Transcript
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Hello and welcome to the Fire Science Show.
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Perhaps I'm talking a little bit too much about my travels recently, but indeed the trip to New Zealand was something else and besides participating in the Brilliant Fire NZ conference, I also had the chance to stay for a few days at the University of Canterbury.
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For me, it was a very important trip, as research from Canterbury inspired me to become a scientist and I've always looked up to these guys.
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So it was fantastic to meet up with all the colleagues from New Zealand Charlie ,A ndy B Aatif, Ton , pete Thompson and also some guests they had Bronwynn Forrest and Patrick Van Hess.
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Like so many people I've met and I've enjoyed all those meetings thoroughly, and among those, one who hosted me was Professor Daniel Nilsen.
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I've spent three days with Daniel at Canterbury and, of course, I took the chance to interview him.
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Daniel is one of the lead human behavior and fire experts and actually also someone from whom I've learned about the craft of engineering systems for human evacuation.
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First I was in 2015, where he led a course on evacuation with late Rita Fahy in Copenhagen.
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Anyway, for a long time I was trying to set up an interview with Daniel and we were thinking about appropriate topic and you know, one thing that is very interesting in the space of human evacuation is this phenomenon or myth of panic.
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That is something that always starts a very emotional discussion in social media when someone uses the term panic.
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Panic is widely used to describe fires and evacuations in the media, but the question is is it really there?
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Is it a real thing?
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Can we blame stuff on panic?
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Actually, many scientists already know that you cannot, but still there are a lot of myths around the phenomenon of panic.
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In this episode we go deep on panic and we try to some extent debunk the myths.
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We try to illustrate where they came from.
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So we're going through ancient literature from early 20th century to see how it was first described in publications and then see how our understanding of panic evolved.
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And also what's really really important and that's the fundamental part of the episode we discuss what it means to engineering, what decisions are being taken wrongfully because of the concept of panic, which is incorrect, and what decisions can be taken better if we start to acknowledge the human behavior on a higher level on the way that it should be acknowledged in fire safety engineering.
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So in this episode we're trying to replace a myth of panic with fire safety engineering Another episode that I had the chance to record live in person.
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The dynamic is a little bit different than when we record online.
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I kind of enjoy it.
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Perhaps in future I'll be able to do more like this.
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But anyway, enough of talking, let's spin the intro and jump into the episode.
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Welcome to the Firesize Show.
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My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host.
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This podcast is brought to you in collaboration with OFR Consultants.
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Ofr is the UK's leading fire risk consultancy.
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Its globally established team has developed a reputation for preeminent fire engineering expertise, with colleagues working across the world to help protect people, property and environment.
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Colleagues are on a mission to continually explore the challenges that fire creates for clients and society, applying the best research experience and diligence for effective, tailored fire safety solutions.
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In 2024, ofr will grow its team once more and is always keen to hear from industry professionals who would like to collaborate on fire safety futures.
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This year.
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Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.
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Okay, hello everybody.
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I'm here today with Professor Daniel Nielsen.
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Hey, daniel, hi, what a nice change to be in person.
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For me that's perhaps the third time it happens.
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Really good, and thanks for the invitation to the University of Canterbury.
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In this episode we're going to discuss panic, one of the favorite things of all behavioral fire scientists.
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So often it's referred to as the P word.
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Why does it annoy a behavioral scientist that much?
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Well, I think there are a lot of myths concerning panic and it's been described in a lot of different ways in the literature.
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So, looking back, panic is mentioned in like historic literature quite a bit and there are a lot of claims made about panic, claims that some might be true and many of them are actually myths.
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And these myths, they seem to live for a very long time in our awareness and sometimes we make suboptimal decisions based on myths about panic and we're afraid of something which might not actually happen.
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So you think there's real consequences of this non-factual idea of?
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what panic is, Absolutely.
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I've seen too many cases where people are afraid of panic vaguely defined as panic something they're afraid of and the consequences that that would result in, and then they try to limit information to people.
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Okay, and that's not really very good, since if you limit the information to people, then they can't make informed decisions.
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So hence, evacuation should, in theory, take a long time.
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And is there any medical definition of what panic would be if we go outside of fire?
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There are definitions of panic.
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So you have definitions of panic.
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In the stock market you have anxiety and panic attacks.
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That's quite different from fire and there are definitions of panic.
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Is in the fire situation we're gonna get there yeah, yep, you've prepared some material from historical papers, like where we can go through the how it started, like where the myths came from.
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That's, that's absolutely, and I thought I'd start off by reading some sections out of books just to give you a bit of an idea of how panic has been described, and one of the publications that I often use in my my courses when I teach on the topic of panic is the one by croker, and croker wrote a publication in 1917 1917 okay, that's a long time ago yeah, and croker was a fire chief in new york, I believe, and and wrote a book based on his experience of being a fire chief, and this is just one example of a series of events that happened, according to croker describing what he describes them, or he mentions, as panic.
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so he says that a girl sitting at the nearest machine or table sees it so, so the fire.
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She leaps up and yells fire, shrieking as hard as she can.
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In the space of a breath the room is in pandemonium.
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The girls 60 or 70 of them are all on their feet, jamming each other against the rows of machines, yelling, trampling on each other.
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In their frantic efforts to get to the exit they ordinarily use an elevator or a staircase.
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In the flimsy material the fire is spreading fast, but it is still the merest infant fire, making a good deal of smoke and a little more heat, but still capable of quick extinction, even with a chemical extinguisher.
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On the floors above and below that in which the fire is, panic also holds sway.
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The garment workers, the feather workers, the shirt waste workers, remembering other horrors, stampede without any cause, like sheep determined to be slaughtered.
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Croker then continues and says perhaps you think this is an exaggerate or a sensational account of a hypothetical case.
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It is not Just.
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This very thing happened in March 1911 at the Triangle Waste Fire in Washington Place.
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This is one of the more famous fires in the history of fire engineering.
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Now, if you look at this description, there are several things that are mentioned to describe what panic is.
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There seems to be an indication of an overreaction.
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Yeah, yelling running.
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Exactly.
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So there is a fire.
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It's a small fire, but people are overreacting Exactly.
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He also claims that it's not particularly logical behavior.
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They don't really take in all the information and sort of go for the best option.
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They don't consider their options.
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I'm quite surprised that he mentions people on other flows are also reacting, also reacting in the same way, and sort of.
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There is an element With a stampede, stampede, and that's the other thing is that in many of these old publications, and Stampede Stampede, and that's the other thing is that in many of these old publications and you can see it in new publications as well the authors use analogies and sort of compare it to animal behavior.
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So a stampede, we lose rationality, we behave like animals, which is very graphical.
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But the question is if that's actually a good explanation.
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If you put it into the context of the times when it happened.
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You don't have modern fire alarms, you don't have big trust in firefighters' response, you certainly do not have modern escape pathways, and people are living in times where they get news from newspapers and they read about those terrific fires in which hundreds of people perished every now and then.
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We're still in the age of great fire of XYZ city, right, yeah?
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So I think a responsive person in 1917, hearing about a fire being in the circumstances of overcrowded room, witnessing it firsthand, with no real good escape routes, that's pretty different from a responsive 21st century user of an airport.
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Well, possibly there is a difference in the type of behavior, but still, that people would respond or overreact in this way, even when the fire is very small, it's still to me very unlikely.
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The other thing in Croker's description is that there's almost this link between panic and the casualties.
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So panic causes casualties, Stampede, Stampede.
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People get injured.
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And the final question I ask myself when I read this was was Croker actually there?
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Did Croker witness this?
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If he's a fire chief in New York, was he in the factory when it happened?
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Or is this looking at the consequences of the fire and drawing your own conclusions?
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And maybe providing a poetic description or a book right, exactly, but this is not the only account.
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There are other accounts as well, so Phillips in 1951, so a bit later said that panic has been the cause of more loss of life than burning by fire or suffocation by smoke.
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Okay, quite a powerful statement.
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To say that more people die from panic than actually from smoke inhalation, which we know today is, is not true people die from smoke, yeah, but but then again, okay, again the context 1951.
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Yeah, and I've interviewed david purser.
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He told me that this brought uh interest to him because firefighters told him in 1940s people would not die from smoke, they would go out of the room, take five breaths and they're good.
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Yeah, and suddenly you start having people dying.
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So this is before the plastics era.
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It is, but it's still with things burning.
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So so, just carbon monoxide.
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So it is sort of in a lot of these publications, panic is considered dangerous and hence something that needs to be prevented.
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Well, here it says that it has been the source of more loss of life than the fires themselves.
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So then, you need to consider it in design and, as we mentioned before, some of these publications claim that panic can happen even if there's no real cause, like a real small fire or something that people might just believe there is a fire and can actually cause panic.
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So Phillips continues and says panic may be aroused when there is not the least danger from fire and in an undisciplined rush to escape many may suffer serious injury or death.
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So you have another claim here that people will overreact.
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It doesn't have to be a danger at all and people will run towards exit and are crushed in exits since there are too many people running at the same time.
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So in this record it's more like the panic is the real danger, not the fire itself, exactly, so perhaps better to not notify, yeah, and sort of looking at what triggers panic.
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Philips does give some explanations, yeah, like incidents that may lead to panic include the sight of smoke or flames, the smell of burning, the sound of escaping gas or any unexpected noise or happening, whether the danger is real or imaginary.
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So we have a bunch of publications that says anything can cause panic, and if panic happens we get really bad outcomes.
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It is interesting, though, that in some of these publications you look at the characteristics of people and who are more prone to panic than others.
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Phillips again says that the possibility of panic arising will depend to a large extent upon the composition of the assembly of people.
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Panic is most infectious this is something you find in a lot of the publications that it's like a disease it infects from one person to another, and the loss of control by a few weaker-minded persons may rapidly affect the whole.
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A crowd consisting of children and young persons may be more prone to panic than an assembly of older persons of a reasonable degree of intelligence.
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Okay, quite powerful wording.
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It's from the 1950s, but basically saying that some people are more prone to panic than others, what kind of scientist was?
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Phillips, was he a behavioral scientist, fire scientist, I guess fire person Okay, and this is actually true for many of these publications that it is often someone who might be multidisciplinary, have an opinion about panic.
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So from this record of Philips.
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It's not just that.
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It's caused easily by a slight view of smoke, a slight view of fire or any other trigger.
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It can happen spontaneously in a group of people without you having any control of that.
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It's infectious, it spreads.
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Like a disease.
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Yeah, so if one person panics, then everyone will panic.
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Yeah, yeah, they'll have a mass disaster.
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It causes a loss of control by a few weaker-minded people and rapidly affects the whole.
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Okay, so indeed, like this description from those early, early materials that they do reassemble the image of panic that media would, would employ.
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So it's like kind of uh, I would say cultural description of what panic could be right, which we know that it's not very factual when you compare that with science.
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Yes, there are definitely some elements and some myths that you need to consider.
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There have been sort of as you saw from Phillips.
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They claim that some individuals are more prone to panic than others.
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There have been claims that that is actually a national difference, so some nationalities might panic more than others.
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So bird and docking, for example, claim that, yes, you would have different tendencies to panic in different countries.
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Bird and docking also have a funny quote about British crowds.
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They actually claim that British crowds panic less than other crowds in the world and they're British.
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So they say that other cases could be quoted for the good behavior of British crowds.
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It might be added that foreigners have been known to say that the British rarely panic because they are fundamentally unimaginative.
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Since they don't have any imagination, then the British don't panic and they behave quite well in emergencies.
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I'm also not so sure about good behavior of British crowds.
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Yeah, so there are a lot of those claims.
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But, an interesting thing though, we talked about publications from different parts of the world and we basically looked at the Western world during the Cold War and pre-Cold War, but they actually had the same types of claims in the Soviet Union.
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They actually had the same types of claims in the Soviet Union.
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So the USSR, where Reutemann in 1975 wrote that panic spreads rapidly over the whole or a large part of the public and induces people to flee from the danger zone in any way they can.
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This leads to the use of physical force by everyone, or at least many of the individuals trapped in the premises.
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So he even adds physical force that you're fighting to get out, and says that this could happen when one person gets panic and then it spreads, similar to disease.
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So even in a country where they didn't really have a lot of communication, I would suspect with the UK or the US, where Croker was from they still have this concept of panic in the Soviet Union.
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And, as I said, cold War I don't expect too much, but perhaps you know.
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I wonder to what extent those observed because, as you mentioned, there's multiple people, multiple records stating very similar things.
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I would guess it must have been to some extent observed behavior.
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Perhaps people to some extent behaved like that and it's just qualification of the action that has been misleading.
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Perhaps people were in a very emotional response to fire and not necessarily the state of panic.
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One potential explanation of it, which we will discuss as well, is that you have difficulty estimating how other people behave.
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You know how you behave, but you have difficulty understanding how other people behave, and if you can't understand someone's behavior, they must be panicked.
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And since you don't understand why they behaved in a certain way, Do we have access to any records like voice records or video records of events like that?
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Or interviews with people, but not like personal statements, more like objective video material.
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Absolutely.
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We've done experiments where we tried to give people different type of information to see how they behave.
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Yeah, to try and test out some of these myths, like can you tell them there's a fire, for example, can you not?
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And then we've observed their behavior.
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Reutemann continues to give some examples of cases where you've had panic.
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Arguably Probably Reutemann wasn't actually there, since he gave examples in the US and other places.
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Argues that it can cause crowd crush, same as we heard from the other.
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Yeah, stampede.
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He also says that panic may also arise when there is no real danger to life.
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So you see the same type of trend Again.
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It's re-emphasis of the exactly Can be caused by the smallest, faintest smoke exactly someone just saying fire and everyone panics, but also claims which many of the other publications claim that it can be prevented, so we can reduce the risk of panic.
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Now, a funny addition this is publication from the soviet union.
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They had political editors.
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So it does say in this publication that modern theaters and movie houses, clubs and cultural centers and other public buildings constructed in the USSR provide comfortable conditions and guarantee the safety of the public in such premises and halls by providing suitable passages, doors and staircases.
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Besides, the administrative and operational staff of such buildings are trained to forestall panic and effectively extinguish any fire in the building.
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Okay, so it wasn't a problem in the Soviet Union, it was just outside of the Soviet Union.
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It was a problem, but I expect that to be the political editor who went in and added but it's interesting that they've already recognized there would be operational things like the staff being able to forestall the panic, even though it's so easily triggered.
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Exactly, if it's so easily triggered and so overwhelming, how can a single person of a staff stop it right?
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yeah, no, I agree, it's sort of.
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It's something that can be caused by anything.
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So the the logical question here is how can you prevent something which can happen without any cause?
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Yeah, what can you do?
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if it's just prevented exactly.
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So it's sort of a counter-argument to the argument of panic happening, since how can you prevent something that can happen, irrespective of so?
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It could be a small thing or nothing at all, so you couldn't really prevent that, but they still claim that you can prevent it.
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So is this something that leads to those dangerous things like limiting the information, like?
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this attempt to prevent Absolutely so in many of these publications.
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Going back to Phillips again, phillips writes that in some buildings a warning system of lights or other means which would not attract the attention of the public is used to give early warnings of an emergency to staff who are then in a position to be of material assistance in maintaining an orderly evacuation of premises.
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So basically what Phillips is saying that since there is a risk of panic, then we limit the information to the people.
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Okay, tell the staff we're trained, and then the staff can deal with the people.
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But then again, if people panic for no reason at all, the staff trying to evacuate people could trigger panic right.
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Yeah.
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So how does that help really?
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But there is that tendency or that recommendation in many publications to actually limit the information that is given to people, and this is, in my view, this is actually quite bad.
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Now, the publication that really was relied on a lot was this that you see here he's holding a book and it looks old.
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There's Manual of Safety Requirements in Theaters and Other Places of Public Entertainment that you see.
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Here he's holding a book, yeah, and it looks old as manual of safety requirements in theaters and other places of public entertainment, issued by home office london's his majesty stationary office 1935.
00:21:40.227 --> 00:21:44.704
Yeah, and he stole it from swedish library exactly.
00:21:45.144 --> 00:21:45.807
So this is.
00:21:45.826 --> 00:21:50.335
There's a funny story which um around us and so I, when I did my phd.
00:21:50.776 --> 00:22:04.211
I really needed to quote this and I really needed to see it, and it wasn't really available anywhere in sweden, so I had to get it on loan from the uk and it was the most quirky and strange loan I've ever had.
00:22:04.211 --> 00:22:19.584
I got it on a one day loan from the national library, or I think it was was either Oxford or Cambridge where they sent it, and they even called our librarian to tell them to sit beside me when I read it, since it was a national treasure and I could never lose it.
00:22:19.584 --> 00:22:21.828
So I did that and I read it.
00:22:21.828 --> 00:22:30.904
And then the next week I went down into our library and there was actually a book that had been donated to us from the Swedish Fire Protection Agency.
00:22:30.904 --> 00:22:34.251
They changed their library and they had donated a lot of books, and it was donated.
00:22:34.251 --> 00:22:38.229
It was in our basement at Lund University and I was clicking through the book and there it was.
00:22:38.229 --> 00:22:42.150
So we had a national treasure in our that no one knew about.
00:22:42.451 --> 00:22:45.161
But it was really good, since now I have the source material.
00:22:45.161 --> 00:22:48.247
So this is what was relied on and it is.
00:22:48.247 --> 00:23:07.017
I mean, it is official, it's His Majesty's stationery office, it has an official stamp on it and what it says in this book is that it is recommended that any telephone for the use for the purpose of communicating with the fire brigade shall be so situated that members of the public cannot overhear a call and be alarmed.
00:23:07.017 --> 00:23:08.602
This might easily cause panic.
00:23:08.602 --> 00:23:17.711
So an official document saying you can't tell people since then they will panic, means that engineers would look at this and say, well, I need to limit the information to people.
00:23:18.621 --> 00:23:32.320
So, as an important comment to the listener, you're hearing recalls from a very, very old past of what has not even been 5-7 engineering then and which to some extent have transponed themselves to the modern times.
00:23:32.320 --> 00:23:38.000
However, today we know that early communication with the building occupants is critical.
00:23:38.000 --> 00:23:51.880
The response is fundamental to limit the time it takes for the pre-evacuation of people and essentially this is the fundamental thing that allows to do 5-step engineering, Absolutely.
00:23:51.880 --> 00:24:05.412
So it's kind of interesting to see that this idea of panic or these descriptions you've shown, they go like 180 degrees, like opposite direction of what we would consider good 5-step engineering today.
00:24:05.593 --> 00:24:06.795
Yeah, they do.
00:24:06.795 --> 00:24:08.988
But it's not just old publications.
00:24:08.988 --> 00:24:16.549
Like in publications that are written today, you still have claims about panic and panic happens, and we're doing this to prevent panic.
00:24:16.549 --> 00:24:30.115
So, even though many of the publications I've read are from early 1950s or 1934, you still have this myth of panic, this thing that people are afraid of, that we're trying to prevent.
00:24:30.115 --> 00:24:36.817
Now, the first time this was actually systematically criticized was by Jonathan Syme in the 1980s.
00:24:36.817 --> 00:24:49.727
So Jonathan Syme wrote a publication called the Concept of Panic, where he went through the description of panic and how it was used in the field and started criticizing it, since we use panic without actually knowing what panic meant.
00:24:50.047 --> 00:24:52.113
That was the main criticism in this publication.
00:24:52.113 --> 00:24:57.691
So someone might say well, this was a fire here, A lot of people died, there was panic.
00:24:57.691 --> 00:25:03.711
But in those accident investigations the investigator didn't really understand that people's perspective.
00:25:03.711 --> 00:25:06.692
They just saw the outcome and they said this must have been panic.
00:25:06.692 --> 00:25:15.792
They didn't try and interview people to figure out how did you make decisions in that situation, and did you make a panic decision or not?
00:25:16.496 --> 00:25:17.220
So that was one of the criticism.
00:25:17.220 --> 00:25:26.012
It's quite interesting because let's brace them for a second you were tasked with a fire where you had, let's say, 50 people died in a narrow passage Yep.
00:25:26.012 --> 00:25:30.287
So how can you tell a panic from just the crowd crash incident?
00:25:30.287 --> 00:25:40.891
How can you tell a panic from people who just lost their way and were unable to evacuate, or they were maybe taking care of others in that room?
00:25:41.661 --> 00:25:47.009
And I would even ask the question of was the outcome of the fire even related to the panic?
00:25:47.009 --> 00:25:52.344
Since many times when you have crowd crash situations, then it might actually be something else.
00:25:52.423 --> 00:26:01.460
It might be a too narrow passage yeah, and people trying to funnel situation exactly a funnel and you get an increase of the crowd pressure, and this was one of sime's points.
00:26:01.460 --> 00:26:03.805
Like, panic is often used as a scapegoat.
00:26:03.805 --> 00:26:06.230
You have a fire, a lot of people die.
00:26:06.230 --> 00:26:09.305
Well, you need an explanation for why a lot of people die.
00:26:09.305 --> 00:26:11.209
They're're dead, so they panicked.
00:26:11.209 --> 00:26:12.311
It's their fault, they died.
00:26:12.311 --> 00:26:14.907
So you're using a skateboard goat.
00:26:14.907 --> 00:26:24.132
You're basically blaming the people for the outcome of the fire by saying that you panic, and one of the problems of this is it takes away the focus from the real reason.
00:26:24.132 --> 00:26:28.664
Okay, since you look at it and you say 50 people died in this opening, they must have panicked.