How do people react during a disaster? observations of concrete situations and experiments based on simulated situations
Résumé
In the context of disasters, one of the major challenges to protect the populations is to understand the individual and collective behaviors, and the displacement dynamics. When a sudden, dramatic event occurs, the individuals have immediate reactions for their self-protection and self-evacuation, much before the arrival of rescue authorities. Understanding these reactions, at both individual and collective levels, is key to anticipate the forthcoming social behaviors when a next event occurs. This anticipation is of upmost importance because the actual impact of a given hazard is primarily controlled by the reactions of the population; those reactions can either reinforce or jeopardise the safety of the affected individuals, of their relatives, and of the collective population. This is especially true in case of a sudden, unpredicted event, such as a strong earthquake, a tsunami, a nuclear accident, or a terrorist attack. The work presented in this conference is one of the results of a transdisciplinary collaboration (Com2SiCa project : https://www.com2sica.cnrs.fr/) between geographers, psychologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, operational staff and stakeholders in risk management. We presented several methodologies for observing human reactions to collect data that allow us to collate the range of human reactions that occur for different types of events and affected areas, and to consider the behavioral sequences and movement trajectories associated with spontaneous evacuation decisions. We therefore analyzed more than 200 videos of major disasters throughout the world, conducted a focus group with institutional and operational actors, developed a virtual reality immersion exercise based on the scenario of a tsunami on the Cote d'Azur coast and also carried out innovative studies putting participants in the field (rather than in the laboratory): the city of Nice threatened by a tsunami, the city of Le Havre faced with a technological accident. Our results highlight the fact that, even for a same disaster scenario, people can behave in a wide variety of ways. Through this work, we will present a new typology of behaviors classifies behavioral responses into different categories: ranging from a state of alert to a state of panic or, on the contrary, control of the situation.
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