Nov. 6, 2024

176 - The Myth of Panic with Daniel Nilsson

176 - The Myth of Panic with Daniel Nilsson

You are not supposed to use the word 'panic' in the context of human behaviour in fires, yet this episode contains 196 instances of it. Why? because we try to get to the bottom of the thing! Can panic be both a myth and a reality?

Join us as we challenge the age-old narratives of panic in emergencies with our distinguished guest, Professor Daniel Nilsson, from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. We unravel the misconceptions surrounding human behaviour during fires, spotlighting the harmful effects of outdated myths perpetuated by media and literature. By debunking these myths, we aim to reshape fire safety engineering, focusing on realistic human reactions and informed decision-making.

Our conversation takes you across cultural landscapes, from the Western world to the Soviet Union, questioning national claims of panic susceptibility and the portrayal of panic as a contagious force. Challenging the historical context, we try to figure out what panic is once you apply the scientific method to understand it.

We also try to assess historical events like the Victoria Tower evacuation and the Love Parade tragedy, we underscore how engineering failures, not irrational behaviour, often lead to crowd disasters. Professor Nilsson and I delve into the psychology of decision-making during evacuations, emphasising the power of clear communication to prevent chaos and save lives.

Finally, we reflect on the profound research of Quarantelli, who redefined panic through thousands of disaster case studies, revealing the complexity of human responses in crises. We explore how cultural contexts influence perceived panic behaviour by differentiating between non-rational and irrational actions. We aim to enlighten fire safety professionals and the broader audience on the importance of replacing the myth of panic with empathy and evidence-based strategies, fostering a safer and more understanding approach to emergency responses.

Further reading?
Sure.
Daniel's paper in SFPE Europe magazine - is panic a myth or reality?
Proloux and Sime paper where they challanged the limiting of information (1991)

And if you really got into this, Jonathan Sime's PhD

Also, a ton of material on Human Behaviour and evacuation is waiting for you in the Uncovered Witness project!

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The Fire Science Show is produced by the Fire Science Media in collaboration with OFR Consultants. Thank you to the podcast sponsor for their continuous support towards our mission.

Chapters

00:00 - Debunking the Myth of Panic

14:20 - Exploring the Phenomenon of Panic

26:01 - Challenging Misconceptions About Panic

29:26 - Effective Communication in Emergency Evacuations

34:47 - Debunking Panic Behavior Myths

39:19 - Understanding Panic Behavior in Disasters

52:04 - Debunking Panic Behavior Myths in Engineering

59:14 - Fire Science Podcast Preview

Transcript
WEBVTT

00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:01.826
Hello and welcome to the Fire Science Show.

00:00:01.826 --> 00:00:17.530
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.

00:00:17.530 --> 00:00:26.452
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.

00:00:37.567 --> 00:00:46.201
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.

00:00:46.201 --> 00:00:52.462
I've spent three days with Daniel at Canterbury and, of course, I took the chance to interview him.

00:00:52.781 --> 00:01:02.057
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.

00:01:02.057 --> 00:01:09.927
First I was in 2015, where he led a course on evacuation with late Rita Fahy in Copenhagen.

00:01:09.927 --> 00:01:26.233
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.

00:01:26.233 --> 00:01:35.055
That is something that always starts a very emotional discussion in social media when someone uses the term panic.

00:01:35.055 --> 00:01:44.129
Panic is widely used to describe fires and evacuations in the media, but the question is is it really there?

00:01:44.129 --> 00:01:45.954
Is it a real thing?

00:01:45.954 --> 00:01:48.021
Can we blame stuff on panic?

00:01:48.021 --> 00:01:56.064
Actually, many scientists already know that you cannot, but still there are a lot of myths around the phenomenon of panic.

00:01:56.064 --> 00:02:03.463
In this episode we go deep on panic and we try to some extent debunk the myths.

00:02:03.463 --> 00:02:06.852
We try to illustrate where they came from.

00:02:06.852 --> 00:02:21.192
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.

00:02:21.192 --> 00:02:49.027
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.

00:02:49.027 --> 00:02:59.264
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.

00:02:59.664 --> 00:03:03.473
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.

00:03:13.561 --> 00:03:20.063
Welcome to the Firesize Show.

00:03:20.063 --> 00:03:23.526
My name is Wojciech Wegrzyński and I will be your host.

00:03:39.854 --> 00:03:43.016
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00:03:43.016 --> 00:03:45.957
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00:03:45.957 --> 00:03:56.793
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00:03:56.793 --> 00:04:12.612
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00:04:24.267 --> 00:04:34.908
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00:04:34.908 --> 00:04:35.310
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00:04:35.310 --> 00:04:38.266
Get in touch at ofrconsultantscom.

00:04:38.668 --> 00:04:39.571
Okay, hello everybody.

00:04:39.571 --> 00:04:41.826
I'm here today with Professor Daniel Nielsen.

00:04:41.826 --> 00:04:46.146
Hey, daniel, hi, what a nice change to be in person.

00:04:46.146 --> 00:04:48.572
For me that's perhaps the third time it happens.

00:04:48.572 --> 00:04:52.149
Really good, and thanks for the invitation to the University of Canterbury.

00:04:52.149 --> 00:05:00.805
In this episode we're going to discuss panic, one of the favorite things of all behavioral fire scientists.

00:05:00.805 --> 00:05:03.473
So often it's referred to as the P word.

00:05:03.473 --> 00:05:06.321
Why does it annoy a behavioral scientist that much?

00:05:06.721 --> 00:05:12.903
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.

00:05:12.903 --> 00:05:26.088
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.

00:05:26.088 --> 00:05:39.110
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.

00:05:39.661 --> 00:05:44.971
So you think there's real consequences of this non-factual idea of?

00:05:44.992 --> 00:05:46.434
what panic is, Absolutely.

00:05:46.434 --> 00:05:59.622
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.

00:05:59.622 --> 00:06:06.249
Okay, and that's not really very good, since if you limit the information to people, then they can't make informed decisions.

00:06:06.249 --> 00:06:09.709
So hence, evacuation should, in theory, take a long time.

00:06:10.120 --> 00:06:15.692
And is there any medical definition of what panic would be if we go outside of fire?

00:06:15.860 --> 00:06:17.788
There are definitions of panic.

00:06:17.788 --> 00:06:19.446
So you have definitions of panic.

00:06:19.446 --> 00:06:22.788
In the stock market you have anxiety and panic attacks.

00:06:22.788 --> 00:06:28.766
That's quite different from fire and there are definitions of panic.

00:06:28.826 --> 00:06:40.161
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.

00:06:40.201 --> 00:07:19.612
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.

00:07:20.252 --> 00:07:24.507
so he says that a girl sitting at the nearest machine or table sees it so, so the fire.

00:07:24.507 --> 00:07:28.113
She leaps up and yells fire, shrieking as hard as she can.

00:07:28.113 --> 00:07:30.869
In the space of a breath the room is in pandemonium.

00:07:30.869 --> 00:07:37.562
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.

00:07:37.562 --> 00:07:42.786
In their frantic efforts to get to the exit they ordinarily use an elevator or a staircase.

00:07:42.786 --> 00:07:54.309
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.

00:07:54.309 --> 00:07:58.987
On the floors above and below that in which the fire is, panic also holds sway.

00:07:58.987 --> 00:08:07.646
The garment workers, the feather workers, the shirt waste workers, remembering other horrors, stampede without any cause, like sheep determined to be slaughtered.

00:08:08.026 --> 00:08:14.394
Croker then continues and says perhaps you think this is an exaggerate or a sensational account of a hypothetical case.

00:08:14.394 --> 00:08:15.658
It is not Just.

00:08:15.658 --> 00:08:20.531
This very thing happened in March 1911 at the Triangle Waste Fire in Washington Place.

00:08:20.531 --> 00:08:25.752
This is one of the more famous fires in the history of fire engineering.

00:08:25.752 --> 00:08:32.001
Now, if you look at this description, there are several things that are mentioned to describe what panic is.

00:08:32.001 --> 00:08:34.811
There seems to be an indication of an overreaction.

00:08:34.811 --> 00:08:36.746
Yeah, yelling running.

00:08:36.746 --> 00:08:37.421
Exactly.

00:08:37.421 --> 00:08:38.464
So there is a fire.

00:08:38.464 --> 00:08:41.591
It's a small fire, but people are overreacting Exactly.

00:08:41.591 --> 00:08:45.250
He also claims that it's not particularly logical behavior.

00:08:45.250 --> 00:08:49.346
They don't really take in all the information and sort of go for the best option.

00:08:49.346 --> 00:08:51.206
They don't consider their options.

00:08:51.763 --> 00:08:59.043
I'm quite surprised that he mentions people on other flows are also reacting, also reacting in the same way, and sort of.

00:08:59.082 --> 00:09:11.557
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.

00:09:11.557 --> 00:09:17.953
So a stampede, we lose rationality, we behave like animals, which is very graphical.

00:09:17.953 --> 00:09:20.749
But the question is if that's actually a good explanation.

00:09:21.760 --> 00:09:24.707
If you put it into the context of the times when it happened.

00:09:24.707 --> 00:09:43.575
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.

00:09:43.575 --> 00:09:48.912
We're still in the age of great fire of XYZ city, right, yeah?

00:09:48.912 --> 00:10:09.673
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.

00:10:09.940 --> 00:10:23.692
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.

00:10:23.692 --> 00:10:30.908
The other thing in Croker's description is that there's almost this link between panic and the casualties.

00:10:30.908 --> 00:10:34.763
So panic causes casualties, Stampede, Stampede.

00:10:34.763 --> 00:10:35.684
People get injured.

00:10:35.684 --> 00:10:40.202
And the final question I ask myself when I read this was was Croker actually there?

00:10:40.202 --> 00:10:41.767
Did Croker witness this?

00:10:41.767 --> 00:10:45.364
If he's a fire chief in New York, was he in the factory when it happened?

00:10:45.364 --> 00:10:50.293
Or is this looking at the consequences of the fire and drawing your own conclusions?

00:10:51.100 --> 00:10:57.044
And maybe providing a poetic description or a book right, exactly, but this is not the only account.

00:10:57.044 --> 00:11:08.265
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.

00:11:08.265 --> 00:11:10.173
Okay, quite a powerful statement.

00:11:10.173 --> 00:11:21.144
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.

00:11:21.546 --> 00:11:23.229
Yeah, and I've interviewed david purser.

00:11:23.229 --> 00:11:34.205
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.

00:11:34.205 --> 00:11:36.591
Yeah, and suddenly you start having people dying.

00:11:36.591 --> 00:11:38.322
So this is before the plastics era.

00:11:38.842 --> 00:11:41.706
It is, but it's still with things burning.

00:11:41.706 --> 00:11:45.071
So so, just carbon monoxide.

00:11:45.071 --> 00:11:52.326
So it is sort of in a lot of these publications, panic is considered dangerous and hence something that needs to be prevented.

00:11:53.601 --> 00:11:58.365
Well, here it says that it has been the source of more loss of life than the fires themselves.

00:11:58.919 --> 00:12:16.070
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.

00:12:16.070 --> 00:12:27.028
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.

00:12:27.028 --> 00:12:31.134
So you have another claim here that people will overreact.

00:12:31.134 --> 00:12:38.990
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.

00:12:39.029 --> 00:12:50.288
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.

00:12:50.851 --> 00:13:05.981
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.

00:13:06.623 --> 00:13:13.125
So we have a bunch of publications that says anything can cause panic, and if panic happens we get really bad outcomes.

00:13:13.125 --> 00:13:22.562
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.

00:13:22.562 --> 00:13:29.207
Phillips again says that the possibility of panic arising will depend to a large extent upon the composition of the assembly of people.

00:13:29.207 --> 00:13:42.582
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.

00:13:42.582 --> 00:13:51.182
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.

00:13:51.182 --> 00:13:52.825
Okay, quite powerful wording.

00:13:52.825 --> 00:14:01.049
It's from the 1950s, but basically saying that some people are more prone to panic than others, what kind of scientist was?

00:14:01.090 --> 00:14:16.248
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.

00:14:16.840 --> 00:14:19.448
So from this record of Philips.

00:14:19.448 --> 00:14:20.942
It's not just that.

00:14:20.942 --> 00:14:27.649
It's caused easily by a slight view of smoke, a slight view of fire or any other trigger.

00:14:27.649 --> 00:14:35.014
It can happen spontaneously in a group of people without you having any control of that.

00:14:35.014 --> 00:14:36.917
It's infectious, it spreads.

00:14:37.197 --> 00:14:37.839
Like a disease.

00:14:37.839 --> 00:14:40.427
Yeah, so if one person panics, then everyone will panic.

00:14:40.427 --> 00:14:41.951
Yeah, yeah, they'll have a mass disaster.

00:14:42.080 --> 00:14:46.567
It causes a loss of control by a few weaker-minded people and rapidly affects the whole.

00:14:46.567 --> 00:14:59.153
Okay, so indeed, like this description from those early, early materials that they do reassemble the image of panic that media would, would employ.

00:14:59.153 --> 00:15:09.754
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.

00:15:09.980 --> 00:15:15.092
Yes, there are definitely some elements and some myths that you need to consider.

00:15:15.092 --> 00:15:18.186
There have been sort of as you saw from Phillips.

00:15:18.186 --> 00:15:22.399
They claim that some individuals are more prone to panic than others.

00:15:22.399 --> 00:15:28.649
There have been claims that that is actually a national difference, so some nationalities might panic more than others.

00:15:28.649 --> 00:15:35.225
So bird and docking, for example, claim that, yes, you would have different tendencies to panic in different countries.

00:15:35.225 --> 00:15:39.539
Bird and docking also have a funny quote about British crowds.

00:15:39.539 --> 00:15:45.773
They actually claim that British crowds panic less than other crowds in the world and they're British.

00:15:45.773 --> 00:15:50.371
So they say that other cases could be quoted for the good behavior of British crowds.

00:15:50.371 --> 00:15:57.614
It might be added that foreigners have been known to say that the British rarely panic because they are fundamentally unimaginative.

00:15:58.181 --> 00:16:02.879
Since they don't have any imagination, then the British don't panic and they behave quite well in emergencies.

00:16:02.879 --> 00:16:05.808
I'm also not so sure about good behavior of British crowds.

00:16:05.828 --> 00:16:08.528
Yeah, so there are a lot of those claims.

00:16:08.659 --> 00:16:22.750
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.

00:16:22.750 --> 00:16:26.644
They actually had the same types of claims in the Soviet Union.

00:16:26.644 --> 00:16:34.870
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.

00:16:34.870 --> 00:16:41.100
This leads to the use of physical force by everyone, or at least many of the individuals trapped in the premises.

00:16:41.100 --> 00:16:51.788
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.

00:16:51.788 --> 00:17:04.708
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.

00:17:04.708 --> 00:17:09.663
And, as I said, cold War I don't expect too much, but perhaps you know.

00:17:10.384 --> 00:17:18.488
I wonder to what extent those observed because, as you mentioned, there's multiple people, multiple records stating very similar things.

00:17:18.488 --> 00:17:22.550
I would guess it must have been to some extent observed behavior.

00:17:22.550 --> 00:17:31.092
Perhaps people to some extent behaved like that and it's just qualification of the action that has been misleading.

00:17:31.092 --> 00:17:36.692
Perhaps people were in a very emotional response to fire and not necessarily the state of panic.

00:17:37.540 --> 00:17:46.555
One potential explanation of it, which we will discuss as well, is that you have difficulty estimating how other people behave.

00:17:46.555 --> 00:17:54.109
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.

00:17:54.601 --> 00:18:03.732
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?

00:18:03.732 --> 00:18:10.765
Or interviews with people, but not like personal statements, more like objective video material.

00:18:10.984 --> 00:18:11.464
Absolutely.

00:18:11.464 --> 00:18:16.690
We've done experiments where we tried to give people different type of information to see how they behave.

00:18:16.690 --> 00:18:22.494
Yeah, to try and test out some of these myths, like can you tell them there's a fire, for example, can you not?

00:18:22.494 --> 00:18:24.257
And then we've observed their behavior.

00:18:24.257 --> 00:18:32.236
Reutemann continues to give some examples of cases where you've had panic.

00:18:32.236 --> 00:18:35.671
Arguably Probably Reutemann wasn't actually there, since he gave examples in the US and other places.

00:18:35.671 --> 00:18:40.086
Argues that it can cause crowd crush, same as we heard from the other.

00:18:40.386 --> 00:18:41.250
Yeah, stampede.

00:18:41.250 --> 00:18:46.525
He also says that panic may also arise when there is no real danger to life.

00:18:47.006 --> 00:18:48.170
So you see the same type of trend Again.

00:18:48.230 --> 00:19:02.460
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.

00:19:02.460 --> 00:19:06.255
Now, a funny addition this is publication from the soviet union.

00:19:06.255 --> 00:19:07.500
They had political editors.

00:19:07.500 --> 00:19:23.605
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.

00:19:23.605 --> 00:19:31.372
Besides, the administrative and operational staff of such buildings are trained to forestall panic and effectively extinguish any fire in the building.

00:19:31.372 --> 00:19:35.779
Okay, so it wasn't a problem in the Soviet Union, it was just outside of the Soviet Union.

00:19:35.799 --> 00:19:49.440
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.

00:19:49.440 --> 00:19:54.852
Exactly, if it's so easily triggered and so overwhelming, how can a single person of a staff stop it right?

00:19:54.971 --> 00:19:56.703
yeah, no, I agree, it's sort of.

00:19:56.703 --> 00:19:59.373
It's something that can be caused by anything.

00:19:59.373 --> 00:20:05.769
So the the logical question here is how can you prevent something which can happen without any cause?

00:20:05.769 --> 00:20:07.333
Yeah, what can you do?

00:20:07.492 --> 00:20:09.183
if it's just prevented exactly.

00:20:09.203 --> 00:20:17.740
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?

00:20:17.740 --> 00:20:23.271
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.

00:20:23.940 --> 00:20:29.144
So is this something that leads to those dangerous things like limiting the information, like?

00:20:29.164 --> 00:20:36.282
this attempt to prevent Absolutely so in many of these publications.

00:20:36.282 --> 00:20:50.566
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.

00:20:50.566 --> 00:20:56.115
So basically what Phillips is saying that since there is a risk of panic, then we limit the information to the people.

00:20:56.115 --> 00:21:01.625
Okay, tell the staff we're trained, and then the staff can deal with the people.

00:21:01.625 --> 00:21:08.355
But then again, if people panic for no reason at all, the staff trying to evacuate people could trigger panic right.

00:21:08.434 --> 00:21:08.635
Yeah.

00:21:08.840 --> 00:21:10.026
So how does that help really?

00:21:10.026 --> 00:21:20.868
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.

00:21:20.868 --> 00:21:29.469
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.

00:21:29.779 --> 00:21:31.554
There's Manual of Safety Requirements in Theaters and Other Places of Public Entertainment that you see.

00:21:31.554 --> 00:21:40.227
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.

00:26:28.664 --> 00:26:29.665
Case closed.

00:26:29.685 --> 00:26:44.411
We don't have to look at changing our design to do wider exits not a funnel, for example, since we've found the reason, and that was a reason which, if we go back to the old publication, which is impossible to stop anyway.

00:26:44.431 --> 00:26:49.670
It was just a freak accident, though, if you have trained personnel in the USSR, then yes, maybe so, maybe so.

00:26:49.670 --> 00:26:51.415
So why did Syme start?

00:26:51.415 --> 00:26:53.382
Did you have any chance to ever talk with him about that?

00:26:53.682 --> 00:27:00.223
I haven't had a chance to talk to Jonathan Syme, so Jonathan Syme passed away before I got into this area.

00:27:00.223 --> 00:27:11.432
But I think the reason was one of the reasons was the fact that panic was used as a reason for limiting information about the fire to people, which is bad.

00:27:11.432 --> 00:27:17.133
And another thing that Syme highlighted in his publication was also the role of the media.

00:27:17.133 --> 00:27:23.026
So panic in the headline sells paper Okay, without actually a definition.

00:27:23.026 --> 00:27:27.352
And you sort of have panic and the reader reads that and you go oh panic, oh yeah, interesting.

00:27:27.352 --> 00:27:28.683
Today we would say clickbait.

00:27:28.683 --> 00:27:36.387
Yeah, pretty much Everyone who reads that paper probably has a different definition of what panic is, but everyone is interested to read the paper.

00:27:36.387 --> 00:27:37.431
So that was another reason.

00:27:37.431 --> 00:27:45.644
And media he saw often used panic without actually describing what Sime would say is a panic situation.

00:27:45.644 --> 00:27:51.128
It was just people who are stressed, trying to get out quickly, but saying panic sells papers.

00:27:51.128 --> 00:27:54.464
So media had an important role in this.

00:27:54.464 --> 00:27:55.748
So let's go to science definition maybe.

00:27:55.748 --> 00:27:56.589
Well, it's.

00:27:57.070 --> 00:28:19.426
The thing with jonathan syme is that jonathan syme didn't actually offer a definition, just said that the way we use it today is not suitable okay, so just observation just observation and he criticized some of the things like irrational behavior is often used like they don't act in a rational way, whereas Simon would argue that, no, given their perspective, they probably did what they thought was right.

00:28:19.426 --> 00:28:22.446
But irrational means that people act.

00:28:22.446 --> 00:28:24.772
They have all the information and they do the opposite.

00:28:24.772 --> 00:28:26.426
And he didn't really see that.

00:28:26.426 --> 00:28:39.906
You don't really see that in fire situations you can see people having a lot of stress put on them and making simplified decision-making, but not necessarily having the perfect information and saying, well, that's the exit I should take, but I'm going to take that one which is worse.

00:28:39.906 --> 00:28:43.067
Okay, so people don't really do that in a fire situation.

00:28:43.067 --> 00:28:49.673
So hence irrational might not be the right word to use in a definition of panic.

00:28:49.673 --> 00:28:55.345
So there are a couple of myths related to panic that are important to know about.

00:28:55.445 --> 00:28:59.482
As an engineer, one of the things we've talked about is limit the information for panic.

00:28:59.482 --> 00:29:02.048
Now this has been dismissed.

00:29:02.048 --> 00:29:08.945
You should tell people about the fire, you should tell them what is happening, and I guess the first publication to look at that was by Canterbury and Sime.

00:29:08.945 --> 00:29:25.916
They did interviews with survivors from fires and homes and hospitals and they asked people about recognition, their location, when they realized there was a fire, tried to get them to tell the interviewer about their behavior and their perception, and they developed something which is called the behavior sequences.

00:29:25.916 --> 00:29:37.982
And the behavior sequence is just a series of behaviors that are typical for an evacuation situation, and the main thing of the behavior sequences is that initial part of the behavior sequences, where people receive information.

00:29:38.403 --> 00:29:50.586
They either ignore the cue or they investigate and search for more information until they're convinced they should evacuate, since you either ignore, which means it takes longer, or you get that first cue and then you go.

00:29:50.586 --> 00:29:54.352
I need to confirm and I need to process and I need to make sure that this is actually a fire.

00:29:54.352 --> 00:30:01.463
That always takes time and that's why we have pre-movement time, or at least part of the pre-movement time is that recognition time.

00:30:01.463 --> 00:30:04.414
So people never hear one cue and they go.

00:30:04.414 --> 00:30:11.329
I'm going to evacuate and take zero seconds Always takes a significant time for them to process it, to make a decision.

00:30:11.349 --> 00:30:15.136
Always takes a significant time for them to process it, to make a decision.

00:30:15.136 --> 00:30:23.170
So in the previous thought process it was thought that you will see the fire and you may panic, or if you're sufficiently British or intelligent, you will not Instantly.

00:30:23.170 --> 00:30:27.819
Instantly right and now we understand there's a series of chain of events.

00:30:28.422 --> 00:30:43.205
And with this behavior sequence sort of framework, the more information you can give people to a limit, I mean you can't overload them with information but if you give them clear information, they should, in theory, get out of this loop quicker Okay, since they make an informed decision quicker.

00:30:43.205 --> 00:30:46.568
So, for example, if you smell smoke, there is no alarm.

00:30:46.568 --> 00:30:48.267
You need to explore what's happening.

00:30:48.267 --> 00:30:57.940
If you have a voice alarm that tells you there is a fire, it tells you which floor it's on and it tells you to evacuate, you might not have to look as long for additional information.

00:30:58.670 --> 00:30:59.378
So it's quicker.

00:30:59.378 --> 00:31:03.538
That is an exercise that I like to give to people like a thought experiment.

00:31:03.538 --> 00:31:07.960
Imagine you're walking through a corridor of your office and you hear a fire alarm.

00:31:07.960 --> 00:31:13.267
You would most likely be confused about it in a way that you would not know.

00:31:13.267 --> 00:31:14.724
Is it a real fire alarm?

00:31:14.724 --> 00:31:15.729
Is it a drill?

00:31:15.729 --> 00:31:17.306
Was something planned today?

00:31:17.306 --> 00:31:28.647
But if you end up in the same situation, walking through that corridor, and you smell burned plastic from a cable and you hear the alarm, that must be a fire somewhere, right?

00:31:28.909 --> 00:31:44.606
Absolutely, and I've seen this from my own experience when we evacuated an office building and we just used their alarm, which was a ringing bell, and I was a bit confused, since everyone said that they checked the clouds or the cloud, and I didn't really understand what they meant.

00:31:44.606 --> 00:31:46.385
But they actually checked the intranet.

00:31:46.385 --> 00:31:47.609
That was the first thing.

00:31:47.609 --> 00:31:53.788
So they heard an alarm and then they were wanting to check is this a drill or is this a real fire?

00:31:53.788 --> 00:31:59.974
So they checked the internet and then, when they didn't say anything about a drill, then okay, it's probably real.

00:31:59.974 --> 00:32:02.702
So that's part of that behavior sequences and that's a delay.

00:32:02.702 --> 00:32:06.902
So the more information you can give them, the better, the quicker.

00:32:06.902 --> 00:32:18.261
And Jonathan Syme so Prue and Syme actually did an experiment, a really interesting experiment, where they evacuated a metro station and they had the opportunity to try different types of alarms.

00:32:18.261 --> 00:32:25.023
So they had one alarm which was a ringing bell, which is not great if you don't train people what it means.

00:32:25.023 --> 00:32:27.692
They had staff running around telling people to evacuate.

00:32:27.692 --> 00:32:32.145
They had a public announcement system saying evacuate, but no real reason.

00:32:32.145 --> 00:32:44.663
They had staff plus this PA system which told people to evacuate, and then they had a PA system which added information about what has happened plus what people should do, okay, and the outcome was Bell.

00:32:44.663 --> 00:32:49.804
Well, they had to terminate the experiment before everyone was out, since no one, there were still people on the platform.

00:32:50.184 --> 00:32:56.382
When you had staff running around, it was a matter of how quick the staff was and how quickly they were running, but it took about eight minutes.

00:32:56.382 --> 00:33:04.169
When you had a public announcement system where you didn't say what has happened, just that they should evacuate, it actually took 11 minutes.

00:33:04.169 --> 00:33:05.251
It's a long time.

00:33:05.251 --> 00:33:10.087
And when you had staff plus the same PA system, then it was more efficient than the staff.

00:33:10.087 --> 00:33:11.589
So staff only took eight minutes.

00:33:11.589 --> 00:33:14.796
You add a PA system, it takes seven minutes.

00:33:15.135 --> 00:33:30.666
But the thing was that when they had a PA system which said what had happened and what you should do, then it was by far the shortest time six minutes to evacuate the station without any staff interaction, since you told them what had happened and they don't have to look for additional information.

00:33:30.666 --> 00:33:32.873
And then you told them what had happened and they don't have to look for additional information.

00:33:32.873 --> 00:33:34.017
And then you told them what to do and they did that.

00:33:34.017 --> 00:33:34.116
Okay.

00:33:34.116 --> 00:33:43.282
So telling people what is happening and so telling people what they should do is good, since you reduce that time it takes for people to respond initially.

00:33:43.763 --> 00:33:59.686
And I've done similar experiments and others have done as well where we've done equivalent experiments with voice alarms and, and in one voice alarm we say that there is a fire and in another one we say that we don't mention fire, and in none of these cases we ever get stressed behavior or panic.

00:33:59.686 --> 00:34:00.950
People are quite calm.

00:34:00.950 --> 00:34:04.346
They behave in a very similar way, and this is just one example.

00:34:04.346 --> 00:34:15.224
I did it at Lund University, but others have done it in other places and don't typically see any panic or stress reaction in those situations where the stimuli are quite mild.

00:34:16.246 --> 00:34:20.934
Have you ever seen intense emotional response in an experiment?

00:34:21.900 --> 00:34:29.284
The only time I've seen an intense emotional response was when we've done experiments in a smoke-filled tunnel with acetic acid.

00:34:29.925 --> 00:34:31.268
So that was irritating smoke.

00:34:31.268 --> 00:34:33.253
It was slightly irritating smoke.

00:34:33.253 --> 00:34:46.750
The thing, though, in that particular case where the person was stressed, it was probably more linked to claustrophobia, sort of being in an enclosed environment, rather than it being fire smoke.

00:34:46.750 --> 00:34:59.612
I've seen stress as well, when we did an evacuation in Victoria Tower, where you see a heightened level of stress but you don't have people running or rushing to exit eating.

00:34:59.612 --> 00:35:00.961
No, no, stampeding.

00:35:00.961 --> 00:35:03.550
Those experiments was with one person at a time.

00:35:03.550 --> 00:35:08.086
They just walk maybe a bit faster, but I haven't seen any any running really.

00:35:08.086 --> 00:35:09.431
So that's a rational response.

00:35:09.431 --> 00:35:10.355
Right, it is.

00:35:10.355 --> 00:35:13.643
You should move quicker when there is a fire.

00:35:13.764 --> 00:35:17.309
Now, another myth is that crowd crush is the same as panic.

00:35:17.731 --> 00:35:29.351
Okay, and the problem with that is you see a crowd crush and then you say, well, that's equivalent to panic, but there have been so many cases of crowd crush that are unrelated to panic.

00:35:29.452 --> 00:35:37.362
People might be extremely stressed as they're being crushed, but that's different from the stress and their behavior leading to the crowd crush.

00:35:37.362 --> 00:35:44.425
In many cases, what causes a crowd crush is narrow openings, really high densities, counterflow.

00:35:44.425 --> 00:35:53.425
If you have a funnel where a lot of people are moving and everyone's pushing a bit, but then towards the edge or the end of the funnel, you get an increase of pressure.

00:35:53.425 --> 00:35:57.222
So an example would be the love parade, where you had opposing flows.

00:35:57.222 --> 00:36:06.753
You had a, basically a tunnel that they had to go through, and the flow of people going in was simply bigger than the tunnel capacity, and hence you got the crown crusher.

00:36:06.753 --> 00:36:14.713
That does not mean that people were panicking to get out through that tunnel, but it just meant the flow led to a situation where you got a crash.

00:36:14.713 --> 00:36:18.510
So in that case you wouldn't be able to say well, we had a crash, hence panic.

00:36:19.000 --> 00:36:27.048
The important distinction is that panic is something non-preventable in a way, while crowd crash is preventable by engineering.

00:36:27.320 --> 00:36:28.543
Crowd crash is preventable.

00:36:28.543 --> 00:36:31.490
I guess we have to figure out first what panic actually is.

00:36:31.490 --> 00:36:33.346
That's an interesting question.

00:36:33.346 --> 00:36:35.532
So does panic exist Now?

00:36:35.532 --> 00:36:42.460
The panic the way it's been described in historical literature probably doesn't exist, but that doesn't mean that panic doesn't exist.

00:36:42.460 --> 00:36:45.487
It's just that we need a clear definition of panic.

00:36:45.487 --> 00:36:48.012
But it's not the same as Crowdcrush.

00:36:48.012 --> 00:36:49.804
It's not the same as Crowdcrush Exactly.

00:36:49.885 --> 00:36:50.987
It doesn't end with Stampede.

00:36:50.987 --> 00:36:54.710
No, exactly, and I would argue it rarely ends with Stampede.

00:36:54.710 --> 00:37:02.590
But we'll come back to the definition of panic, which is also the reason why I think it very rarely leads to a Stampede.

00:37:02.590 --> 00:37:03.713
Okay, let's go further.

00:37:04.059 --> 00:37:06.869
Another myth was that panic spreads as a disease.

00:37:06.980 --> 00:37:13.222
Yeah, people from top floor reacted the same way, exactly, and that has been dismissed in many fires.

00:37:13.222 --> 00:37:16.048
So one example that I remember is the World Trade Center bombings.

00:37:16.048 --> 00:37:38.423
One of the things that was discovered there was that as people were evacuating and they were evacuating down staircases and they were filled with smoke and lighting had gone out a lot of people expressed frustration, and you can say that that's sort of expressing their anxiety the seed of panic, according to the old definition, rather than that spreading through the crowd as wildfire or a disease.

00:37:38.423 --> 00:38:01.601
You actually had people calming each other, so saying to others like you'll be fine, we'll do this together, we'll walk down together, and it was a very orderly evacuation and we've seen this quite a bit that people might express this frustration and stress, but then you have people around it, so, rather than being reinforced, many times it's actually dampened and people feel security by being there with others who try and calm them down.

00:38:01.601 --> 00:38:05.291
Now, this does not mean that we don't consider the behavior of others.

00:38:05.291 --> 00:38:07.164
So we have the theory of social influence.

00:38:07.224 --> 00:38:12.365
So you look at others and you understand their behavior, or you look at their behavior and you understand the situation.

00:38:12.365 --> 00:38:14.490
So we have the normative social influence.

00:38:14.490 --> 00:38:16.204
That's about the fear of being different.

00:38:16.204 --> 00:38:17.952
It's like an inhibitor.

00:38:17.952 --> 00:38:20.382
And then we have informational social influence.

00:38:20.382 --> 00:38:23.960
So if you see people who are stressed, you probably take the situation more seriously.

00:38:23.960 --> 00:38:30.302
That's a big step from taking a situation more seriously to stampeding example losing control.

00:38:30.302 --> 00:38:38.869
So yes, we do have some social influence influencing how we there's a good behavior, but it's not Absolutely.

00:38:39.291 --> 00:38:47.222
And if there is a fire alarm and someone is running past your office, you probably think it's a more serious fire than if someone is walking past your office.

00:38:47.222 --> 00:38:58.682
So, yes, there is that element, but in my view, probably not to the point of causing you to lose your thinking altogether and just run out, which would be the traditional definition of panic.

00:38:58.682 --> 00:39:00.628
So an interesting question.

00:39:00.628 --> 00:39:04.668
You've raised this a couple of times what is actually panic and does it?

00:39:04.728 --> 00:39:05.230
exist.

00:39:05.329 --> 00:39:06.434
What's the definition of panic?

00:39:06.434 --> 00:39:14.519
Now, the one that I often go to when I teach my students about panic is one by Quarantelli from 1954.

00:39:14.519 --> 00:39:18.248
Now, quarantelli defined panic in a slightly different way.

00:39:18.248 --> 00:39:18.990
What was it?

00:39:18.990 --> 00:39:25.405
Quarantelli was a researcher who looked at disasters, so how people behave in disasters.

00:39:25.425 --> 00:39:37.704
So not just fire, Not just fire any type of disaster, and so the definition is not just fire related, it's just sort of in disasters, not just fire, any type of disaster, and so the definition is not just fire-related, it's just sort of in disasters Now, and Quarantelli derived the definition rather than set.

00:39:37.704 --> 00:39:40.987
So usually as a researcher, you might define it and then you apply it.

00:39:40.987 --> 00:39:42.487
Quarantelli did it differently.

00:39:42.487 --> 00:39:57.275
So he looked at a thousand or several thousand cases where people's behavior in disasters were described, and whenever he discovered something which he, based on his gut feeling, would say I would say this is panic, he saved it.

00:39:57.275 --> 00:40:08.063
And then he read all of these publications and it was only a handful, it wasn't that many publications and tried, based on what he saw, to define panic.

00:40:08.083 --> 00:40:19.096
And the definition that he eventually wrote down was that panic is an acute fear reaction, marked by the loss of self-control, which is followed by non-social and non-rational flight behavior.

00:40:19.096 --> 00:40:22.467
And there are several things in this definition that are worth mentioning.

00:40:22.467 --> 00:40:25.161
Acute Okay, very, very.

00:40:25.161 --> 00:40:28.659
So acute would be the first one Very, very short-lived.

00:40:28.659 --> 00:40:34.581
So what Quarantelli saw was seconds of heightened anxiety and stress.

00:40:35.262 --> 00:40:48.251
People might temporarily lose their self-control, so not a whole moment running around we're talking five seconds, maybe two to five seconds, maybe a bit more in extreme situations.

00:40:48.251 --> 00:40:52.251
He also said that there was always an emotion, a fear reaction.

00:40:52.251 --> 00:40:54.425
Okay, so there is an emotional component.

00:40:54.425 --> 00:40:55.748
That seems to make sense.

00:40:55.748 --> 00:41:00.347
He also said that there's usually some type of non-social behavior.

00:41:00.347 --> 00:41:03.579
Now, quarantelli was very careful in the word choice here.

00:41:03.579 --> 00:41:05.123
Non-social is not antisocial.

00:41:05.123 --> 00:41:11.007
Antisocial would be fighting to get out, so not aggressive, but just not adhering to the social norms.

00:41:11.068 --> 00:41:17.141
Exactly, not considering the fact that you're there with others rather than hurting others to get ahead, and that's quite different.

00:41:17.141 --> 00:41:21.231
And you might remember some of the myths like people were fighting to get out.

00:41:21.280 --> 00:41:22.382
That's the definition of panic.

00:41:22.382 --> 00:41:27.364
According to Quarantelli, that doesn't really happen, but you might not consider the others.

00:41:27.364 --> 00:41:31.614
You just walk, but you're not fighting to get out first, since that's competitive behavior.

00:41:31.614 --> 00:41:33.467
But this is non-social.

00:41:33.467 --> 00:41:35.405
He also said non-rational.

00:41:35.405 --> 00:41:36.570
Rather than irrational.

00:41:36.570 --> 00:41:40.469
Irrational would be you have perfect information and then you make the wrong decision.

00:41:40.469 --> 00:41:42.565
Okay, and people don't do that.

00:41:42.565 --> 00:41:46.692
But you can do non-rational, which means almost like a reaction.

00:41:46.692 --> 00:41:48.246
You don't take in all the information.

00:41:48.246 --> 00:41:49.824
You see something in front of you and go for it.

00:41:50.023 --> 00:41:53.572
You don't make a Like pick a spurter exit because you think this one is.

00:41:53.920 --> 00:42:00.445
Or since that's the only one you perceive, okay, since you don't perceive the one that is closer, okay, and that's a non-rational.

00:42:00.445 --> 00:42:04.248
It's like tunnel vision, so that could definitely happen, according to Corintelli.

00:42:04.248 --> 00:42:07.179
Quarantelli also highlighted that it's flight behavior.

00:42:07.179 --> 00:42:12.958
So running away rather than freezing or apathy, he said it is some type of flight behavior.

00:42:12.958 --> 00:42:17.300
Okay, now, what Quarantelli used to illustrate this is two examples that I remember.

00:42:17.300 --> 00:42:21.521
One is a woman who was doing the dishes in the kitchen and there is an explosion.

00:42:21.521 --> 00:42:34.719
I think it was a tire blowout, okay, but before this happened there had been some explosions in the area and the woman was in the kitchen with her child, but when this tire blew out, she ran out into the lawns.

00:42:34.719 --> 00:42:37.192
Is that what you're supposed to do if there's a gas explosion?

00:42:37.192 --> 00:42:39.398
And forgot the fact that she had a child?

00:42:39.398 --> 00:42:46.751
Now, that is non-social, since she forgot she had a child in the crib, but she didn't hit the kid going out, since that would be anti-social.

00:42:46.751 --> 00:42:48.554
Yeah, so it's just non-social.

00:42:48.594 --> 00:43:09.782
You forgot the fact that you were there with someone else, and the example that corintelli uses for the non-rational was a man from memory that was sort of doing some gardening I think it was with a wheelbarrow and then there was a plane that came down and he was afraid that that plane would crash on him and basically what the man what did was, without considering anything, he just ran.

00:43:09.782 --> 00:43:17.201
Now, when a plane is coming towards you, you have no idea if it's going to hit you or not, or it's going to miss you, so there's no point running really, you can just stand still.

00:43:17.201 --> 00:43:21.961
But in that particular situation running seems sensible since you just want to get away.

00:43:21.961 --> 00:43:25.554
So that would be non-rational, not irrational.

00:43:25.554 --> 00:43:29.659
It's not running towards the crash site of the plane, so that would be the non-rational.

00:43:29.659 --> 00:43:34.005
So the bit of tunnel vision or narrowing of the cognitive math happens.

00:43:34.005 --> 00:43:37.599
So that's the definition by Crantelli.

00:43:37.599 --> 00:43:41.373
Now the question is given this definition, does panic happen?

00:43:42.114 --> 00:44:13.697
It's interesting because if you consider it at a level of emotional response of a single human being within the crowd, I think, like this it could happen, like people would have different emotional responses, right, you can imagine someone traumatized by a fire in the past who has to relieve a fire even again, you know, and they might have, let's say, a panic attack, whatever, that probably bad warning, but their response in here would be justified, you know, because of their experiences.

00:44:13.697 --> 00:44:21.280
You might have someone who's just really like scared, or who's in some sort of environment they don't know.

00:44:21.280 --> 00:44:28.030
Like, imagine if a fire alarm happened to you while I don't know, being in Japan, you don't understand what's happening.

00:44:28.030 --> 00:44:30.239
You know the social norms are different, everything's different.

00:44:30.239 --> 00:44:35.259
I mean, I would be stressed as hell, right, so I can imagine a response.

00:44:35.259 --> 00:44:38.858
But then would it spread to the Japanese people surrounding me?

00:44:38.858 --> 00:44:39.820
Highly unlikely.

00:44:40.021 --> 00:44:51.297
Probably not, and probably what would happen in that particular situation is you have an earthquake in Japan or something like that that you're unused to, or something like that that you're unused to, and then for a period of five seconds, you're really stressed and you don't know what to do.

00:44:51.297 --> 00:44:58.597
But then, after five seconds, you calm down, you take your jacket, you go out and you stand outside the building and you seek help.

00:44:58.597 --> 00:45:07.338
So for that small time period, yes, maybe you do have panic, but from a fire engineering or an earthquake engineering perspective in this case, does that matter?

00:45:07.338 --> 00:45:08.541
That's a pre-movement time engineering perspective.

00:45:08.434 --> 00:45:08.742
In this case does that matter?

00:45:08.742 --> 00:45:09.217
That's a pre-movement time?

00:45:09.510 --> 00:45:10.150
Yeah, exactly.

00:45:10.411 --> 00:45:12.074
And I would definitely.

00:45:12.074 --> 00:45:20.858
Okay, it's hard to say the indefinitives, but I would rather not start a fight with the Japanese surrounding me or start a stampede, right.

00:45:20.858 --> 00:45:24.692
So I can resonate with the emotional response of humans.

00:45:24.692 --> 00:45:36.786
That sounds very human, right, but this record of stampede, people running around, people not knowing what to do, shouting and stuff that sounds very Hollywood-ish, you know.

00:45:36.806 --> 00:45:36.885
Yes.

00:45:37.371 --> 00:45:41.641
It's kind of like you know a car falling from the cliff and always exploding, right?

00:45:41.641 --> 00:45:45.059
Yeah, yes, a car can fall from a cliff and be damaged.

00:45:45.059 --> 00:45:48.313
The explosion is a Hollywood thing, yeah, and here as well.

00:45:48.313 --> 00:45:50.498
Like the emotions could be there.

00:45:51.110 --> 00:45:52.615
It could, but there are cases.

00:45:52.615 --> 00:46:01.360
So, for example, the station nightclub has been used as an example of where you could potentially have had something which is similar to Corintel's definition.

00:46:01.869 --> 00:46:43.135
This is actually research done by Aguirre, who I think was one of Corintel's students, and his and Aguirreirre students, where they looked at the behavior of people evacuation the station, evacuating the station nightclub and the station nightclub, as you know, rapidly developing fire, really bad conditions and people were highly stressed and we have video feedback from that right exactly, and what, from memory, they do mention, they do see in that, is that some people were there with someone else and you might be holding hands as you evacuate, but at some point, with smoke coming over your head, you actually let go and then you evacuate on your own and for five seconds you've let go and then you're looking for your partner.

00:46:43.135 --> 00:46:50.371
That could actually be the definition of panic, since in that situation you have non-social I'm just going to focus on getting out.

00:46:50.371 --> 00:46:57.657
Yeah, and also in that particular situation, letting go for a second or a fraction of a second could mean you lose someone in the crowd, right?

00:46:57.697 --> 00:47:09.494
yeah, so it can have an impact on you personally, but in the station nightclub, looking at the design, it was the narrow openings, the lack of windows and the quick fire, the quick fire growth.

00:47:09.494 --> 00:47:18.083
Those were the real factors that influenced a lot of the losses, rather than people panicking If we said that, they would panic and that's why they died.

00:47:18.824 --> 00:47:26.581
again, going back to the scapegoat, we're blaming the people for dying, which we know that that wasn't the reason.

00:47:26.581 --> 00:47:27.447
It was an environment that was unescapable?

00:47:27.467 --> 00:47:27.769
Yeah, absolutely.

00:47:27.769 --> 00:47:31.663
But an interesting question is going back to the literature.

00:47:31.663 --> 00:47:40.878
We have these claims about panic from the UK, from the US, from Russia, and it seems to be something we're afraid of.

00:47:40.878 --> 00:47:47.103
So the question is why do we have this myth of panic and this preconceived idea of what panic is?

00:47:47.103 --> 00:47:52.858
And one of the reasons I I think is that we can't really understand why other people make decisions.

00:47:52.858 --> 00:47:57.217
We understand why we make decisions, but we don't understand why other people make decisions.

00:47:57.217 --> 00:48:16.838
Now, in order to test that, I did experiments during my PhD, which I actually never published, but I did experiments where I went to IKEA and I had people listen to a different type of voice messages and as part of that, I also asked them like, if you would have heard this voice message at IKEA, just imagine yourself and you heard this message, would you panic?

00:48:17.250 --> 00:48:19.916
And I didn't give them a definition of panic, I just asked them would you panic?

00:48:19.916 --> 00:48:25.362
And what do you think people would reply if they no, no, I wouldn't panic, exactly right.

00:48:25.362 --> 00:48:31.786
But then I asked them okay, that person, random person there what's the likelihood of them panicking?

00:48:31.786 --> 00:48:32.965
They don't seem that stable.

00:48:32.965 --> 00:48:36.588
I don't know how they're thinking, so they probably panic, and that was the trend.

00:48:36.588 --> 00:48:37.807
I never panic, they panic.

00:48:37.807 --> 00:48:38.891
I know how I behave.

00:48:38.891 --> 00:48:46.795
I don't know how they behave, hence they panic, since they're acting totally irrational from my perspective, since I don't understand how they make decisions.

00:48:46.795 --> 00:48:56.559
So this is, I believe, one of the reasons why the myth of panic is there, since you don't trust other people, you don't know how they make decisions.

00:48:57.010 --> 00:48:59.900
A really good example of this is one that Syme gives.

00:48:59.900 --> 00:49:06.099
So Syme, and this is based on a real fire that happened where elderly people were trapped by a fire.

00:49:06.099 --> 00:49:10.039
So these were maybe 60 plus or thereabouts.

00:49:10.039 --> 00:49:21.382
So elderly people who met in a venue and then there was a fire and the corridor filled up with smoke and they couldn't evacuate and their behavior, as described by someone else, was that the elderly residents.

00:49:21.382 --> 00:49:25.056
They heard the alarm and they go into a state of panic.

00:49:25.056 --> 00:49:31.494
They are very loud, they were very frightened, they were yelling and at one point they were throwing something out the window.

00:49:31.494 --> 00:49:35.193
So the person who watched them said that that's total panic.

00:49:35.693 --> 00:49:37.056
That's the observer's description.

00:49:37.117 --> 00:49:39.001
Okay, that's the observer's description of them.

00:49:39.001 --> 00:49:40.112
It's total panic.

00:49:40.112 --> 00:49:41.275
They threw something out the window.

00:49:41.275 --> 00:49:47.757
And then Syme then explains that, well, when you talk to the people who were trapped, they were trapped.

00:49:47.757 --> 00:49:54.318
They were elderly, some with respiratory issues, so they weren't going to go out into the smoke and they were afraid of losing their lives.

00:49:54.318 --> 00:50:11.295
They were high up in a building and they tried to sort of argue among each other how should we evacuate, and one person came up with the idea well, we can jump up, but it's quite far and my hip isn't great, so let's throw a chair out the window to see what happens to the chair.

00:50:12.197 --> 00:50:18.574
And they did, and the chair broke and they decided we're not going to jump out, since that's going to happen to my hip If the chair breaks.

00:50:18.574 --> 00:50:19.177
My hip is great.

00:50:19.177 --> 00:50:24.119
So from their perspective, that was a rational decision to Extremely rational.

00:50:24.119 --> 00:50:26.936
It's a scientific experiment to see if you can jump out the window.

00:50:26.936 --> 00:50:34.496
But from an external perspective, that's panic, since it's totally irrational.

00:50:34.496 --> 00:50:35.340
I can't understand what they're doing.

00:50:35.340 --> 00:50:36.264
They're screaming, they're throwing out chairs.

00:50:36.264 --> 00:50:36.766
I can't understand it.

00:50:36.766 --> 00:50:41.659
Hence, it must be this concept of panic that they're displaying, but in this case, it was highly rational.

00:50:41.659 --> 00:50:47.481
It might have been in a stress situation, but they made an informed decision based on an experiment they had done.

00:50:55.289 --> 00:50:59.284
So this is why I think that we have this myth of panic, since we struggle to understand how other people make decisions.

00:50:59.284 --> 00:51:01.150
But let's now focus on real consequences for real fire engineers.

00:51:01.150 --> 00:51:07.744
Okay, on the one hand, you can just consider this an annoying nuisance of the press media, like click-baiting titles.

00:51:07.744 --> 00:51:10.237
On the other hand, it causes real damage.

00:51:10.237 --> 00:51:17.123
So if it's victim blaming, it makes it difficult to figure out the real reason for damage.

00:51:17.123 --> 00:51:23.643
What would be the consequences for engineers and how engineers should approach the concept of panic?

00:51:23.969 --> 00:51:29.251
Well, I think, first of all, if panic is discussed at a building meeting, you probably have to make sure everyone is on the same page.

00:51:29.251 --> 00:51:30.572
And then it's about thinking this concept of all if panic is discussed at a building meeting, you probably have to make sure everyone is on the same page.

00:51:30.572 --> 00:51:33.536
And then it's about thinking this concept of panic.

00:51:33.536 --> 00:51:40.021
It's not the panic as such, it's actually what you want to do to prevent something which might not be a danger.

00:51:40.021 --> 00:51:47.199
So sometimes you might have a fire engineer who says, no, we can't tell people what's happening, since you will have mass panic and you will have a crowd crush.

00:51:47.199 --> 00:51:54.389
Then you have to pick that apart and say, actually that's really bad, since that's going to make the situation worse.

00:51:54.389 --> 00:51:59.036
But sometimes someone says, well, we might get panic, so let's make the exits wider.

00:51:59.036 --> 00:51:59.757
That's actually good.

00:51:59.757 --> 00:52:04.340
But I'll still have a discussion at the meeting of what is panic.

00:52:04.340 --> 00:52:05.494
What does the research say?

00:52:05.494 --> 00:52:07.059
Is it something we should be afraid of?

00:52:07.059 --> 00:52:12.219
And rather than focusing on panic, let's just make the exits wider and tell people what's happening.

00:52:12.719 --> 00:52:17.518
But it is so ingrained, like what do we call the bars to open the doors?

00:52:17.518 --> 00:52:19.193
Panic bars, panic bars.

00:52:19.193 --> 00:52:21.123
Since people panic, they can't be trusted.

00:52:21.123 --> 00:52:24.452
So if they don't know how to operate a door, they just run into it and it will open.

00:52:24.452 --> 00:52:33.485
That's a panic bar, but it's based on the myth of people not making rational decisions and running into a door without using the handbook and then it opens automatically.

00:52:34.030 --> 00:52:37.099
Now, on the grand scheme of things, panic bars are maybe neutral.

00:52:37.099 --> 00:52:39.838
I don't think they make the situation worse.

00:52:39.838 --> 00:52:45.376
They make it slightly better, maybe, but they're also quite tricky to understand how to use if you're not used to it.

00:52:45.376 --> 00:52:53.242
So, probably neutral, but some things we do are actually bad, and some things we do to prevent this myth of panic or that panic from happening is bad.

00:52:53.242 --> 00:53:05.490
So, rather than making the situation unclear by using panic, a concept that we don't have the same definition of, maybe we should just look at what does the research say in terms of what should we tell people?

00:53:05.490 --> 00:53:06.936
Should we make exits wider?

00:53:06.936 --> 00:53:08.161
Should we avoid funnels?

00:53:08.161 --> 00:53:08.724
Should we make exits wider?

00:53:08.724 --> 00:53:09.327
Should we avoid funnels?

00:53:09.327 --> 00:53:11.253
Should we make s exits easily open?

00:53:11.333 --> 00:53:14.784
yeah, so so you just recommend good fire engineering.

00:53:14.784 --> 00:53:15.326
That that's.

00:53:15.326 --> 00:53:15.626
That's it?

00:53:15.626 --> 00:53:16.148
Yep.

00:53:16.148 --> 00:53:23.110
And how how do you feel about us stepping into the role of debunking the myth of panic when we see that in media?

00:53:23.110 --> 00:53:26.599
Because every now and then you see that happening in the media.

00:53:26.599 --> 00:53:30.244
Yep, yeah, on linkedin it's like every other week.

00:53:30.244 --> 00:53:36.420
Someone describes some even as a panic and it's being jumped by a bunch of fire scientists.

00:53:36.420 --> 00:53:38.650
Do you think it's our role?

00:53:38.650 --> 00:53:40.233
Is it necessarily important?

00:53:40.233 --> 00:53:41.677
Not, necessarily.

00:53:41.757 --> 00:53:55.681
I think in the research community we need to have a common understanding of panic and particularly we can't, in my view, have researchers saying that they're doing this to prevent panic when they don't have a clear definition of what they're trying to prevent.

00:53:55.681 --> 00:54:06.481
So we definitely need a clear definition in the research community to be able to speak the same language and not just throw panic around as a word that just sells scientific papers.

00:54:06.481 --> 00:54:20.320
What media does and what people understand might be difficult to influence, and media will still be using panic, and I've seen examples of panic being used in the heading and then it's not used in the article at all.

00:54:20.320 --> 00:54:27.297
But that's probably since the heading might be set by someone else than the one who actually wrote the paper or the article.

00:54:27.297 --> 00:54:40.951
But I think the main thing is in the research community and also in the fire engineering practice, that we're not using panic without actually knowing what we mean and we're not using panic to introduce things that are bad for the design.

00:54:41.492 --> 00:54:57.219
I think that the only time where I would be really inclined to step in would be when the panic is brought up as the reason for some consequences, absolutely where it is kind of obvious that the true reason may be somewhere else.

00:54:57.400 --> 00:55:22.333
Yes, like if you would have a situation like a crowd crash situation and I would say, oh, they've panicked and they died, I think I would be inclined to step in absolutely if there is an accident investigation, as we mentioned before, using panic as a scapegoat and basically blaming the people without actually exploring what was wrong in the design, that's also a bad use of panic, since we are basically blaming the people for their behavior.

00:55:22.333 --> 00:55:29.137
And if we go back to the old publications, we're blaming people for behavior that was not preventable, since they've been caused by anything.

00:55:29.137 --> 00:55:31.322
Case solved, we can move on.

00:55:31.322 --> 00:55:33.599
But no, we have to learn from disasters.

00:55:33.599 --> 00:55:40.420
So panic is not particularly useful in accident investigation unless we interview people and we try and understand.

00:55:40.420 --> 00:55:44.215
You break it apart Exactly and then we're probably fine.

00:55:44.215 --> 00:55:53.338
Same as Quarantelli, I was initially very stressed and didn't know what to do, but then I calmed down and I made an informed decision based on the information I had.

00:55:54.375 --> 00:55:58.117
I think looking at it from that perspective is useful and helpful.

00:55:58.117 --> 00:56:08.858
I hope after this interview, a lot of people understand much better why people online would be so pissed about someone using the word panic Absolutely.

00:56:08.858 --> 00:56:19.271
Also for us fire engineers, it's important that we understand this so we take better engineering decisions in our everyday engineering.

00:56:19.271 --> 00:56:21.545
Very good Thanks, daniel, good job.

00:56:21.545 --> 00:56:24.739
Thank you Good job on ripping the myth of panic apart.

00:56:24.739 --> 00:56:28.195
It was a pleasure to do an interview in person for once.

00:56:28.195 --> 00:56:31.057
Yes, it was great to meet in person, and that's it.

00:56:31.809 --> 00:56:39.652
So far in the episode the word panic has been used 182 times and that's probably the most I've ever used the word In my life.

00:56:39.652 --> 00:56:44.543
I feel liberated to be able to say panic, panic, panic, panic Nah, just kidding.

00:56:44.543 --> 00:56:52.096
It's important that we understand, or we have a common understanding what panic is and it's just a word.

00:56:52.096 --> 00:56:55.119
You know it's us who give meanings to words.

00:56:55.119 --> 00:56:59.338
Words is just a sound and the word panic on its own doesn't mean anything.

00:56:59.338 --> 00:57:04.753
It's us who decide what meaning we put behind the word.

00:57:04.753 --> 00:57:25.063
We need to understand the difference between short, emotional, irrational response to a situation from stampeding and spreading like a wildfire type of mind virus or whatever that makes people do stuff that are general.

00:57:25.063 --> 00:57:27.244
Panic is not crowd crush.

00:57:27.244 --> 00:57:30.646
Panic is not a main driver of evacuation.

00:57:30.646 --> 00:57:32.307
Panic could be there.

00:57:32.307 --> 00:57:35.356
It could lead to some troubles for individuals.

00:57:35.356 --> 00:57:39.893
It could lead to losing your loved ones when you try to evacuate together.

00:57:39.893 --> 00:57:59.789
It could lead to taking perhaps a wrong decision or not the most optimal decision, in a split second, but it is not a driver of evacuation at large, and this is important and if you view it from this lens, you will be able to really engineer your buildings in a better way.

00:57:59.789 --> 00:58:08.054
And one thing that's really, really important panic can be used to blame victims, and this is, in my opinion, the worst thing.

00:58:08.054 --> 00:58:26.155
If someone perished in the fire and then we try to figure out how to prevent deaths of further individuals in similar situations and someone blames it on panic, it's kind of the victim's fault and it's not the fault of those who engineered the systems that failed the person.

00:58:26.155 --> 00:58:28.539
And from that we learn nothing.

00:58:28.539 --> 00:58:34.958
From that we lose all the learnings from a tragedy and we should not do that.

00:58:34.958 --> 00:58:36.222
We owe it to the society.

00:58:36.222 --> 00:58:46.614
We need to learn, we need to strive to do better, we need to learn on our mistakes and we need to design engineering systems that provide safety to everyone around.

00:58:46.614 --> 00:58:55.197
And, yeah, if we blame it on phenomenon that does not even exist, probably, or at least not in a way that media describe it.

00:58:55.197 --> 00:58:58.202
Don't fall for Hollywood panic.

00:58:58.202 --> 00:59:07.755
The cars when they fall from the cliffs, they don't immediately explode and crowds do not start running and stampeding at the first sight of fire.

00:59:07.755 --> 00:59:13.855
Let's split the Hollywood reality or the movie reality from the reality.

00:59:14.516 --> 00:59:17.943
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed my interview with Daniel Nielsen.

00:59:17.943 --> 00:59:25.695
I also had the privilege to spend multiple hours interviewing Daniel for my other project, uncover Witness Fire Science Revelations.

00:59:25.695 --> 00:59:26.777
It's also a podcast.

00:59:26.777 --> 00:59:32.271
It has eight episodes on means of escape and human behavior in fires.

00:59:32.271 --> 00:59:36.320
We'll also talk about the myth of panic a bit in that podcast.

00:59:36.320 --> 00:59:40.336
It's more like educational series, more like fire fundamentals.

00:59:40.336 --> 00:59:45.375
I show in Fire Science Show and I'm sure if you enjoy Fire Science Show you would enjoy that one.

00:59:45.375 --> 00:59:50.610
There's so much more material on human behavior in fires that you will not find in the 5th Sense Show.

00:59:50.610 --> 01:00:02.583
So if you are interested, if you enjoyed me talking with Daniel, if you enjoy how Daniel presents knowledge, then that podcast would be a good thing for you and for today's.

01:00:02.583 --> 01:00:06.175
That would be it and I'm back to my reality.

01:00:06.175 --> 01:00:07.878
Fixed, my jet lag.

01:00:07.878 --> 01:00:15.831
I'm catching up with the work and getting ready for next episode that's gonna air next Wednesday, of course, thank you.