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The media’s portrayal of our response to emergencies is harmful, says Ed Galea, a mathematical modeller who specialises in disasters

Everyone thinks they know how they will act in an emergency, but what happens in reality?

People don’t respond how they think they will. One problem is that they don’t respond quickly enough. In a familiar place, they think they will be able to find their way out so become complacent. Also, people are no longer afraid of fire because we no longer come across it in our everyday lives. People don’t realise how quickly fire and toxic gas spreads in a building, and how rapidly a situation that seems benign can become life-threatening.

Does Hollywood get its portrayal of emergencies wrong?

Hollywood movies and the press paint a picture that bears no resemblance to what actually happens in emergencies. In movies the classic scenario is the Towering Inferno-type situation in which you have everyone running around in stampeding crowds, trampling others. All the research shows that panic behaviour – irrational behaviour that is harmful to the self or to others – happens very rarely in emergency situations.

Does getting the portrayal right matter?

Yes, otherwise the victims get blamed for the tragedy. At the Duisburg Love Parade in Germany earlier this year, where 21 people were killed due to overcrowding, the media reported that people were stampeding and gave the impression it was their fault that others were killed. This diverts attention from the real factors that caused the emergency: bad planning or bad crowd control.

that happened in London five years ago. Why?

We are trying to understand whether culture plays a role in the way people respond in emergency situations. It’s a Europe-wide study, and in each country we are hoping to interview survivors who were evacuated from fires, floods and major disasters such as terrorist situations. In the UK we are looking at the 7/7 bombings. We will compare the results we get from our behavioural analysis with a study of the Madrid bombing in Spain.

Can this kind of research save lives?

Definitely. If culture does play a role, that will have an impact on several levels. One is how we respond to emergencies. First responders need to know how people would behave during a fire in a high-rise block of flats where there are people from multicultural backgrounds, for example. Another is in creating evacuation modelling tools to help design complex buildings like high-rises and underground stations. I’m really a mathematical modeller, but to create accurate models I need to understand the complex behaviours.

You have also spoken to people who escaped from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. What did you find?

It turned out that people didn’t even know where the staircases were. We found that engineers and architects cater for the way they think people behave, not how they really do. So you have all these emergency exits that never get used. Often people try to go out the way they came in and the main exits become overloaded.