Dr. Jonah Rainwater wrote:WHY DIDN'T PEOPLE EVACUATE!!??!!?!?!?!!?!?!??!?!!!
That's the $64,000 question a lot of hazards researchers spend a lot of time asking, in order to figure out how to get more people to respond appropriately to warnings.
A 64 word, or therabouts, summary of why is that while most people respond more or less appropriately to a warning, a substantial number of persons, confronted with a threat, in a sense freeze. Rather than respond appropriately, they cling fervently and inappropriately to their routines. It amounts to a kind of magical thinking, that if only they act as if everything is ordinary, things will remain as they are. It can't be said that they're not trying to survive - they're just trying to survive via what amounts to a psychotic response. Elderly persons are especially prone to this response, but it does affect younger persons as well.
There's a variant on this (a variant at least in my opinion; other folks may feel its a separate phenomenon) where persons follow their hazard response plans with irrational rigidity -- say, insisting upon evacuating along a washed-out route and driving straight into the water, because that's the route that had been decided upon prior to the road becoming washed out, or following a fire evacuation route straight into the smoke and flames. Some non-evacuees may have been following preexisting hurricane plans, made for Cat. 1 or 2 storms, to the letter.
Okay, it's probably more than 64 words
Another major reason for staying, even when resources exist to evacuate or at least go to a refuge of last resort, has historically been that issue of pets. This obstacle to evacuation is slowly but surely being removed. Current FEMA policy strongly encourages planning for animals, and more and more pet and pet-friendly shelters are becoming available.
Another reason for not responding appropriately to warnings has been that it's human nature to try to first confirm that a hazard exists before taking action. When you think about it, it's a sensible response -- if we ran out of our homes every time we heard an announcement that "the sky is falling", we'd be a lot poorer, and a lot of burglars with megaphones would be a lot richer. Unfortunately, if "confirmation" means "wait until it is too late to respond", people die. So the challenge, then, is twofold: to produce credible warnings which contain enough information to satisfy that natural urge to confirm that the warning is real, and to educate the public about hazards in general, because research shows that the more information people have about a hazard, the more likely they are to react promptly and appropriately.
Of course, there is good ol' idiocy, especially common among young men with too much beer and too much testosterone, who think it would be really cool if they prove their manhood by facing down the storm. In emergency rooms they call this "young man's immortality syndrome", and it kills quite a few of them, usually with the assistance of automobiles. Again, idiocy, although most common among young men, is not exclusive to certain ages and genders. You can find the occasional middle aged woman with too much beer, too much machisma, and too little sense, too.
I am all for driving the lesson home to individual survivors that their actions were foolish, endangered both themselves and others, and should not ever be repeated. But at the same time it's important to remember that in the vast majority of cases these people
were trying to survive, and acted in a manner which seemed to them at the time to be the best way to survive. They wanted the same thing that the rest of us want. One of the challenges of hazards research is to try to figure out how to effectively educate and warn people so that as few people as possible freeze, or wait till its too late, or otherwise respond in ways that put themselves in danger.
