associations for both the patients and the staff and it was natural for them to use the normal staircase, even when evacuating the building. The evacuation, therefore, took longer time to perform than was expected by the building designer.
When dimensioning evacuation routes, one should already at the planning stage be aware of how the routes are to be used. People usually choose to leave a building the same way they came in, even if this is a poorer alternative than other available. Within the field of behavioural science, it is pointed out that people often choose the known before the unknown, which would explain the above behaviour. Dr Jonathan Sime has presented a study of the use of evacuation routes, in which he arrived at the conclusion that knowledge of and familiarity with routes, are important if they are to be used. According to Dr Sime, this is more important than the width or length of the routes.
When leaving the bar in a large building, most of the guests preferred to leave by the same door as they had entered, Figure 1 (Sime and Kimura, 1988).
The majority of the staff, however, chose to leave via the emergency exit, which they also had used to enter the hall. The fire had not reached the hall at this time. The location of exits is also important for their use. In an auditorium, it is better to have the emergency exits located at the front of the room so that they can be seen by the people sitting in the auditorium.
Proposed solutions
The key now, says Dr Groner, is to incorporate findings like these into buildings and building evacuation systems. Proposed solutions include:
• Vocal alarms. A vocal alarm that instructs building occupants to evacuate is more convincing than a simple bell, Dr Groner says. And, if that alarm were operated by a security desk or fire command centre that could monitor the course of the fire, a vocal alarm could even alert building occupants to the location of the fire in the building and recommend safer evacuation routes, he adds.
• Automatic exits. An alarm system might automatically open emergency exit doors, notes Dr Proulx, showing people those doors are safe to use.
• Comprehensive building orientations. In the World Trade Centre, many employees had never tried to walk down the emergency stairwells from their offices to the ground floor and had no idea whether they could do so or how long it would take, says Dr Gershon. New employee or new-tenant orientations in high-rises should include a comprehensive introduction to the building's emergency-exit system, she suggests.
Findings like have begun to convince even non psychologists of the importance of human behaviour in any study of fires. A case in point is mathematician Dr Ed Galea, who develops computer models that estimate how a fire would spread through a particular building and how its occupants would get out. Head of the fire safety engineering group at the University of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, Dr Galea says he cannot create accurate models without understanding people's typical fire behaviour.
On the positive side, some recommendations are starting to make their way into legislation; it is now mandatory for high-rise buildings to conduct evacuation drills at least once a year in the United States.