- Author
-
Pauls, J.
|
Groner, N.
|
Gwynne, S.
|
Kuligowski, E. D.
|
Meacham, B.
|
Proulx, G.
|
Thomas, I.
|
Ripley, A.
- Title
- Informed Emergency Responses Through Improved Situation Awareness Discussion Panel.
- Coporate
- Jake Pauls Consulting Services, Silver Springs, MD
John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York, NY
Hughes Associates, Inc., Boulder, CO
National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD
Worcester Polytechnic Inst., MA
National Research Council of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario
Victoria Univ., Australia
Journalist and Author, USA
- Book or Conf
- Human Behavior in Fire. International Symposium, 4th. Proceedings. July 13-15, 2009,
Interscience Communications Ltd., London, England,
Cambridge, UK,
531-542 p.,
2009
- Keywords
-
human behavior
|
evacuation
|
emergencies
|
stairways
|
situation awareness
|
World Trade Center
|
egress
|
communication networks
|
response time
|
information dissemination
|
apartments
|
building fires
|
bush fires
|
NFPA 101
|
NFPA 5000
|
occupants
|
human factors engineering
|
ergonomics
- Identifiers
- World Trade Center (110-story-high) Towers, Manhattan, New York, September 11, 2001; situation awareness (SA); global situation awareness; team and shared situation awareness; stages in designing for good situation awareness; engineering implications of situation awareness; sociological perspective of situation awareness; access to good information
- Abstract
- A classic problem in emergencies is the need for information about what is happening and what to do about it. Thus much behaviour in emergencies is occupied with information seeking and, while this often delays the initiation of important behaviour such as evacuating via the exits stairs, it is essential to know what strategy is best and how to implement it. This is "Situation awareness." For example, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center on 9-11, one of the three exit stairs was temporarily available through the impact zone -- post jet impact - for limited egress. On 24 June 2002, Beverly Eckert was recorded on video at a NIST hearing in New York City relating her final discussion on 9-11 with her husband, Sean Rooney, who worked for Aon Corporation on the 98th floor of World Trade Center South Tower, the second to be hit and the first to collapse on 9-11. He called her on the morning of the attacks, and they talked until there was a loud explosion and nothing more. Some of her recollections from the 2002 hearing: "I was on the phone with Sean for the last half hour of his life, beginning at 9:30 a.m. He described his situation, what escape routes he had tried and asked me for information based on what I was seeing on TV. He was calmly and rationally trying to assess his options. I reached 911 on another phone but a full half hour after the planes had struck they had no information to pass along. . . . Sean died because of failures in communication. . . . There are lessons to be learned from what he and so many others endured."Following 9-11, Beverly Eckert went on to serve as the co-chair of Voices of September 11th and was an active participant in the "families" advocacy for, among other things, understanding - situation Awareness -- of what happened before, on and after 9-11. An especially moving photograph (by Kathy Willens for Associated Press) of Beverly was taken in August 2006 as she listened to the emergency responder recordings made during 9-11, recordings that underlined how inadequate situation awareness was on the part of emergency responders. (The documentary videos shot by Jules and Gedeon Naudet in the lobby of the World Trade Center also show the woefully inadequate situation awareness of emergency responders at the site.) Beverly Eckert died on 12 February 2009 in the crash of Continental Connection Flight 3407 (a 74-seat Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 with twin turboprop engines), while it was attempting to land at the Buffalo, New York, Airport. Situation awareness -- or shortage thereof -- apparently played a role in the crash. This panel session is dedicated to Beverly Eckert and her eloquent contribution to our understanding of situation awareness in relation to 9-11.