There's also additional kind of behavioral facts that I'd like to talk about before I
move on to the next module.
Remember that person that I had kind of standing in the middle of the screen that
was going through all those stages of a decision making process?
That person can have differing physical or
cognitive capabilities in any building in the world.
All right, we can not assume that our population, everyone moves the same,
everyone has the same abilities, both physical or cognitive.
That's just not gonna be the case.
And some of the numbers we've been seeing in the United States is that we can assume
that about 6% of our population in our buildings have some sort of disability.
And so we have to take that into account when we're thinking about how
to Make sure that our population reaches safety from a building fire.
And we're also not just one big group of people in a building that will evacuate
all together, all at the same time.
Instead we're kind of, we can think about a building population
as a kind of different social groupings, so
there might be families that stay together in an evacuation.
There might be co-worker who know each other,
who stay together when they evacuate.
Or make sure that they find each other first, before they evacuate.
And so instead of looking at the population as one,
a group of strangers, that's not right either.
Or a group who all know each other and you all evacuate together, we
should be looking at a building population as a bunch of different social groups.
And trying to understand how those groups might interact during a building fire.
Instead of just thinking too as people who are risk averse,
which is what I talked about in the middle of this module,
we also have some people who may perform high risk behaviors.
They might do it intentionally, or unintentionally.
Intentionally is, we've seen examples when there have been significant
amounts of smoke in front of them in a route, and they walk through it anyway.
And so that is that if people feel at risk and there is no other way to evacuate,
we have seen that people will walk through a significant amount of smoke.
Or unintentionally, if we don't give people the right information they could
find themselves moving through some very dangerous places in the building.
And they do it because they don't know any other way.
The next kind of key behavioral fact is that people are likely to move to
the familiar.
And this is a really important part of for fire protection engineers to understand,
and for also the public to understand.
We can't just know the one main route in a building,
because that is what's familiar to us.
Normally, we know the route in which we've entered the building, and for
some buildings that's about all we know.
And our buildings are designed for
people to use all of the routes available equally.
And so what we found in some of our building fire events is that the main exit
gets clogged, or congested because that's the route that people use,
because that's the one that they know.
So, it's really important for
us to think about the other routes that are available to people.
That we should also, when we walk into a building,
understand what are the other routes available to us.
And if we're getting to a point we're designing an evacuation procedure for
a building, we have to understand that people are most likely to use the routes
that are most familiar.
And find other ways to make sure that in a fire
event people will find other routes that are not so familiar to them.
Another thing that people do is move to people who are familiar to them.
And so, like I talked about with the social groupings a couple bullets earlier.
People are likely to find the other people in their social groups
before they evacuate, and evacuate together with them.
And the last key behavioral fact is that people are likely to respond to authority
figures and the information provided to them by that authority figure.
And so what I'm saying here is that role matters, and
so there was a nationwide survey done awhile back asking
Americans who was their credible source of information in the United States.
And we should know that there is no one credible source for
all people in our population in the United States.
Some buildings may find someone else credible, like their building manager.
Or they might find the mayor of their city more credible than people in
another building, or another city.
But the one kind of main credible source, the source that got
the highest percentage in this nationwide survey was firefighters.
So, we do know that there's this kind of an understanding in our
country that firefighters do provide credible information to us.
And if in a building fire we are likely to listen to them.
But it's important also for us to know when we are looking at a building,
when we're trying to make a building safer.
If we're designing emergency procedures for a building, who is the credible
source, or who are the credible sources for our building population?
Who will they listen to?
Who do they find credible?
And then provide that person with information or a way for the person to
give information in a fire event, so that people listen and reach safety sooner.