More than 615,000 people signed up for ShakeOut, which ran at 1.30pm today. That’s a huge number!
NEMA’s framing for it was athletic. Its Deputy Chief Executive Emergency Management, John Price, says that just as athletes build confidence and capability through practice, “we need to rehearse the right actions until they become instinctive.”
I think the principle is exactly right, which is why the rest of this is awkward.
Rehearsing until something is instinctive means it runs without deliberation. Someone with that response doesn’t consult the context, because they aren’t asking a question. The evidence below, though, shows people doing just that. The way I see it, and I acknowledge I’m a massive vote of n=1, is that the instinct wasn’t there.
The other possibility is that it was there and the shaking never crossed the threshold to trigger it. To be fair, I can’t rule that out, but read on.
What 68 people did at Wellington Airport
The M7.8 Kaikōura earthquake struck at 12.02am on 14 November 2016, while Wellington Airport’s CCTV was running. In the study I’ll call the CCTV paper, Vinnell, Inch, Horspool and Johnston coded five videos covering the general terminal, baggage claim, the international meet and greet area, and the Customs and Ministry for Primary Industries arrival halls. Sixty-eight people were visible clearly enough, and for long enough, to code.
One of them completed the recommended action. In the paper’s words, a woman in the customs arrival hall is “the only person out of 68 codable individuals across the entire dataset to fully drop, cover, and hold.”
Others took some protective action without that same description applying to them. In the international meet and greet area, where 19 people were waiting, “approximately half of the individuals moved out of the area (and out of view), presumably to evacuate. The other half did some combination of dropping and covering (though at quite different rates).” The paper doesn’t break down which components those nine or ten of the 19 performed, and it doesn’t define what “fully” requires, so there’s a gap I can’t cover.
So, it’s one site, one event, after midnight, and the CCTV authors say there weren’t enough clear instances of social influence in the dataset to run formal analyses at all. So nothing here is a measured effect, and this isn’t a national participation rate. That’s all my hedging.
Their abstract states the gap directly: “While education efforts such as the annual ShakeOut earthquake drill in Aotearoa New Zealand have been shown to improve knowledge of protective actions, the rates of use of these actions in real earthquake events could be improved.”
That’s a key takeaway. Knowledge improves. Use doesn’t, or not enough.
That is absolutely not an argument against rehearsing until the action is instinctive. The authors report a gap between knowing and doing without diagnosing what causes it. My question is whether a once-a-year drill, at a time announced in advance, performed by everybody at once, is the kind of rehearsal that closes it.
What people were reading instead
In one area, two men didn’t react until the shaking was severe, and one “continues leaning against the wall for the entirety of the shaking, only moving when a staff member directs him to evacuate”. In another, “very few individuals in this video take any action, with some crouching initially before standing again even as the shaking continues”.
The CCTV paper’s authors don’t claim to know why, but they do offer two candidates. It’s “unclear whether this lack of behaviour among the public was a result of seeing staff continue standing, seeing most other members of the public not taking protective action, or a combination of both.” Both, though, are about other people. And of the 68, 43 were with companions, four were with children and 21 were alone, so most had someone to take a cue from.
What they did have was a magnitude question to answer fast on poor information. Is this the small one or the bad one? The authors’ candidate account of why people followed staff is because it gave them information. They suggest it was “potentially because they thought a staff member would have better knowledge of what to do”. From that view, people were after data about the situation. (I note the word “potentially.”)
There’s another thing. There was “no internal structural damage to the building and therefore no related triggers (e.g., cues for taking actions from ceiling tiles falling)”. Nothing fell. The signal that would have answered the magnitude question wasn’t there, so people read the room instead, and the room was full of people standing still.
That’s how I read it.
The footage can’t tell us what anyone judged the shaking to be, and its authors are explicit that motivation can only be assumed from visual cues. Their own conclusion keeps the hedges in: “Although limited, the evidence presented in this paper provides valuable preliminary evidence that social influence is a key factor in both appropriate and inappropriate actions during earthquakes.”
Ok. Fine. So what?
I think the key implication here is this: If you wear the lanyard, be the one who drops.
That qualifier is doing some heavy lifting, so here’s my reasoning. The channel was never the problem. Social influence was running, and it was not mostly helping. Its authors put it this way: “In some instances, this influence was beneficial, but in many cases it was either neutral or potentially detrimental.” Neutral is not harmful, so the fair summary is that most of the influence they saw did nothing useful. One of their two candidate explanations for the Customs hall is people “seeing most other members of the public not taking protective action”, which would be strangers transmitting stillness to strangers. The authors decline to choose between that and the staff explanation, and so do I.
What the paper claims for staff is an asymmetry on that same channel rather than a separate one. Its authors write that “an individual staff member exhibiting the correct behaviour would have had more of an influence than an individual member of the public“, even though they hedge that with “It is likely”. The clearest instance seems to support it. In the baggage claim area the staff moved and “a few members of the public clearly follow the staff member who appeared”. In the Customs hall the staff kept standing and so did the public, though that is the case the authors say they can’t attribute.
What we’re really talking about is “Authority”. Which requires being identifiable as staff. The paper doesn’t say what made them identifiable, and a uniform is the obvious candidate in a Customs hall, but that’s my guess not theirs.
Which means the people this lands on are yours. If they are senior, influential, wear a uniform, are identifiable as staff in a public area, like council staff, duty crews, anyone a member of the public can tell is staff and who therefore may possess more knowlerdge and authority, then they have social influence. They are the signal in the room whether or not they act, and the Customs hall is what it looks like when they don’t.
That’s a ShakeOut I think is useful. At 1.30pm today they were practising being the thing the room reads, whether anyone framed it that way or not.