Evacuation And Human Behaviour Episodes

When one takes a decision to evacuate and starts moving, this is not the end of their decision-making process. Which route to take? Who to contact? How to arrange a place of shelter? Where to go first? Have I forgotten anything? I previously discussed the decision-making with Erica Kuligowski from RMIT, and today we're meeting again to follow up on decision-making for large-scale evacuations. We focus on choices and uncertainties that make many of the evacuees take additional trips, and those ...

A fire in a public venue happened again. No, I am not talking about the one in Switzerland. Since the tragic New Year celebration, we had one more near-miss in Madrid on Jan 10th 2026... In fact, who knows how many we actually had? It is a tragedy that feels like it is playing on repeat... In this podcast episode, we try to dig into why nightclub fires follow the same script decade after decade—what are the parts of the pattern, and what can we do through smarter design, honest modelling, and r...

The devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California serves as a haunting reminder of how rapidly wildfires can overwhelm communities. We have not known anything like it - the flames raced through Paradise at four miles per hour, 30,000 residents had mere minutes to evacuate, and many couldn't escape in time. What happens when the fire goes worse than worst case scenario, but still people need to escape? How do we protect lives when escape routes are blocked by fire or gridlocked traffic? Dr....

When experts from different disciplines attempt to collaborate on complex problems, such as evacuation modelling, we often discover that we're not speaking the same language. Even seemingly simple terms like "density," "velocity," and "distance" carry dramatically different meanings across physics, psychology, engineering, and computer science. In this episode, we present the "Glossary for Research on Human Crowd Dynamics," a remarkable community effort that brought together over 60 researchers...

If we truly want to account for the population at a disadvantage in evacuation, there is only this much we can do with the current approach... Pre-evacuation time distributions, walking speeds, and so on only tell us a part of the story - the story of your average person within an average population, with an average walking speed and average response. While these models are undoubtedly useful in engineering, there is perhaps a better way. My friend and guest Enrico Ronchi is trying to find this...

You are not supposed to use the word 'panic' in the context of human behaviour in fires, yet this episode contains 196 instances of it. Why? because we try to get to the bottom of the thing! Can panic be both a myth and a reality? Join us as we challenge the age-old narratives of panic in emergencies with our distinguished guest, Professor Daniel Nilsson, from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. We unravel the misconceptions surrounding human behaviour during fires, spotl...

Is evacuation of a community during a wildfire largely different from evacuation of a building? How much of the knowledge from the building fires is directly useful in planning and managing such an event, and what stuff is completely different? These are the lead questions for my today's interview with prof. Enrico Ronchi from Lund University and dr Max Kinateder from National Research Council Canada. Both guests currently research the evacuation layer of the WUI problem – starting with the res...

The fire is detected in the building. Please evacuate. Do not use the elevator. I’ve heard this emergency message perhaps a thousand times. It is deeply engraved in my mind to the extent that the moment I hear the first beep of the fire alarm, I know this message will come up. I heard the chime sound, and I knew I should evacuate and not use the elevator. But in all seriousness, why? Why shouldn’t I use the elevator, and what would happen if I did (in case the building would not prevent me...

It's time to learn about "the evacuation equation" from one of its creators. This week I interview prof. David Purser about the elements that go into the evacuation process that help us determine the fire safety of buildings. We go through the components of the Required Safe Evacuation Time (RSET) one by one: detection time alarm time pre-movement occupant movement and congestion. We discuss how those were initially defined, what the assumptions behind establishing them as a part of the fra...

This is an important episode. Our guest for today, UK fire engineer Mary Button, who uses a wheelchair herself, shares some of her own stories and feelings describing the reality for many disabled individuals. Drawing from her own experiences, Mary shares invaluable insights into the cognitive complexities individuals with mobility issues face, physical barriers, and psychological burdens related to the fire evacuation process. But most importantly, I think we touch on the essence here of how th...

What factors influence the walking speed of an occupant? Is it just their physiology and crowd density? It seems it is more complicated than that (as most things are in fire science...). Dr John Gales of York University takes me on a journey through their extremally interesting research on anthropomorphic data and movement speeds, which they have been extensively carrying through the last years. You will learn why the crowd at a football match will have a different characteristic than one attend...

You have seen these lovely evacuation simulations, the ones with a bunch of agents moving together or clumping at an exit. Ones that we use to determine ASET condition, and which are present in almost every large PBD project... Maybe even you are running such simulations. So, with that experience in mind - have you ever wondered if what you see makes sense. We all feel that humans in groups behave differently than a bunch of units in a crowd. But to what extent that 'different' could be importa...

If you were investigating phenomena and built your whole narrative around a flawed and debunked concept, would that get published? Would that get cited? Would that be recognized? Many of us would say an obvious *no*, but that is not so obvious when we discuss the human behaviour field of science and the concept of panic (the p-word we do not say!). Even though among top evacuation scientists there seems to be a consensus about why this concept is flawed, every year we see more and more papers in...

There is plenty of fire engineers who think they are modelling human behaviour... Some claim they can do it... And there is very, very few who actually did and succeeded with it. One of them is today's guest, Dr Erica Kuligowski of RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. After two decades of groundbreaking research at NIST, Erica has moved to Australia to seek new challenges related primarily to the mass evacuation of people during bushfire events. She presents her unique views on modelling hum...

Evacuation modelling is paramount in accounting for the human aspect in our fire modelling. But how is it developing? Where are we with our tools, and where are we heading with them? What are the most profound challenges related to the evacuation modelling? To answer these questions I have invited two renowned experts on evacuation modelling. Professor Enrico Ronchi from Lund University in Sweden and Professor Ruggiero 'Rino' Lovreglio from Massey University in New Zealand. Together we try to ...

Why do we take certain decisions during an evacuation process? How do we choose the evacuation route? These are often affected by cognitive biases, which is the main theme of today's episode. With Dr Michael Kinsey we will discuss how biases can be used to understand known behaviours and model human behaviour in a more realistic way. A lot of focus is placed on the evacuation modelling, and how the decision-making processes are implemented in the computer models... And in the end, we talk a bit ...