Yesterday, I sat in an exit row on a plane. I remember looking at my bag at my feet and deciding to grab it in an emergency so that other people won't trip on it on their way out.
Most airlines I have taken even forbid you from stowing bags under the seat if you're sitting on the emergency exit row. Only in the overhead compartments.
I counter your anecdata with my own: unless you're at the front of coach, behind first class, I've never heard of this. I book exit row seats as often as I can.
It's a laptop backpack with straps that can move around a bit. All it takes is someone to hook a toe on a loop, and then that person would go headfirst down the slide.
One of the first things crew does after emergency is to make sure that the exit rows are clear. If your bag does move around during the crash landing and blocks exit, it will be removed out of the way
Great, so now they can trip over the guy blocking the exit of a burning plane while he struggles to get his overstuffed laptop bag out from under the seat.
Don't do this. Stuff it under the seat like your supposed to do and no one's going to trip.
Oh, there's much worse problems at least when it comes to fire alarms in apartment buildings -- people simply refusing to leave their home.
I live in a (modern, 4-floor, built in 2008, steel and concrete) building with 145 apartments. We have about 2 or 3 fire alarms a year because late-20s professionals don’t understand that pouring oil into a pan heated on high for 20 minutes does nothing but generate a massive amount of smoke. Though in 7 years, we’ve had 3 actual fires. One serious enough to pop the glycerin disk of a sprinkler head (and cause ~$1M in water damage from the ~5000 gallons it pumped out before it was turned off, compared to about $20-30K in fire damage).
I am the building’s “unofficial first responder”. I try to find it, so I can direct fire fighters to it when they arrive 8 minutes later, in the hopes of it being dealt with before a sprinkler head pops and makes the lives of many of the units' neighbors miserable for the next few months (because water damage and related insurance claims). Once, management was still here, and we used the skeleton key to access the unit and I actually put it out myself with an extinguisher (and killed the breakers to the stove). As I’m running through the hall, I have to tell people peering out their doors to “get out now, fire alarm”, and that no, they can’t take the elevator (because they’re now parked) and they need to take stairs.
When there are firefighters going into the building, with hoses, and putting up ladders, you have people in neighboring apartments watching... from the windows inside their apartments. Until the fire department knocks on their doors and screams at them, through a megaphone, to get out.
Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters.
This is the same in offices, in my experience. Our shared office building has a horrible fire system, and gets about a half dozen false fire alarms a year. My coworkers think I'm crazy for always going directly outside when the alarm starts blaring.
Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire.
This reminded me of 9/11. I thought I heard that people in the second tower were being told by an official to stay at their desks. Why the heck would anyone advise people to remain with that huge and severely damaged building burning so close by? Just looking out the windows would have made me want to get far away from there. Did they really advise people to stay or is my memory faulty?
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, it turned out, in hindsight, that the best course of action was for people to say where they were. That memory and lesson was not lost by 2001.
"Altogether, six people were killed and 1,042 others injured, most during the evacuation that followed the blast."
I had this happen a few years ago. First day in a newly renovated part of the office. We had been told that there might be testing going on on the alarm system and that it might go off. Alarm starts going off and no one pays much attention until the smoke starts pouring through the hallways. A few offices didn't have a good view of the smoke and at least one of my co-workers stayed in the building for a good 15-20 minutes after everyone else left. No one injured, fortunately!
> Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire.
Most people will never in their whole lives experience a real building fire.
It would be much better to make false alarms extremely rare. Perhaps we could do a Toyota-style "five whys" for every single false alarm until the fire alarm in your office is fixed properly.
> Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters.
It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires.
> It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires.
I don't understand. I've experienced probably around a hundred fire alarms in my life and maybe two fires. A 1/5 chance that an alarm means a fire is an excellent reason to leave the apartment every time—That's a terrible rate to justify staying inside.
Being a former firefighter, I totally understand this problem. But by the same token, I can understand how people become complacent in regards to automatic alarms. Hell, it even happens to us when certain buildings have automatic alarms that go off repeatedly.
But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. Back in my firefighting days we had a church in Shallotte that had an automatic alarm that had frequent false alarms. So much so that if that call came in, we would admittedly not hurry go get into turnout gear and get on the rig... we'd lollygag around a minute or two waiting for the inevitable cancellation notice. Then one day, that alarm comes in, and two minutes later dispatch comes back "police office on scene advises smoke showing". Urk!
There's really no easy answer to this though... people are going to be who and how they are. All we can do is try out best to get people to do the right thing.
>But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits.
This happened about 7 blocks away a week or two ago. Older building (1950s, wood and brick), 5 stories, 15 units. Unlike my building (CAL133 compliant cabinets, modern fireproofing, lots of sprinklers) it probably didn't have sprinklers.
It went 6 alarms. If you didn't leave immediately, you would've had no chance to afterwards. Fatalities were probably all but guaranteed for anyone who lacked the wherewithal to get out. Thankfully, folks had the common sense to get out quickly and I believe there weren't even any injuries.
In the office building I work in the smoke detectors van be a bit sensitive. After burnt microwave popcorn setting the alarm off several times "policy" was changed that if a false alarm was triggered by a sensor in a tenants area that was preventable that tenant would have to pay a $500 fine. False alarms have almost ended since then... seems people and businesses don't care for $502 popcorn.
My previous apartment simply banned microwave popcorn as part of the lease. (Presumably if the alarm went off and your popcorn was found to be the culprit, you were considered in violation of your lease and evicted.)
Chicken Little alarms should never be tolerated. Looks like the alarms in your building are just chicken little.
Hopefully your building is apartments instead of condos. If I lived in such a situation, I'd get out of there ASAP. Nothing's worse then getting pulled out of sexy time because Chicken Little is running around screaming that the sky is falling.
The problem is the number of false positives. Odds are the first few alarms a new resident will leave their apartment (at least from my experience). But people become desensitized to if after they see false alarm after false alarm. It becomes a boy who cried wolf situation.
A similar problem exists with car alarms. What percentage of car alarms going off are in response to a legitimate threat of theft? I would imagine it is in the single digits at the highest. This leads to most people reacting to car alarms with mere annoyance rather than any suspicion of an actual crime.
I don't know a real solution to this. It is really just human nature to react to personal experience and if that experience says alarms are usually wrong, we will begin to ignore them. Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. This results in a sort of tragedy of the commons in which all alarms end up being too prone to trigger accidentally.
> Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative.
I wonder whether this is actually statistically true, if false positives cause true positives to be ignored by some non-trivial proportion of the population? I think it's just as likely this is legal CYA from the alarm makers -- they can only get sued for false negatives, after all.
To them a false negative is worse than a false positive, for precisely the reason you describe: it simply doesn't matter how many false positives you have, but the very first false negative destroys your company. Their optimization function is not fire safety. It's making money, which is only mostly associated with fire safety.
Right, so I wonder how we could change the incentives so their optimization function is a little more socially responsible? Perhaps a law that allows civil lawsuits for false positive alarms would help, but I'd be afraid of unexpected side-effects.
If you have fire alarms that are not serious that often, it is just going to cause people to ignore them. We had a problem with the fire alarm going of every two weeks or so at my university (all were false alarms) and people just flatly ignore it.
You are explaining that you seek out the dangerous fire in the same breath you complain that others don't run away from it fast enough.
Which hey, fine, you know better, but how many people from the building have been dragged out of a fire by the fire fighters? For all the people that haven't been rescued, why conclude that their risk assessment is so much worse than yours?
Anybody else get excited when you hear about an obvious opportunity to solve a problem? Like water damage due to fire sprinklers and then get disappointed that there is already a solution?
If airlines had a clear policy that they would compensate for lost luggage in emergencies I think this would be less common. When a small handbag can be worth $1000 and it takes you 5 seconds to grab it, it's an easy choice to take it vs leaving it to burn and not knowing whether you'll be compensated.
It's hard to compensate for things like your keepsakes, favorite items, and personal media & contacts in your devices. There's also the fear of being stuck somewhere without ANYTHING that makes people grab what they can, to at least have a change of clothes and their toothbrush or whatever.
I agree that I don't think it's so much compensation. It's more like "But it's just a little bag and it's right here with my wallet and phone and medications. If I leave it I'll be at this random airport with absolutely nothing."
It's game theory and herding in effect. We all know it'd be most helpful to the group to abandon our luggage and exit single file. We also know no one else will do it. Plus, we witness examples and use those as justification for similar behavior.
There have been studies done that show if you're in the middle of a crisis with bystanders, it's important to single them out and call for their direct responsibility:
"You in the green shirt, call the police now!"
Otherwise, responsibility distributes evenly among the group with no one player having enough impetus to affect change.
Are handbags, like those ladies are carrying in the picture, supposed to be left behind? I have a hard time imagining women would ever leave something like that behind even if you "fine" them.
At that point, a compromise is needed... probably smaller bags and packs that fit under the seat should be allowed and should be incorporated in the safety tests, but certainly opening up the overhead bins in an emergency should definitely be fined.
Yes. They're most certainly supposed to be left behind. That picture makes it pretty clear that even those smaller bags have plenty of opportunity to tangle ip with people and slow down an evacuation.
This has been a big discussion point everywhere - about shocking this behavior is and how people's lives are at stake. But let me offer an alternate perspective, and maybe some insight into their behavior.
If you lose your ID or any other official documents in India, everyone knows how much of a hassle it is going to be to get these documents reissued. Of course the possibility of bribes to move the papers. Insurance claims for lost baggage? I wouldn't rely on it. It might take them a while to save up to buy whatever they might have in their bags too. Laptops, tablets etc. They probably don't earn that much to begin with. This is probably what ran through their minds.
Yes, lives are more important in the end and every second counts in such a scenario. But as an individual they might think - hey, it takes a few seconds to grab my bag and jump out. That would save me SO much trouble. Unfortunately that's what everyone thinks and in the end everyone goes for their bags and waste precious time.
It seems like a more effective social fix for this would be to ensure that any survivors of a plane crash are immediately met inside the terminal by representatives of the airline, doctors, and members from the national consulate, who give complimentary toiletries, changes of clothes, spending money, etc. and fasttrack any requests for replacement travel documents.
Such a system would be beneficial for other reasons as well: in many recent plane crashes, survivors have ended up wandering the area, which leads to a lot of unnecessary stress for loved ones searching for them, administrative hassles for airlines and first responders, and difficulty for accident investigators. If there was a clear protocol for where to go, who to receive, and what you'd receive in the event of a crash, people would be a lot less nervous about their belongings.
>Such a system would be beneficial for other reasons as well: in many recent plane crashes, survivors have ended up wandering the area, which leads to a lot of unnecessary stress for loved ones searching for them, administrative hassles for airlines and first responders, and difficulty for accident investigators. If there was a clear protocol for where to go, who to receive, and what you'd receive in the event of a crash, people would be a lot less nervous about their belongings
In light of this, the phenomenon of passengers grabbing their luggage makes objective sense, and has changed my view of people trying to take their carry-on with them.
FTA:
>> The main reasons passengers gave for grabbing their bags was money, wallets, or credit cards, followed by work materials, keys, and medication
The individualism 'above' (no particular effort on the part of airline, airport or first responders to create an environment to receive and help crash survivors) informs the individualism 'below' (one should grab one's documentation, money, means of communication etc because no immediate means of support otherwise exists). Note to self, ALWAYS grab luggage from plane wreckage.
> In light of this, the phenomenon of passengers grabbing their luggage makes objective sense, and has changed my view of people trying to take their carry-on with them.
Exactly. What happens here is simple economics, presenting a simple Nash equilibrium and everyone's complaining why nobody reacts against the equilibrium situation.
Even worse, the only thing the FAA is worried about is that these things might cost the airlines money ... and that they must punish passengers to make them ignore their own judgement. There's the big fear of being stuck in a foreign country with zero means to communicate or do anything, being entirely dependent on a foreign state for aid. It's not just about money. Meanwhile the risk increase to yourself is not perceived as serious (and it probably isn't), and they're probably standing there waiting for other people to move anyway.
Also of note is that plane operators are liable for damages here. Lowering the risk only saves the plane operators, airports and regulators money, whilst costing more to the passengers.
Regulating 101:
1) create impossible situation, leaving people alone and helpless, do nothing about people in this situation
2) threaten to punish anyone who attempts to avoid getting into said very bad situation
(coming I'm sure) 3) actually punish people for reacting sanely
It would be trivial to regulate places on planes so planes can be evacuated much faster (e.g. make mandatory with of aisle double what it is now or outlaw middle seats or generally require sufficient space for passengers to move around and minimum available space for a passenger).
> It seems like a more effective social fix for this would be to ensure that any survivors of a plane crash are immediately met inside the terminal by representatives of the airline, doctors, and members from the national consulate, who give complimentary toiletries, changes of clothes, spending money, etc. and fasttrack any requests for replacement travel documents.
That would certainly help, but that would still mean loss of all data on electronic devices not carried out. Sure, I have remote backups — secured with an account whose credentials are stored on my local hard drive.
They should just autolock the baggage compartments and maybe line them with insulation to stop a fire from ruining the stuff inside. A purse or a small computer bag on your lap is not going to cause that large of a delay in getting off the plane.
My rationale: Make sure to have IDs, CCs, etc. on you. Grab your small bag from under the seat. Leave the overhead closed. It should be locked automatically as suggested in the article.
This is one of those scenarios where of course airline people know how to do things. But you cannot expect the consumers of your service to have the same level of fluency. Does everyone on the entire aircraft acknowledge and believe that evacuating the aircraft in 90 seconds is the number one goal?
I would say no. Despite it being somewhat logical, I think it is unreasonable to believe that people are rational agents and won't act emotionally in a state of emergency.
So don't get upset that people aren't following your directions.
I think it would help if people knew why 90 seconds is the goal: because the real danger in a plane crash isn't the crash, it's the post-crash fire. I'm speaking generally of course. For something like Sioux City for example (total loss of hydraulics/controls), the crash is obviously catastrophic. But even in that case, the post-crash fire added to the death toll significantly.
I don't think passengers realize this. No sane airline would ever mention it in a passenger briefing. Can you imagine? "P.S. If we crash, get off right away or you'll be burned alive." Never gonna happen. But it's the truth, and it's why getting the f* off the plane as fast as humanly possible after a crash will save your life—and the lives of all the people who can't get off until you do because they're stuck behind you.
That's the other thing I don't think people realize. Grabbing your bag may take you two seconds, big whoop. But what if two seconds is the difference between life and death for the person thirty people behind you in line out the door? You just killed that person.
Yes this is terrible and avoidable, but it's also an extremely uncommon event. The amount of lives saved by properly educating against this is basically negligible.
Have to wonder how much of it is cultural. Flown alot in China and I can only imagine it being worse while here in Japan we'd politely try to figure out who went first while burning.
Alternative: shoot out the overhead bins around the plane like a ejector seat, everyone gets their stuff when they get off.
Now you got people scrambling to get off the plane to get their stuff. win-win.
aww man i was thinking about this more, and its going to take a really big compressed air tank to shoot out the bins. But good thing there was that recall of millions of airbags, we can just use those instead of wasting them.
The reason this happens is because it's hard to know the boundary between a minor problem and a major situation, and people tend to have a lag in their estimation of severity of the situation. Kinda like a car engine with a turbocharger has turbo lag.
People end up not wanting to make a stupid mistake where they leave their passports, money, laptops behind just because of a false alarm.
If they knew what they know later, they'd act differently. But in the moment, it's hard to predict if it's going to be a big deal or a minor thing.
It is a certification requirement for airliners that they can be evacuated in 90 seconds, with half the emergency exits closed/inoperational (see [1], [2]).
This is tested with volunteers before certification, see e.g. [3] for a video of the certification test for the Airbus A380.
The details [4] are quite interesting: a third of "pax" must be over 50, three life-size infant dolls must be carried along, etc.
Given those certification requirements, a slow passenger is very much a problem.
People can act bizarrely in a crisis. In situations like this where there is panic and the adrenaline starts pumping, rational thought gets tampered down and instinct and training takes over. Which is actually a great survival mechanism, but we don't really have any instincts, and very few people are actually trained for emergencies like this. What we are trained to do is not forget our luggage when leaving the plane.
Assuming this is the case (see above warning), no amount of fines or prosecution will really help, because we're dealing with people's subconscious. People won't internalize that negative reinforcement unless it actually happens to them, and how often are people in plane crashes? Maybe having plane evacuation drills would help, but I don't know how practical that is.
> Assuming this is the case (see above warning), no amount of fines or prosecution will really help, because we're dealing with people's subconscious.
Yeah, that also bothered me about the article. I don't think anyone in a crisis is going to think, 'if I grab my bag, I will be fined' — and I don't believe that the money recouped from fines will do anything to compensate for lives lost, anyway.
Rather, I think that folks are going to feel, 'my life, and everything I have is in danger, I must rescue myself and my things or perish!'
"The possibility of a huge fine “would stick in their mind” and cause passengers to leave their bags as directed"
I'm not sure. There are psychologists who claim that people who have to disembark start their "leave a plane" program, and that includes taking ones luggage, because that program has worked well for them zillions of times.
"Of the 419 passengers who reported that they carried on bags, 208 (nearly 50 percent) reported attempting to remove a bag during their evacuation. The primary reason that passengers stated for grabbing their bags was for money, wallet, or credit cards (111 passengers). Other reasons included job items (65), keys (61), and medicines (51). Most passengers exited the airplane with their bags"
So, urges that normally are top of the list (don't lose your wallet or keys) seem to get precedence over a directly life-threatening but unfamiliar one (you're in a burning plane)
Given that, I doubt a technical solution such as a huge fine will have much effect.
This is a classic tragedy-of-the-commons problem. From one individual's perspective, you think to yourself that grabbing your bag only takes 1 additional second, and it's pretty unlikely that you'll get hurt just because of that additional second. Compared to the upside of not losing your precious belongings, that seems like an understandable cost-benefit analysis.
The problem is, you aren't just delaying yourself by 1 second, you're also delaying the other 100 people behind you by 1 second. And if you multiply the risks involved by 100, the outcome of the cost-benefit analysis changes dramatically.
We could yell at people for being too dumb to do the "right thing", but let's be honest, this isn't the kind of issue that will filter down to everyone in society. Unless it makes the front page of NYTimes or CNN, the vast majority of people will never get to hear your moral lectures and explanations. And airlines don't want to unduly alarm their passengers on the vast majority of flights which won't have problems, so they aren't going to spend too much effort on this either. The best solution here is some simple technology. Equip all the overhead bins with central locks, so that once a switch is flipped, it's impossible for a passenger to get them open. This way, people won't even have the chance to grab their luggage, and we wouldn't have to sit here having this discussion.
> The problem is, you aren't just delaying yourself by 1 second, you're also delaying the other 100 people behind you by 1 second. And if you multiply the risks involved by 100, the outcome of the cost-benefit analysis changes dramatically.
In you analogy you are assuming that those people cannot perform that operation at the same time.
Opening overhead compartments will take longer time, also having baggage in front/behind you takes space for other people.
IMO I don't understand though concern about grabbing handbags or items that are not in overhead compartments. Since it is quick and those are generally small items.
>The problem is, you aren't just delaying yourself by 1 second, you're also delaying the other 100 people behind you by 1 second.
Except for most people, it doesn't take an additional second. Past experience in crowded areas with narrow aisles and few exits tells you that you're going to be standing around waiting awhile for a chance to move. What else are you supposed to do, flail your arms, scream, and panic? Trample the people ahead of you? Fling your bag randomly, hitting someone else and causing a trip hazard?
All our lives we are taught that in an emergency you should remain calm and collected and exit in good order.
Of course you shouldn't waste time going back for unimportant things or things that are hard to get to, but if your bag is right there and you can pick it up in the same motion as standing up, that seems perfectly reasonable, rational, and logical. Or if you're standing around waiting for your chance to exit, it makes sense to pick it up.
The article uses hyperbole like "Materialism has been winning out over self-preservation", "when it's your money or your life, money wins", and "leave your bags behind. Yes, all of them. Laptops and purses, too." But urging people to panic and act counter to everything they've ever been taught and everything that they've experienced in life, especially in the middle of a stressful emergency, doesn't really make sense.
As others have said, fining people for behaving the way that they are supposed to behave does not make sense. Intercepting people and delaying the evacuation to remove their things does not make sense. What would make sense would be to improve egress routes if that is a problem. More exits and wider aisles would be a lot easier than trying to force everyone to act irrationally and counter-intuitively during an emergency.
There is a video on a BBC story [1] about the Emirates crash landing. First of all the video is appalling - everybody is going for their bags in the overheads instead of moving to the exits and it looks way more chaotic than it would if they followed the procedure. Secondly, and even more shocking, is that some idiot videoed this. Considering the fireball this plane became soon after everyone got off the delays all of these people were causing to the evacuation is incredibly dangerous. Particularly for crew members who are going to be last off. I feel like there needs to be a pretty heavy punishment for anyone who comes down that slide with a bag.
So get rid of overhead storage. Or have the overhead compartments automatically lock down in an emergency as suggested.
I can't honestly say I wouldn't grab my backpack from the floor, if the situation allowed, but I am fairly convinced it won't be delaying my departure from a burning aircraft. The 82 year old lady in row 8, who had to be wheelchaired onto the plane or perhaps the mother/father trying to juggle one or more screaming children might be a more serious concern.
(In this article): The same people who are condemning taking your bags, citing it as an impediment to evacuation, are suggesting an additional movement restriction, passenger bag checks at the exit.
Personally, I think treating this issue in a black and white manner is a mistake. I think that each individual's judgement should be better respected, acknowledging the limits of central control.
> “Smoking is not allowed because it can jeopardize the lives and the health of other passengers and the lives and health of the crew,” she said. “And carrying your bag could have the same consequence.”
No, smoking is not allowed because people like to have an out-group they can hate, and it is currently politically-correct to hate smokers. Inhaling a little smoke on a plane ride is annoying (so, too, body odour …), but it doesn't negatively impact anyone's health. So-called 'secondhand smoke' is junk science, pure and simple: no more factual than phrenology.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadDon't do this. Stuff it under the seat like your supposed to do and no one's going to trip.
I live in a (modern, 4-floor, built in 2008, steel and concrete) building with 145 apartments. We have about 2 or 3 fire alarms a year because late-20s professionals don’t understand that pouring oil into a pan heated on high for 20 minutes does nothing but generate a massive amount of smoke. Though in 7 years, we’ve had 3 actual fires. One serious enough to pop the glycerin disk of a sprinkler head (and cause ~$1M in water damage from the ~5000 gallons it pumped out before it was turned off, compared to about $20-30K in fire damage).
I am the building’s “unofficial first responder”. I try to find it, so I can direct fire fighters to it when they arrive 8 minutes later, in the hopes of it being dealt with before a sprinkler head pops and makes the lives of many of the units' neighbors miserable for the next few months (because water damage and related insurance claims). Once, management was still here, and we used the skeleton key to access the unit and I actually put it out myself with an extinguisher (and killed the breakers to the stove). As I’m running through the hall, I have to tell people peering out their doors to “get out now, fire alarm”, and that no, they can’t take the elevator (because they’re now parked) and they need to take stairs.
When there are firefighters going into the building, with hoses, and putting up ladders, you have people in neighboring apartments watching... from the windows inside their apartments. Until the fire department knocks on their doors and screams at them, through a megaphone, to get out.
Management commented to me that during the fire alarms with actual fires (which granted, were small), ~30% of people (~80-90 people) refused to leave. That's a hell of a potential burden in the event of a serious fire to put on the firefighters.
This is the same in offices, in my experience. Our shared office building has a horrible fire system, and gets about a half dozen false fire alarms a year. My coworkers think I'm crazy for always going directly outside when the alarm starts blaring.
Sooner or later, one of those "false alarms" is going to be real and people will still be sitting at their desks while the building is really on fire.
"Altogether, six people were killed and 1,042 others injured, most during the evacuation that followed the blast."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
Most people will never in their whole lives experience a real building fire.
It would be much better to make false alarms extremely rare. Perhaps we could do a Toyota-style "five whys" for every single false alarm until the fire alarm in your office is fixed properly.
It's not great, but you can see where they're coming from, with 2.5 alarms per year compared to 0.5 fires.
I don't understand. I've experienced probably around a hundred fire alarms in my life and maybe two fires. A 1/5 chance that an alarm means a fire is an excellent reason to leave the apartment every time—That's a terrible rate to justify staying inside.
But, as you might guess, eventually the real deal hits. Back in my firefighting days we had a church in Shallotte that had an automatic alarm that had frequent false alarms. So much so that if that call came in, we would admittedly not hurry go get into turnout gear and get on the rig... we'd lollygag around a minute or two waiting for the inevitable cancellation notice. Then one day, that alarm comes in, and two minutes later dispatch comes back "police office on scene advises smoke showing". Urk!
There's really no easy answer to this though... people are going to be who and how they are. All we can do is try out best to get people to do the right thing.
This happened about 7 blocks away a week or two ago. Older building (1950s, wood and brick), 5 stories, 15 units. Unlike my building (CAL133 compliant cabinets, modern fireproofing, lots of sprinklers) it probably didn't have sprinklers.
It went 6 alarms. If you didn't leave immediately, you would've had no chance to afterwards. Fatalities were probably all but guaranteed for anyone who lacked the wherewithal to get out. Thankfully, folks had the common sense to get out quickly and I believe there weren't even any injuries.
Hopefully your building is apartments instead of condos. If I lived in such a situation, I'd get out of there ASAP. Nothing's worse then getting pulled out of sexy time because Chicken Little is running around screaming that the sky is falling.
A similar problem exists with car alarms. What percentage of car alarms going off are in response to a legitimate threat of theft? I would imagine it is in the single digits at the highest. This leads to most people reacting to car alarms with mere annoyance rather than any suspicion of an actual crime.
I don't know a real solution to this. It is really just human nature to react to personal experience and if that experience says alarms are usually wrong, we will begin to ignore them. Meanwhile the makers of the alarms have an incentive to be overly sensitive because a false positive is much less dangerous than a false negative. This results in a sort of tragedy of the commons in which all alarms end up being too prone to trigger accidentally.
I wonder whether this is actually statistically true, if false positives cause true positives to be ignored by some non-trivial proportion of the population? I think it's just as likely this is legal CYA from the alarm makers -- they can only get sued for false negatives, after all.
Which hey, fine, you know better, but how many people from the building have been dragged out of a fire by the fire fighters? For all the people that haven't been rescued, why conclude that their risk assessment is so much worse than yours?
HiFog - Uses water mist to prevent limit damage:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_NsBZ7oXok
Then you think... Maybe it could be made better?
There have been studies done that show if you're in the middle of a crisis with bystanders, it's important to single them out and call for their direct responsibility:
"You in the green shirt, call the police now!"
Otherwise, responsibility distributes evenly among the group with no one player having enough impetus to affect change.
Good luck to you.
I'm suggesting there's a strong cultural component to this behaviour. (Yes, I'm preparing to be down-voted by the PC brigade.)
Maybe the reasonable thing is to require small separate handbag with all the valuables.
And there are more things which prevent fast evacuation. Are we going to ban them as well?:
- catering trolleys
- less mobile persons
- high heels
At that point, a compromise is needed... probably smaller bags and packs that fit under the seat should be allowed and should be incorporated in the safety tests, but certainly opening up the overhead bins in an emergency should definitely be fined.
If you lose your ID or any other official documents in India, everyone knows how much of a hassle it is going to be to get these documents reissued. Of course the possibility of bribes to move the papers. Insurance claims for lost baggage? I wouldn't rely on it. It might take them a while to save up to buy whatever they might have in their bags too. Laptops, tablets etc. They probably don't earn that much to begin with. This is probably what ran through their minds.
Yes, lives are more important in the end and every second counts in such a scenario. But as an individual they might think - hey, it takes a few seconds to grab my bag and jump out. That would save me SO much trouble. Unfortunately that's what everyone thinks and in the end everyone goes for their bags and waste precious time.
Such a system would be beneficial for other reasons as well: in many recent plane crashes, survivors have ended up wandering the area, which leads to a lot of unnecessary stress for loved ones searching for them, administrative hassles for airlines and first responders, and difficulty for accident investigators. If there was a clear protocol for where to go, who to receive, and what you'd receive in the event of a crash, people would be a lot less nervous about their belongings.
In light of this, the phenomenon of passengers grabbing their luggage makes objective sense, and has changed my view of people trying to take their carry-on with them.
FTA:
>> The main reasons passengers gave for grabbing their bags was money, wallets, or credit cards, followed by work materials, keys, and medication
The individualism 'above' (no particular effort on the part of airline, airport or first responders to create an environment to receive and help crash survivors) informs the individualism 'below' (one should grab one's documentation, money, means of communication etc because no immediate means of support otherwise exists). Note to self, ALWAYS grab luggage from plane wreckage.
Exactly. What happens here is simple economics, presenting a simple Nash equilibrium and everyone's complaining why nobody reacts against the equilibrium situation.
Even worse, the only thing the FAA is worried about is that these things might cost the airlines money ... and that they must punish passengers to make them ignore their own judgement. There's the big fear of being stuck in a foreign country with zero means to communicate or do anything, being entirely dependent on a foreign state for aid. It's not just about money. Meanwhile the risk increase to yourself is not perceived as serious (and it probably isn't), and they're probably standing there waiting for other people to move anyway.
Also of note is that plane operators are liable for damages here. Lowering the risk only saves the plane operators, airports and regulators money, whilst costing more to the passengers.
Regulating 101:
1) create impossible situation, leaving people alone and helpless, do nothing about people in this situation
2) threaten to punish anyone who attempts to avoid getting into said very bad situation
(coming I'm sure) 3) actually punish people for reacting sanely
It would be trivial to regulate places on planes so planes can be evacuated much faster (e.g. make mandatory with of aisle double what it is now or outlaw middle seats or generally require sufficient space for passengers to move around and minimum available space for a passenger).
That would certainly help, but that would still mean loss of all data on electronic devices not carried out. Sure, I have remote backups — secured with an account whose credentials are stored on my local hard drive.
I would say no. Despite it being somewhat logical, I think it is unreasonable to believe that people are rational agents and won't act emotionally in a state of emergency.
So don't get upset that people aren't following your directions.
I don't think passengers realize this. No sane airline would ever mention it in a passenger briefing. Can you imagine? "P.S. If we crash, get off right away or you'll be burned alive." Never gonna happen. But it's the truth, and it's why getting the f* off the plane as fast as humanly possible after a crash will save your life—and the lives of all the people who can't get off until you do because they're stuck behind you.
That's the other thing I don't think people realize. Grabbing your bag may take you two seconds, big whoop. But what if two seconds is the difference between life and death for the person thirty people behind you in line out the door? You just killed that person.
It would be much more effective than the threat of a fine.
Of course then you'll have people deploying the escape slides without permission during non-evacuations...
Really the endpoint is the same. Humans panic.
win-win-win
People end up not wanting to make a stupid mistake where they leave their passports, money, laptops behind just because of a false alarm.
If they knew what they know later, they'd act differently. But in the moment, it's hard to predict if it's going to be a big deal or a minor thing.
Then I have a vision of scrambling over the tops of seats to get out of a crash incident. Luggage isn't a part of that vision.
Then I go back to reading.
This is tested with volunteers before certification, see e.g. [3] for a video of the certification test for the Airbus A380. The details [4] are quite interesting: a third of "pax" must be over 50, three life-size infant dolls must be carried along, etc.
Given those certification requirements, a slow passenger is very much a problem.
[1] http://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?contentKe... [2] http://adg.stanford.edu/aa241/fuselayout/far801.html [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIaovi1JWyY [4] http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=4fcf34b24a7a7963642...
People can act bizarrely in a crisis. In situations like this where there is panic and the adrenaline starts pumping, rational thought gets tampered down and instinct and training takes over. Which is actually a great survival mechanism, but we don't really have any instincts, and very few people are actually trained for emergencies like this. What we are trained to do is not forget our luggage when leaving the plane.
Assuming this is the case (see above warning), no amount of fines or prosecution will really help, because we're dealing with people's subconscious. People won't internalize that negative reinforcement unless it actually happens to them, and how often are people in plane crashes? Maybe having plane evacuation drills would help, but I don't know how practical that is.
Yeah, that also bothered me about the article. I don't think anyone in a crisis is going to think, 'if I grab my bag, I will be fined' — and I don't believe that the money recouped from fines will do anything to compensate for lives lost, anyway.
Rather, I think that folks are going to feel, 'my life, and everything I have is in danger, I must rescue myself and my things or perish!'
I'm not sure. There are psychologists who claim that people who have to disembark start their "leave a plane" program, and that includes taking ones luggage, because that program has worked well for them zillions of times.
Chapter 7 of the referenced https://app.ntsb.gov/doclib/safetystudies/SS0001.pdf gives that theory some credence. Quote:
"Of the 419 passengers who reported that they carried on bags, 208 (nearly 50 percent) reported attempting to remove a bag during their evacuation. The primary reason that passengers stated for grabbing their bags was for money, wallet, or credit cards (111 passengers). Other reasons included job items (65), keys (61), and medicines (51). Most passengers exited the airplane with their bags"
So, urges that normally are top of the list (don't lose your wallet or keys) seem to get precedence over a directly life-threatening but unfamiliar one (you're in a burning plane)
Given that, I doubt a technical solution such as a huge fine will have much effect.
The problem is, you aren't just delaying yourself by 1 second, you're also delaying the other 100 people behind you by 1 second. And if you multiply the risks involved by 100, the outcome of the cost-benefit analysis changes dramatically.
We could yell at people for being too dumb to do the "right thing", but let's be honest, this isn't the kind of issue that will filter down to everyone in society. Unless it makes the front page of NYTimes or CNN, the vast majority of people will never get to hear your moral lectures and explanations. And airlines don't want to unduly alarm their passengers on the vast majority of flights which won't have problems, so they aren't going to spend too much effort on this either. The best solution here is some simple technology. Equip all the overhead bins with central locks, so that once a switch is flipped, it's impossible for a passenger to get them open. This way, people won't even have the chance to grab their luggage, and we wouldn't have to sit here having this discussion.
In you analogy you are assuming that those people cannot perform that operation at the same time.
Opening overhead compartments will take longer time, also having baggage in front/behind you takes space for other people.
IMO I don't understand though concern about grabbing handbags or items that are not in overhead compartments. Since it is quick and those are generally small items.
Except for most people, it doesn't take an additional second. Past experience in crowded areas with narrow aisles and few exits tells you that you're going to be standing around waiting awhile for a chance to move. What else are you supposed to do, flail your arms, scream, and panic? Trample the people ahead of you? Fling your bag randomly, hitting someone else and causing a trip hazard?
All our lives we are taught that in an emergency you should remain calm and collected and exit in good order.
Of course you shouldn't waste time going back for unimportant things or things that are hard to get to, but if your bag is right there and you can pick it up in the same motion as standing up, that seems perfectly reasonable, rational, and logical. Or if you're standing around waiting for your chance to exit, it makes sense to pick it up.
The article uses hyperbole like "Materialism has been winning out over self-preservation", "when it's your money or your life, money wins", and "leave your bags behind. Yes, all of them. Laptops and purses, too." But urging people to panic and act counter to everything they've ever been taught and everything that they've experienced in life, especially in the middle of a stressful emergency, doesn't really make sense.
As others have said, fining people for behaving the way that they are supposed to behave does not make sense. Intercepting people and delaying the evacuation to remove their things does not make sense. What would make sense would be to improve egress routes if that is a problem. More exits and wider aisles would be a lot easier than trying to force everyone to act irrationally and counter-intuitively during an emergency.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-36977903
I can't honestly say I wouldn't grab my backpack from the floor, if the situation allowed, but I am fairly convinced it won't be delaying my departure from a burning aircraft. The 82 year old lady in row 8, who had to be wheelchaired onto the plane or perhaps the mother/father trying to juggle one or more screaming children might be a more serious concern.
Personally, I think treating this issue in a black and white manner is a mistake. I think that each individual's judgement should be better respected, acknowledging the limits of central control.
No, smoking is not allowed because people like to have an out-group they can hate, and it is currently politically-correct to hate smokers. Inhaling a little smoke on a plane ride is annoying (so, too, body odour …), but it doesn't negatively impact anyone's health. So-called 'secondhand smoke' is junk science, pure and simple: no more factual than phrenology.