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PLANNING, WARNING, EVACUATION, AND SEARCH AND RESCUE:
A REVIEW OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH LITERATURE

B. E. Aguirre
Department of Sociology
Texas A&M University
College Station, Texas, USA, 77843
 PLANNING, WARNING, EVACUATION, AND SEARCH AND RESCUE:
A REVIEW OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH LITERATURE
ABSTRACT
The focus of this review is on planning, warnings,
evacuations, and search and rescue activities that are
designed to minimize the deleterious effects of disasters
on populations. The review discusses the points of
consensus among specialists in these disaster-related
activities, and it illustrates them with my own research
in Puerto Rico and Mexico. The review disccusses
present-day lack of interest in planning for disasters
and the determinants of public response to warnings. A
third section presents the prevailing definition of
evacuation, types of evacuation and a list of its
determinants, as well as the two major extant conceptual
frameworks of evacuation. The fourth and final section
of this review presents what is known about search and
rescue activities in disasters, to include the importance
of volunteers and emergent group activities, the
importance of the timing of rescue, and the policy
implications of these patterns.
 2

PLANNING, WARNING, EVACUATION, AND SEARCH AND RESCUE:

A REVIEW OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH LITERATURE
This review of the social science research
literature on planning, warning, evacuation, and search
and rescue assumes that disasters are failures of social
systems (Dynes, 1993). As such, its emphasis is not on
physical agents but on what people do together to respond
in an organized fashion to the crisis of disasters, and
on the continuities between pre and post disaster social
organizations.
Its focus is on disaster preparedness, or on the
programs, training, and traditions that minimize the
effects of disasters that will occur (Gillespie and
Streeter, 1987). Planning, warnings, evacuations, and
search and rescue are processes designed to minimize the
deleterious effects of disasters on populations. While
limitations of space and time preclude the treatment of
other preparedness issues such as the level of awareness
of hazards of populations, the four topics presented in
this review cover most of the empirical work on the
subject of disaster preparedness in the social sciences
today, although perhaps some important contributions may
have been omitted by error. The most vigorous research
tradition is on warnings, followed by research on
evacuation. Search and rescue and planning run a distant
third in the amount of attention they have received so
far.
Two caveats are in order. Search and rescue
activities have until now being conceptualized as part of
disaster response. I would like to suggest ways in which
they should be seen as presenting legitimate disaster
preparedness planning and program issues. Moreover,
while it can be argued that there is a chronology to the
four types of activities reviewed in this paper, with
planning preceding warnings which are then followed by
evacuation behavior and search and rescue efforts, in
fact this chronological assumption is not made in this
paper. More complex interconnections among the four
processes take place.
PLANNING. Despite its obvious relevance to preparedness
activities, planning for disasters has not received a
great deal of research attention in the social sciences.
Disaster planning is a rather unpopular activity for most
Americans. This is the case in spite of the importance
of disaster planning and its complexity, made clear, for
example, by Vogt and Sorensen's (1992) review of the many
planning issues related to evacuations (see below).
Quarantelli (1991; see also Britton, 1987; Burby and
French, 1981) has recently summarized these patterns. He
points out that:
1. It is very difficult to get individuals and families
to become interested and concerned about disasters before
they happen. Most people are involved in the here and
now and are uninterested in low probability, future
disaster events. Moreover, they see planning as the
responsibility of the state, not of themselves. The
exception to this disinterest in planning occur in
communities with a recurrent and serious disaster threat
 3

(e.g., Perry and Green, 1983), and among emergent groups

that become active proponents of disaster preparedness
and mitigation measures in their communities. The
proportion of populations that engage in some sort of
preparatory activity increases with the frequency of
hazards (Drabek, 1986, 24). After extensive review of
the social science literature, Drabek (1986, 26-28; see
also Palm, 1981; 1987) write that, after disasters,
families in impacted communities express interest in
disaster planning but very little effective planning gets
done.
2. The few complex organizations that plan for
disasters often do not do a good job of it. With the
exception of organizations formally charged to respond to
crises, such as police, fire departments, and medical
organizations, most private and public organizations in
the United States do not plan for disasters. In the US
the greater the size of the organization the greater the
presence of disaster planning (Drabek, 1986. However,
the plans that are done are rather limited, assume that
the crises will be of the most severe type imaginable,
and that the effects of the disasters will impact others
and not the organizations themselves. Most planning
succumbs to the technological bias, with much emphasis
put on having sophisticated technology such as computers
to respond to the crisis rather than the development of
the social organization required for successful
operations. Moreover, those organizations that have
developed disaster plans tend to think of disasters as
accidents, ignoring that disasters are much more complex
than accidents, for they force the organizations to
interact intensively with many and different groups from
both the public and private sectors, in situations where
the organization has to relinquish parts of its autonomy
and apply different performance standards, and where the
organizations may have suffered losses of their own
resources. In short, organizational planning is often
done incorrectly.
3. Finally, Quarantelli points out that communities
give very low priority to disaster planning. Most
communities in the US do not spend a great deal of time,
money, or other resources in planning for disasters. It
is very seldom that local governments attempt to educate
the public to the hazards that threaten them. In the US
whatever is done is to a large extent the result of the
activities of the federal government, through federal
matching grants and planning grants. Community planning
for disasters is rendered difficult by the divisions,
disputes, and conflicts that punctuate community life.
Such divisions are often expressed in conflicts among the
various organizations charged to respond to disasters,
such as the police, army, emergency medical
organizations, and fire departments. Such conflicts make
it very difficult for organizations to cooperate on a
community-wide disaster plan, for the plan requires their
cooperation and trust, and a willingness to forego some
degree of organizational autonomy.
Drabek (1986) points out that in the US the local
emergency management offices, charged to develop and
implement disaster planning, are often hampered by
uncertainty regarding their authority, task domains, and
public support. Successful disaster planning by local
 4

civil defense offices are a product of their previous

experiences in handling disasters. Their success is also
a function of the willingness of local governments to
make civil defense a legitimate and important
organization, the centrality of the organization in the
structure of local government, and the extent to which
the office is a useful source of information to the other
agencies in the community. Their success is also
determined in part by the ability of the civil defense
director to develop relationships with key officials in
key disaster-relevant organizations in and out of their
communities, and by the resources at their disposal.
Effective community emergency managers are
recognized nowadays as perhaps the most important force
facilitating disaster planning and other preparedness and
mitigation activities. Effective coordinators make it a
habit to visit other officials on a regular basis, feel
comfortable working with them, and are in agreement with
the general goals of their organizations. Most effective
community disaster managers have a regular, comprehensive
preparedness program, have an updated program with
defined duties and responsibilities, have good
communication equipment at their disposal, and spend a
great deal of their time educating the public through
mass media and other means.
Professors E. L. Quarantelli and R. R. Dynes have
argued that planning for a disaster should be
differentiated from managing a disaster. Such planning
is an ongoing process and not a product. It is based on
likely events, not worst possible cases. It aims for
appropriate, not necessarily speedy responses. It is
based upon accurate knowledge of disaster behavior and on
patterns of everyday routines. And it avoids command and
control structures. Reflecting these insights, Wenger,
James, and Faupel (1980) have identified the most common
errors made by planning officials. These are:
1. To see disaster planning as a product, not a
process.
2. to think of disaster planning as isolated from
the day-to-day planning process.
3. to see the plan disconnected from the the
behavior of collectivities during disasters, so that
little attention is given to public response to
disasters.
4. to be unclear as to what constitutes an
emergency and who is responsible to declare the
emergency.
5. to fail to make available and to distribute
disaster relevant information about the plan to all
relevant community organizations.
6. to fail to create a command center to respond to
the crisis.
7. to fail to take into consideration the problem
of interorganizational cooperation in times of crisis.
 5

8. for the plan to remain a paper plan, so that it

is not rehearsed.
Faupel (1987, p. 206-207) argues that disaster
planning has three distinct analytical characteristics
that can be conceptualized using the theoretical paradigm
known as sociological human ecology. These aspects are
the development of the formalized disaster plan, the
constant updating and testing of the plan, and the
formalized plan itself. He points out that the formal
plan is a microcosm of the ecological complex, for it
incorporates assumptions about the population,
environment, social organization, culture, and
technological dimensions of communities. While largely
ignored at present, I find Faupel's attempt to
conceptualize disaster planning in terms of human
ecological processes potentially a very fruitful approach
to planning.
WARNINGS. There is considerable consensus among social
scientists that it is useful to conceptualize the
public's response to warnings as a function of the
physical environment, population, technology, social
relations, and culture. Moreover, it is necessary to
differentiate between the warning message and the system
which produces and responds to it.
Warning systems are complex. Such systems include
the individuals or organizations that detect the hazard
and communicate the information to threatened
populations, others who issue and transmit the warning,
and yet still others who receive the warning, interpret
it, and hopefully act out specific protective behavior.
Quarantelli refers to this behavioral response to
disaster warnings as the specific "adjustive behavioral
outcome of the reaction pattern." Eliciting protective
responses constitutes the primary goal of warning
systems.
Another point on which there is consensus among
specialists is that warning is not the linear
transmission of a message but the result of a complex
interaction of physical, technological and social
systems. The complexity of warning systems derives from
the interdependence among these components and the
intereffects that characteristically take place among
them. It is inappropriate to think of parts of warning
systems in isolation from each other. Thus, the optimum
design and implementation of warning systems require a
generalized openness of disaster preparedness agencies to
system-generated demands for change.
Warning messages often have a scientifically
grounded content. However, such content is insufficient
to make them effective in protecting threatened
populations. Warning messsages and the systems that
produce them must also consider people's perception and
interpretation. To be effective, warnings must take into
consideration people's reactions to warnings. Thus,
considerable knowledge of local populations is required.
 6

Consideration of the interactive, interpretative

nature of warning systems means that warning messages
need to adjust and change in response to historical
events during which people reacted to warnings. Thus,
the designers of warning systems need to allow for the
opportunity of programmatic learning. Imbalances and
lags in the production and distribution of warnings
account for a considerable proportion of present-day
failures of warnings in the US.
Numerous investigators have shown that people's
reactions in disaster situations (both reactive and
proactive) cannot be meaningfully described as panicky
(i.e., wild flight, hysterical breakdown, irrational or
impulsive behavior). Instead, their reactions to
warnings are affected by how they define the situations
in which they find themselves. People have their own
definition of the situation which incorporates the
person's identity and previous history. This personal
history shapes the meanings of social objects and
symbols, and is impacted by the observed or imputed
actions and reactions of other people perceived as
"significant others." It follows that upon receiving
warnings people try to evaluate the message not only in
terms of their own previous experiences, values,
ideologies, and personal goals but also by seeking
information and confirmation of the warning through
observing changes in their surrounding, and by inquiring
how others, including authorities, perceive the risk
(Sorensen and Mileti, 1989).
Social science research has shown that in disasters
different categories of people at risk have different
definitions of the situation, different perceptions of
risk, and different reactions to warnings. For example,
previous experience with disaster make people more
receptive to warnings and to the need for protective
action, and actual or potential victims with relatives in
the area threatened by the disaster receive more offers
of assistance than their counterparts. Similarly, people
have difficulty believing the warning message when they
cannot see or hear the hazard. Sequentially, Mileti and
Sorensen summarize some of the more important aspects of
this process as involving hearing the warning,
understanding its contents, believing that the warning is
accurate and credible, personalizing its message to the
person's life situation, confirming the fact that others
are responding to the warning, and responding by taking
proctective action. Rogers and Sorensen (1989), in their
research on warnings and response in chemical accidents,
report that response time is in part determined by the
timing of the warning, the content of the warning
message, and the source of the information presented in
it.
Reactions to warnings are an outcome of this complex
sociopsychological process. They range from inertia--the
explicit or implicit refusal or denial to grant validity
to the announcement of the risk and the need for
protective action--to the complete, conscious acceptance
of the risk and the need for protection. Between these
two opposites are many stages, in which people attempt to
provide, with varying degrees of explicitness,
purposefulness, and success, independent evaluation of
the risk and assessment of their options. The important
 7

thing to keep in mind is that such reactions are social

products, impacted not only by the person's subjective
interpretation of the situation at hand but also by the
qualities of the warning message. Recently, Sorensen
(1993) identified the social processes that impact
people's responses to warnings in the US and the extent
of empirical support associated with each of these
predictions.
TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Drabek identifies three important qualities of
messages: content, source, and number. Sorensen (1993)
mentions that a public warning message should include
information about the hazard or risk, location, what the
person should do, the time constraints involved, and the
source of the message. Specific messages are more
effective in producing protective response among people
at risk of the hazard. Warnings should be given in the
language of the population at risk of the hazard.
Specific warnings should include general information
about who should do what, when, how, with whom, why, and
with what consequences. Messages need to be internally
consistent regarding such matters as the history, origin,
nature, and seriousness of the risk. For example, they
might include brief coverage of such topics as the
causes, probability of occurrence, probable effects, and
probable place, time, and length of impact of the hazard.
Most crucially, warnings should include the effective
reaction choices open to individuals; they should offer
clear guidance as to what people should do to prevent or
minimize the risk.
People react differently to the warnings they
receive from different sources such as police, fire
departments, mass media, and primary groups. Locally,
each source has a different level of credibility which
affects people's reactions to the warnings. The
probability of eliciting proper responses from the public
is maximized if the issuer is perceived as knowledgeable
and has the public's trust. Numerous, consistent,
timely, and complete messages have more favorable effects
in bringing about appropriate protective actions than
few, inconsistent, inaccurate, or inconsistent messages.
Moreover, there should be congruence between the
content, context, and the tone of the warning message.
Effective warnings should have the appropriate emotive
character or "envelope." Emotion and rationality are not
competing dimensions of social life. Warnings should
have a metalanguage of constrained emotion which, while
not distorting their contents, enhances their ability to
bring about protective responses. Effective warnings
evince emotionality, to mirror the natural tendency of
people to react to crisis in those terms. There have
been instances of disasters in the US in which people did
not respond to warnings of severe weather and continued
to behave under the assumptions of normalcy because the
appropriate emotive envelope of the message was absent.
Another problem occurs in situations when, after the
message of warning is presented, its source reverts to
its customary or habitual routine. Thus, warnings
especially about an impending, quick-onset hazard should
 8

be presented continuously by the mass media and in a

crisis context for the duration of the threat, rather
than being presented in a normal programming context
which is only momentarily interrupted.
Testing the effectiveness of warnings should not
only include hardware, evaluation of decision making
structures, and the outcome of various diffusion methods,
but should also include the population at risk.
Effective warning systems help people develop a
tradition, a custom, a collective acceptance, of hazards
in their lives, so that testing and modification of
warning systems becomes a significant part of their
lives. Thus, while unexplored so far, my guess is much
can be learned from the study of warning systems in
communities with strong disaster subcultures.
The study of warnings cannot be separated from
people's awareness of risk, of the extent of their
awareness of the implications for disaster preparedness
of what they do or fail to do. While people need to
receive instructions as to how best to prepare for
different disaster hazards through public boards,
schools, and telephone directories, for example, they
also need to be encouraged to change their attitudes
towards specific hazards, to become sensitive of
environmental cues, such as weather signs of impending
tornadoes (National Weather Service; Doswell and Ostby,
1982), to notice their landscapes for places where they
might find refuge in rapid onset hazards, and to build
shelters in their homes and adopt other preparedness
measures.
An example of a warning program that has had mixed
success in the U.S. is the weather warning system
currently used by the National Weather Service (NWS) to
produce tornado watches and warning messages. This
warning program needs to be reevaluated in light of the
social science knowledge about warnings already
available, for the two products, especially tornado
watches, violate many of the most important
characteristics of effective warnings.. Changes in the
system will require laboratory and field experimentation
of human reaction to weather warnings. Such changes
become particularly pressing as detailed weather
information becomes available in the US from improvements
in weather technology such as NEXRAD (next generation
weather radar) and the integration of information from
different weather monitoring systems.
The foundation of effective warning systems is the
behavior of consumers. The challenge in the US and
throughout the world is to reshape public perceptions,
attitudes, and customs towards the acceptance of
individual responsibility for disaster preparedness and
away from a unidirectional educational approach which
makes people passive recipients of the information
generated by experts and the services of government
bureaucracies. Such passive-type programs were
inventoried by Sorensen and Mileti. They take many forms:
giving practical instructions or scientific information;
engaging in norm-oriented (social pressure)
communication; modeling behavior through the use of
admired public figures who serve as models for
 9

appropriate response; arousing fear and using prompts;

and teaching appropriate protective response through
participation in an already elaborated program. Despite
their popularity, the effectiveness of these programs is
limited. It is instructive to quote Sorensen and Mileti
on this point:
"Overall (there is) no conclusive evidence that
people are more prepared and protected as a result
of information programs. Furthermore (the evidence)
is inconclusive about how programs could be improved
to produce higher levels of protection. Finally,
the experience gained with one program at a single
location, even if evaluated, may not be useful in
designing protective action schemes for different
locations or for the entire country (Sorensen and
Mileti, 1987a: 225)."
Perhaps this overall evaluation of existing programs is
too pessimistic, for there may be useful elements of this
"planning from above" approach. Nevertheless, my opinion
is that local citizenry can play an important part in
planning, creating, testing, and modifying warning
systems.
The principles of effective planning previously
summarized elsewhere in this paper coincide with my view
that the participation of the residents of local areas in
the creation, implementation, and change of warning
systems is essential. People who are potential victims
must also become active creators and guarantors of their
own welfare (Mileti, Farhar, Fitzpatrick, 1990).
Effective national warning systems are diverse.
What works in one place might not necessarily work in
other places. Some of the elements of warning systems
which can be made to vary are: (1) mass public
participation and education; (2) coverage of special
populations and places like the elderly, school children
(their protectiveness training is routine in schools in
tornado-prone communities in the US), hospitals, and
trailer parks; (3) variations in the sources and content
of the messages and their means of dissemination (e.g.,
sirens/alarms, modulated power lines, aircraft, VHF-FM
Tone Alert Warnings or pagers triggering home receivers,
telephone automatic dialers, radio and TV announcement,
cable override, personal notification through police and
firemen's loudspeakers and sirens alerting neighbors and
persons in stores, markets, or theaters, citizen band
radios, door to door volunteers, taxi companies,
whistles, flares, electronic display boards in major
traffic routes); and (4) the extent to which these
different means of dissemination of warnings are used.
The consensus among specialists is that some degree of
redundancy is appropriate, for a multiplicity of channels
insures that the warning system will work before, during,
and after primary impact of the hazard, and reduces the
problem which is created through dependence on one
channel or on key personnel (Roger and Sorensen, 1991).
EVACUATION. Quarantelli, reviewing the literature
on evacuations, define them as "mass physical movements
of people, of a temporary nature, that collectively
emerge in coping with community threats, damages, or
 10

disruptions (p.10)." This definition is useful for our

purposes, for it excludes permanent or semi-permanent
relocations such as war population movements (Moses,
Rosenfeld, and Moses-Hrushovski, 1987), and the
evacuations of buildings (Pauls, 1980; Weinroth, 1989).
It does not exclude, however, the recent use of high rise
buildings for vertical evacuation (Ruch et al., 1991) .
Quarantelli's definition makes it clear that evacuations
involve a community context and a multiplicity of
behavioral sequences occurring more or less cotemporally.
Evacuations are defined as the round-trip movement of
throngs of people. They are one of many behavioral
outcomes engaged by people faced with imminent danger.
Evacuation behavior is not instinctive or automatic.
Rather, it is contingent, socially constructed behavior.
Aguirre (1983) uses relative distance, voluntarism, and
permanence of population movements to differentiate
evacuation from migration.
In evacuations the movement of people away from
danger is accomplished without a great deal of difficulty
(Quarantelli, 1980); evacuations are usually orderly from
the perspective of the evacuees, and are generally
effective in removing people from danger. Instead,
Quarantelli concluded that the problems that occur in
evacuations take place before and after people's movement
occur. The organizational and interorganizational
planning required to begin evacuations is often poor and
not based on knowledge of the actual problems evacuees
face during transit, after arrival at places of
destination, and during their return to their places of
origin. Evacuations present distinct planning issues
that should be seen as separate from warning.
R. Perry and his colleagues, in their studies of
evacuation, subscribe in general terms to Quarantelli's
definition of evacuation, although they help clarify it
through the identification of four subtypes of
evacuation. These subtypes are preventive, protective,
rescue, and reconstructive evacuations. They identify
two factors that produce different evacuations: the first
is the amount of time available between the evacuation
and the time of impact of the hazard; the second is the
amount of time evacuees remain away from their places of
origin.
The occurrence of pre-impact evacuation, done to
minimize loss of life and property, depends on the type
of hazard and detection system available in a community.
Some hazards, such as hurricanes, allow many hours of
preparation before impact. Likewise, communities differ
in their ability to detect the threat and issue warning
to the population.
Post-impact evacuation is part of community
reconstruction, involving search and rescue efforts and
the long term relocation of survivors while the
reconstruction of their communities occur. Perry and his
colleagues also differentiate short-term from long-term
evacuations. In short term evacuations shelters are used
to house evacuees. These evacuations require fewer and
less complex arrangement for the provision of food,
medical attention, and other essentials. In contrast,
 11

long term evacuation requires complex planning and social

control.
Quarantelli's definition is most appropriate for
preventive evacuations (pre-impact, short-term). This is
the type of evacuation that has received most social
science research attention. Its counterpart, protective
evacuations (pre-impact, long-term), or the removal of
potential victims before impact, received some attention
from U.S. civil defense analysts. The threat of nuclear
war or accidents (Johnson, 1986; Tweedie et al., 1986)
provided the impetus for studies that considered the
logistics of massive, region-wide human evacuations.
Rescue evacuation (post-impact, short-term), also known
as search and rescue activities, see below, is
increasingly gaining importance as a type of evacuation,
as chemical accidents become more common throughout the
world (Rogers and Sorensen, 1989). Finally,
reconstructive evacuation (post-impact, long-term) the
other remaining subtype, is usually studied in wartime
relocation of populations. Recently, however, nuclear
reactor accidents have generated studies of
reconstructive evacuations (Johnson, 1986).
Ronald Perry and his colleagues also emphasize the
importance of voluntary versus coercive compliance
structures for disaster planning. Coercive evacuation
involves the forceful removal, by the military or police,
of potential victims. The use of coercion complicates
the logistics of evacuating populations. It creates
added demands on the complex organizations dealing with
the crisis.
Brabek (1986) has inventoried available social
science knowledge regarding evacuations. Drabek groups
most empirical generalizations about evacuations into
individual, group, complex organizational, community,
societal, and international categories. As Drabek points
out, many of these empirical generalizations do not have
crosscultural and international generalizability. Other
generalizations are based on one or two studies in the
US. Clearly, they need to be tested and hopefully
replicated in future studies of evacuations elsewhere
throughout the world. I now reproduce some of these
empirical propositions, albeit in simplified and somewhat
changed form:
1. Adequate warning with sufficient lead time
increases the probability of evacuation. The previous
section of this report reviewed the literature on
warnings, and tried to indicate the agreement that exists
regarding effective warning systems.
2. The probability of evacuation increases a) if
the the threat is seen as real and immediate, b) if the
risk is personalized, c) if the person has a way of
responding to the threat, i.e., a personal plan, d) to
the extent that the person maintains vigilance over
changing threatening conditions, and e) with increasing
contacts with community organizations responding to the
crisis.
 12

3. Previous experiences with disasters increases

the probability of evacuation, although not consistently
across warning and disaster experiences.
4. The greater the person's perception of
vulnerability the greater is the probability of
evacuation, and such perceptions are impacted by site
characteristics such as proximity to projected impact
area, location, age of buildings, etc.
5. Recent migrants are more prone to evacuate than
long-term residents.
6. Age is positively associated with the
probability of evacuation.
7. Women are more prone to evacuate than men.
8. The probability of evacuation increases if the
family members are together and available to evacuate,
and if absent family members are accounted for before
leaving.
9. Evacuation behavior is a primary group activity
rather than an individual-level behavior.
10. The probability of evacuation increases if
neighbors and significant others evacuate.
11. The majority of families leave in their own
means of transportation.
12. Poorer families evacuate under official
programs more often than families from higher social
classes.
13. The probability of evacuation increases if
families have members in high risk categories, such as
elderly persons and young children.
14. Evacuees prefer to go to the homes of relatives
and friends rather than to official shelters.
15. Evacuees decide by themselves when it is
appropriate for them to go back home, and such decisions
may conflict with official views of risk.
16. Institutionalized populations present serious
difficulties to organizations attempting to evacuate
them.
17. Organizations have more success in carrying out
evacuation tasks when their members are familiar with the
details of their evacuation plan.
18. There is often misunderstanding among
organizations involved in evacuations regarding what each
is doing and the scope of the problems. For example,
there is the tendency to overestimate the number of
people needing shelter, and officials are often unwilling
 13

to order evacuations because of their perceptions

regarding the legal and political effects of their acts.
Emergency operation centers usually increase the
coordination and overall efficiency of these
organizations.
As acknowledged by Quarantelli and Drabek, among
other scholars who have considered the problem, the state
of social science knowledge of evacuation behavior is
rudimentary. It is true that, as indicated, there are
some empirical propositions for which there are limited
research support. However, empirical propositions, no
matter how many and how well documented, do not make up
for the present-day dearth of deductive theory in
research on evacuation which would allow the testing of
falsifiable predictions. Rather than theories, what we
have today are conceptual frameworks that have been used
to order in some logical and temporal fashion the more
obvious conditions and processes affecting evacuations.
Two of these conceptual approaches to evacuation are
Quarantelli's and Perry and Mushkatel's.
Quarantelli's Conceptual Framework. The five
components of Quarantelli's model of evacuation are: the
community context, threat conditions, social processes,
patterns of behavior, and consequences for preparedness.
The community. Quarantelli argues that the
community provides a context for the disaster threat or
impact. This context is the capability of the community
to deal with emergencies. It includes resources, social
links, and social climate. Communities have conceptual
and material resources that can be used to solve the
problems caused by disasters. Social links refer to the
extent of integration, or the closeness and ability to
work together of families, groups, and community
organizations. Social integration is a variable
condition of communities. An example of high integration
would be communities where the police, army, fire, water,
and telephone companies have a history of working
together to respond to community crises and have
developed and implemented a collective disaster response
plan. Such plans facilitate the communication,
coordination, and decision-making necessary for
evacuation.
Quarantelli's general point is that the social links
among social actors in a community tend to cluster in
space and time, so that often the resulting clusters of
people, groups, and organizations do not interact among
themselves. Communication, coordination, and decision-
making is thus rendered less effective.
The final element of the community is its social
climate, a residual category in the framework. As such
it is quite broad, including social, political, economic,
historical, and psychological factors that affect
resources and social linkages.
Threat. The second general dimension of
Quarantelli's evacuation model is the threat, or impact
of a disaster agent. The threat creates a special
situation in the community. This special situation or
context is affected by the characteristics of the
 14

disaster agent, situational factors, and the individual

and collective definition of the disaster and the
response to it. Disasters agents vary in their
frequency, predictability, duration, scope of impact,
destructiveness, speed of onset, and length of possible
forewarning. These characteristics impact the evacuation
preparations and implementations that are possible.
Situational factors are unique to the communities,
such as the time of day of the disaster or season of the
year, especially if there are seasonal fluctuations in
their populations.
The final element in the threat is the definition of
the situation, or how the threat comes to be understood
by the impacted population. The general point
Quarantelli makes is that people, and evacuees among
them, through whatever means, develop collective beliefs
of what is happening in their communities and then act on
the basis of these beliefs.
Social Processes. The community context and the
conditions associated with the threat in turn create
responses, what Quarantelli refers to as social
processes. He identifies four social processes:
communication, decision-making, coordination, and task
manifestation.
Communication refers to the means and channels used
in information flow and the content of the messages that
are transmitted. Decision-making refers to the
evaluation and use of information to make a choice, such
as ordering an evacuation or searching for a missing
family member before evacuating. Coordination refers to
the relative presence of joint activities, and includes
conflict. Finally, task manifestation refers to the
specific behavior that people and organizations enact as
they bring about an evacuation, from readying
transportation equipment to restructuring transportation
routes to make the mass movement possible. The general
point Quarantelli makes is that communication is
necessary for decision-making. Decision-making can lead
to coordination of efforts. And coordination can bring
about task manifestation.
Behavior. The above-mentioned social processes
produce patterns of behavior, such as warning,
evacuation, shelter, and the eventual return of the
population. In turn, these behaviors may have long term
impact on the community's resources, social linkages, and
social climate. Warning behavior and response is
logically prior to evacuation, for as we have defined it,
evacuation is the actual physical flight behavior. Part
of the model is sheltering, which includes the behavior
of evacuees at their place of destination. The analysis
of behavior also includes the study of return behavior,
or what happens during the trip back to the community and
the period of readjustment.
Consequences. Quarantelli argues that after the
evacuation is over and people have returned to their
places of destination the community may experience
substantial and permanent changes in its resources and
their use, the social links available for future crises,
 15

and its social climate. In turn, these changes may help

communities become better prepared to respond to future
crises. Thus, the model is recursive rather than linear
in its causal assumptions.
Perry and Mushkatel's Conceptual Framework. Perry
and Mushkatel's (1984) conceptual model is developed in
path diagram form. they identify four sets of most
proximate predictors of evacuation behavior. These sets
are the family context, the adaptive plan, the sense of
personal risk, and the warning belief. Warning belief is
the determination that a real environmental threat
exists. If such a determination is made, people assess,
by noting their proximity to the impacted area and other
personal vulnerabilities, their level of personal risk.
If people feel that both the warning and the threat are
real and that they are in danger, they begin to make a
plan to protect themselves, or to activate previously
formulated plans of action. The model includes the
family context, to incorporate the well-established
empirical generalization that most people will not
evacuate unless their family members are accounted for.
Perry and Mushkatel, both in the path diagram and in
the text of their monograph, also identify less proximate
predictors that impact the four aforementioned variables.
They write that family context is influenced by kin
relationships. Warning content, or the extent to which
the warning message is properly constructed, influences
both the warning belief and the sense of personal risk of
people. Even further removed from the causal explanation
of evacuation behavior are people's kin relationships
(frequency and nature of contacts) and community
involvement (nature and frequency of contacts with
friends, neighbors, participation in voluntary
associations), which influence the warning content of
potential evacuees.
In contrast to what was the case when Quarantelli
did his influential review of the literature in 1980
(Quarantelli, 1980), evacuation research has blossomed in
the ensuing years. A number of examples attest of this
new-found popularity. Aguirre (1991) tested some
generalizations regarding evacuation, using information
from Cancun, Mexico, in the aftermath of Hurricane
Gilbert. He shows that, as in the US, the majority of
the evacuees found shelter in the homes of friend,
neighbors, and relatives and were gone from their homes
one week or less, and that calculations of personal risks
were the best predictors of evacuation behavior. He also
shows that socio-demographic variables such as the size
of the household, and the gender, age, and marital status
of the respondents were not very useful predictors of the
behavior. Baker (1993; 1991; 1990; see also Southwood
and Chin, 1987) is also a recent example of research
efforts by geographers and city and traffic planners to
solve the problems attending the protective evacuation of
populations threatened by massive hurricanes and
floodings.

Another example that research on evacuation is

thriving is the recent August, 1991 special issue of the
International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters
 16

(IJMED) devoted to the topic. The articles in this

special issue are excellent and should be carefully
studied by anyone interested in the topic of evacuation.
The special issue includes Barbara M. Vogt's research on
the issues attending nursing home evacuations, D.
Gillespie and S. Murty's assessment of organizations
involved in evacuations, S. L. Cutter's analysis of
evacuations produced by chemical accidents, C. L.
Streeter's argument regarding redundancy in social
systems and its import to disaster planning and programs,
and Fitzpatrick and Mileti's article on warning and
warning systems. It is a study of the characteristics of
warning messages that have the effect of bringing about
the perception that evacuation is warranted. These
characteristics are the source, consistency, accuracy,
clarity, certainty, sufficiency, guidance, frequency, and
channel of the warning message. The IJMED also includes
John Sorensen's study of the factors affecting the timing
of evacuation departures,in which he concludes that the
personalization of the warning is the only variable
impacting the timing of flight, as well as Robert
Stalling's study on the problem of ending evacuations.
Stalling contrasts evacuations in natural events and man-
made accidents. He points out that evacuations caused by
chemical spills occur more often in a context of
community conflict and distrust of authorities, so that
authorities' all-clear messages often are not believed by
the evacuees. T. Drabek's article is yet another
important contribution in the special issue. Drabek
extends our knowledge of evacuation by considering the
evacuation readiness of corporations in the U.S. tourist
industry.

SEARCH AND RESCUE. During close to forty years

disaster researchers (Fritz and Marks, 1954; Form and
Nosow, 1958; Fritz, 1961; Barton, 1969; Drabek et al.,
1981; Durkin, 1989; Krimgold, 1988, 1989; Wenger, 1987)
have endeavored to understand what accounts for the
relative success of search and rescue (SAR) activities in
disasters, to include factors such as the nature of
structural and nonstructural damage to the built
environment (Culver et al., 1975; Hart, 1976;
Anagnostopoulos and Whitman, 1977; Hasselman et al.,
1980; Tiedemann, 1989; Stubbs et al., 1989; Lechat,
1989), the epidemiology of SAR events (Lechat, 1976;
Glass et al., 1977; 1979; Lechat et al., 1985), and the
effectiveness of medical services (Quarantelli, 1983).
Recently, I have argued (Aguirre et al., forthcoming) for
the importance of social organization in search and
rescue in disasters.
Wenger (1990, and literature cited therein) has
summarized the consensus among SAR specialists to the
 17

effect that volunteer and emergent group response is

massive and that the initial activity is accomplished by
volunteers and emergent groups. There is also agreement
among specialists that the SAR behavior of these
volunteers is of crucial importance because the chances
of live rescue decrease rapidly after the initial
"golden" hour. Buried and entrapped victims are likely
to suffer from injuries that require life-sustaining
intervention including compromised access to air, severe
loss of blood and body fluid, crushing injury, and
internal damage to essential organ systems. Professional
SAR teams, despite the massive attention they usually
receive from the mass media (Quarantelli, 1991), most
often arrive too late to rescue alive significant
proportions of victims. This is due in large part to the
particular nature of the socio-geography of disasters in
which professional SAR teams are especially hampered by
problems of access, victim identification, inadequate
resources, the breakdown of normal operational
parameters, and the magnitude of the events. Finally,
there is consensus that oftentime the integration and
coordination of volunteers and SAR professionals is
difficult, due in part to disagreement over rescue
strategy, ambiguous authority relationships, and
conflicts among independent agencies.
EXTENDED EXAMPLE OF SAR. I would like to illustrate
many of these principles with examples from research on
the search and rescue activities (SAR) in Guadalajara,
Mexico, in the aftermath of the 22 April 1992 gasoline
explosion. We studied the SAR that occurred in the
neighborhood of Analco, Guadalajara, Mexico, impacted by
the gasoline explosion in which approximately 300 people
died and 1120 were injured. Analco is one of the oldest
neighborhoods of Guadalajara. It is part of the Sector
Reforma. Analco has a very geographically-stable
population. Many of the resident families have lived in
the neighborhood for many years. SAR activities were
dominated by the collective behavior of the neighbors of
Analco. Most of the people that were rescued alive in
the aftermath of the tragedy were rescued by these
volunteers during the first phase of the postimpact
emergency period (Form and Nosow, 1958). In trying to
find out how they did it, we were impressed by the
importance of selected social organizational features of
the search and rescue activities that occurred, and by
the linkage between institutionalized and emergent types
of social organizations.
It is not possible to understand search and rescue
activities in Guadalajara in the aftermath of the
explosion without considering the community's culture and
social relations. The search and rescue processes
occurred in a context of human solidarity, what can be
called a "sociedad solidaria," in which, because of the
culture and social history of the community, there is a
much greater probability than in similar-sized cities in
North American and Western European countries for people
to know and to relate to others as full persons, and in
which social relations assume greater immediacy and
intimacy. The social formations of the peer group, the
extended family, the neighborhood, and the Catholic
Church constitute viable and active social networks in
the lives of people. The social identitities derived
 18

from these social formations impacted the search and

rescue activities we studied.
The importance of these social identities in
people's participation in SAR is magnified by the absence
of official disaster programs and plans, for as
Quarantelli (1993) has argued, in comparison to the U.S.
and Western European countries, Mexico has fewer disaster
preparedness and responding organizations. The dearth of
this type of organization is acute at the local level.
Building upon the work of Drabek et al. (1981) and
others, Olson and Olson (1987) documented that most lives
are saved and victims rescued during this immediate post-
impact period. Thus, it is this phase in SAR that we
were most interested in studying. There are clear
indications that the organization of SAR activities
changed as the day progressed and the agencies
responsible for crisis intervention established control
over the SAR process. As it is typical in community
disasters, a control and command center in charge of the
societal response was formed in the evening of the day of
the explosion.
We met with forty three victims that had been buried
alive by the explosion throughout the impacted area, and
with twenty two volunteers who had participated in the
direct rescue phase. They reported on their own
experience during SAR and the experience of victims and
rescuers near them. Separate interviews were also
conducted with six neighbors who had participated in
search and rescue activities immediately after the
explosion and had subsequently formed themselves, in
conjunction with some of their neighbors, into a search
and rescue voluntary association. In addition, we also
interviewed 5 Red Cross paramedics who had participated
in the search and rescue activities.
Multiple activities were undertaken by supporting
volunteers throughout the broader community. Direct SAR
activities within the impact area generated the need for
services, tools, food and other commodities. Two systems
emerged to resolve these needs. First, a communication
system was created that involved the functional
transformation of privately owned radio stations in
Guadalajara into search and rescue communication systems
serving the public. Second, volunteers established and
operated a nascent transportation system that provided
needed commodities donated by the public.
Numerous students of mass media response during the
emergency period of disasters have noted that mass media
are often transformed into personal media (Waxman, 1973;
Scanlon et al., 1985; Wenger, 1985; Wenger and
Quarantelli, 1989). In effect, they alter their normal
functioning and serve to transmit personal messages,
relay personal information, and request information from
specific individuals and groups. As such, they take on a
new, emergent role in the emergency response system.
This pattern was observed in Guadalajara.
There are two major radio station corporations in
the city. We obtained information from one of them.
Immediately after the explosion they ceased normal
 19

operations, and for two days helped structure the

societal response to the explosion. The corporation owns
five radio stations throughout the city. In what is a
rather unusual pattern of response for U.S. corporations
of its type (Quarantelli, personal communication), they
reformed the stations into a network that functioned
during the first two days of the emergency period.
Moreover, their transmission power was supplemented by
seven radio field stations donated temporarily by a major
local manufacturing firm. These seven field stations
were positioned in key places throughout the city such as
the Red Cross, the morque, the local stadium were the
homeless had congregated, and the hospital where many of
the victims were receiving treatment. The field radio
stations were manned by volunteers under the supervision
of professional staff of the corporation. They helped
the public in finding the whereabouts of lost persons and
of needed supplies.
Initially, before the system was supplemented with
the loaned radio equipment, it was used to satisfy the
immediate needs for tools, supplies, and food of the
people manning the boundary areas and conducting SAR in
the impacted city blocks of Analco. People in the
impacted area would call the stations relaying their
direct needs. The stations would then request the
voluntary donation of the needed resources from people in
the rest of the city. Once their requests were
satisfied, the stations would communicate it to the rest
of the population in an effort to minimize needless
duplication. Later on, the expanded radio communication
system was used to help locate missing persons. In this
capacity the network was made more effective by the use
of a computer program that compared alphabetically-
ordered lists of names of victims kept in the various
locations in the city involved in the emergency.
A second social organizational emergence in the city
were the groups of transportation volunteers who
distributed food, tools, and other needed resources to
people in the boundaries and the impacted areas. We know
very little about the organization of this category of
people involved in transporting goods and services.
Reportedly, as it occurred during the mass assault phase
of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (Dynes et al., 1990),
many of these volunteers were young university students
with their own means of transportation (c.f., Arreola et
al., 1986). College students were in Easter recess.
Apparently, they were recalled by their local colleges
and organized by the colleges to participate in the
emergency phase of the societal response to the
explosion, in conjunction with the activities of the
radio stations.
The filter (or boundary) area was dominated by the
army and police. Reportedly the army, reflecting its
importance in Mexico's national disaster planning, was
one of the formal organizations (the others were the
Mexican Red Cross, the Green Cross, and the Guadalajara
Police and Fire Departments), that deployed most quickly
into the impacted area, setting up perimeter controls in
many of the impacted city blocks before the first hour
after the explosion. Testimony from the neighbors in the
impacted area shows that the army and the other formal
organizations were very well received by them, that they
 20

were able to work together with little friction, and that

their search and rescue efforts were very much
appreciated by the citizenry.
FIGURE ONE ABOUT HERE
The very narrow and mostly rectilinear pattern of
destruction is despicted in Figure One. In this area the
blast destroyed the streets, sewer and potable water
systems, more than 1,000 houses, and an unknown number of
businesses. It extends for more than nine kilometers,
from the intersection of Gantes and 20 de Noviembre at
the northwest end segment of the line to the intersection
of Yunque and Calzada L. Cardenas, in the extreme
southeast segment of the line. People were killed or
injured either on these city streets or inside the homes
lining these streets (c.f., Alexander, 1989). Inside the
homes, most of the people who were killed or injured were
in the rooms closest to the streets where the explosion
occurred.
Cultural Influences. The explosion occurred at
approximately 10.07 a.m. This time of day (Lomnitz,
1970) determined to some extent the different risks of
victimization of population categories. An important
cultural factor determining the gender and age of the
victims of the explosion are the rituals associated with
eating. The custom in Guadalajara is to eat supper
around 9 p.m. Many families leave the cleaning of the
kitchen and dining areas for the morning after. The
customary cleaning sequence in the homes is kitchen,
living room, and bathrooms and bedrooms last. This is
done since typically in Analco the living rooms and
kitchens are the areas of the homes where visitors have
more visual access, and are thus straightened out first.
People in social categories that customarily clean the
homes, such as adult women, were protected to the extent
that the kitchen and dining spaces were in the back of
the homes, away from the street and thus away from the
source of the blast. Reportedly, this is the use of
space that predominates in the destroyed houses.
Another cultural factor that determined the age
composition of the victims was that the gas explosion
occurred during the Easter vacation so that school-age
children were at home. Many were playing in the streets
when the explosion occurred. This accounts for the many
children victimized by the blast.
A third cultural pattern determining victimization
was the use of space in the streets. Some of the streets
impacted by the explosion were part of intercity bus
routes. Small restaurants fronting these city blocks
serve breakfast for travelers. Many of their clients
became victims of the explosion.
Pre-Impact Behavior. Besides these cultural
mechanisms that dictated the demographic characteristics
of the victims, the chance movement of people inside and
outside their homes also affected their exposure to the
effects of the explosion. An example is of a single
mother and her baby. She leaves the baby in her crib to
go to the kitchen to fetch food for the baby. As she is
crossing the interior patio of her home the explosion
 21

occurs and her baby is killed. She escapes physically

unharmed.
For at least 12 hours prior to impact, neighbors
were aware that they were in danger of a gasoline
explosion. The day before the explosion the Fire
Department cooperated with the Transit Police to cordon
off part of the area (corner of Gante and Analco) that
eventually exploded. At least one radio station had
deployed personnel to the area endangered by the gasoline
spill hours prior to the explosion. Red Cross and Fire
Department personnel had been deployed the night prior to
the explosion to the city blocks that were eventually
destroyed. During their deployment they confirmed the
presence of pressurized gasoline vapor columns spewing
out of drainage manholes and of housewives who complained
to them of the presence of gasoline in their toilets.
The Red Cross treated a police officer, a fireman, and a
worker from the Mexican petroleum corporation (PEMEX) for
gasoline inhalation. The day of the explosion a local
newspaper had published the news of the presence of
gasoline in the drainage system in its morning edition.
The existence of these unofficial but nevertheless
important cues of imminent danger probably meant that an
unknown number of neighbors evacuated their homes prior
to the explosion. It is not know the extent to which
such evacuations occurred and were effective in
protecting lives, or the social and demographic
characteristics of the families that left their homes.
Behavior After the Explosion. The explosion
affecting the entire area occurred very quickly, almost
simultaneously. The only indication of warning we
obtained is of people looking down the streets and seeing
a rapidly disintegrating landscape advance towards them.
Those who survived turned away from the center of the
street where the drainage pipe that blew up was located.
Apparently the explosion of the pipeline was not
simultaneous. Rather, it was nearly simultaneous
throughout the city blocks that were destroyed. The
noise of the explosion has been described as a very loud
hissing sound.
Corraborating the findings of Norris Johnson's
(1987a; 1987b; 1988; see also Baker, 1960) research on
the behavior of people in extreme situations, the
behavior of the victims that we talked to was marked by
the continuation of preexisting motivational, normative,
and value orientations. Victims, under the very
difficult conditions of being buried alive, often in
imminent danger of death, continued to be social beings.
As we will show, their actions during entrapment showed
the constraint generated by their membership in primary
groups and other meaningful social categories.
Victims acted cooperatively during entrapment. They
provided information to potential rescuers about other
people in the rubble and thus assisted in increasing
their chances of surviving the explosion. Many examples
of these patterns are available from the record:
A. A man and his two nephews are having breakfast
in their home. The explosion buries them alive.
The man reports experiencing a great amount of
 22

difficulty breathing. He can hear his two nephews

near him in the rubble. He talks to them and
synchronizes their scream for help at his count of
3. Eventually, people hear them and save them.
B. A mechanic is protected by a heavy bench used in
the shop that lands on top of metal engines that
were being repaired. The bench and engines provide
him a cavity in the debris. Within the cavity thus
formed he is buried from his waist down. There are
three other people buried with him and he hears two
of them that are in very close physical proximity
talk to each other. The rubble is very unstable and
the men agree that they must tell the searchers to
pull them out simultaneously, for otherwise the one
who is left behind will be seriously injured by the
resulting collapse of the pile of debris in which
they find themselves.
C. A mother and her two children drive up to her
friend's house. She parks her car in the side of
the street opposite the house. As she gets ready to
get out of the car and lock it, the children rush
out of the car and knock on the front door of the
friend's house. The explosion dislodges the front
door amd one side of it falls on top of the car
parked in front of the house, providing a protecting
space for the two children below it. Soon
afterwards, the brother helps his younger sister
escape from their entrapment. In turn, his sister
calls attention to rescuers nearby about where her
brother and mother are entrapped. The rescuers then
start digging up the mother. The mother can hear
through the rubble and tells the volunteers that she
is alright and first to rescue her son.
D. Neighbors, in conjunction with Army and Red
Cross personnel, begin to look for a mother and her
six children that lived in a one-room apartment in a
multi-family building (casa de vecindad). When they
find the woman in the rubble she is embracing three
of her children. A table protected them from
getting hurt by pieces of the roof and walls, and
they are alive. The mother then tells the rescuers
that her other children are still buried in the
room. They continue to search, and twenty minutes
later find them. Two of the children are rescued
alive. However, her five year old daughter is dead
of massive head injuries.
E. Rescuers hear through the rubble a man calling
for help. He has been protected by a heavy slab of
concrete, and they rescue him alive. The man then
tells the rescuers about his three children still in
the rubble. The rescuers eventually find them, but
the young boys are crushed to death.
F. A woman owns a small restaurant. She is serving
breakfast to four men with whom she has a
relationship as clients. She is the first to be
rescued from the rubble of her restaurant and
immediately reports to her rescuers the last
location of the entrapped clients in it, thus
facilitating their rescue.
 23

G. A young adult shares a bedroom with his younger

brother. They are asleep when the explosion occurs
and are buried alive. He reports feeling initially
confused, but soon begins to struggle to free
himself from the debris and succeeds in doing so
after ten minutes or so. Just as he frees himself
his other brother arrives and he is able to alert
him that their brother is still trapped. He is
injured and cannot participate in the rescue, but
directs it by telling the rescuers where the
brother's bed was in the room. The respondent
refuses to leave for the hospital until his own
brother is rescued alive, for initially the rescuers
ignored his directions and searched for the brother
in the wrong side of the room.
Even those victims who were alone at the time of the
explosion continued to be social beings engaging in
imaginary social interaction with significant others. A
victim reports conversing with the Virgin of Talpa, the
saint of his devotion, and with many of his dead
relatives during entrapment, He reports meeting his dead
father, until then unknown to him. A mother, also buried
in the rubble, reports thanking God for her good luck;
her children were visiting relatives outside the city,
away from the explosion. Victims were able to hear,
despite being buried often in one or two meters of
rubble, what people on the surface were saying and doing.
It was another way they had of maintaining social ties to
the world around them.
As shown by some of these examples, many of the
victims actively participated in increasing their chances
of survival and in their rescue. Some victims mentioned
that they moved their bodies ever so slowly to create
more space for themselves among the rubble that trapped
them. Others called attention to themselves to help
rescuers know their location. Perhaps one of the most
dramatic cases we encountered is that of a man who tells
his son to try to move his arm towards the surface of the
earth to help him locate him. He finally rescues the
child and as he is moving out of the location of the
rescue he turns and sees the arm of his son's friend
protrude from the ground. He returns, calls others to
continue helping him, and the friend is saved.
Response Time and Composition of the Initial
Rescuers. Similar to the findings of research in other
major disasters (e.g., De Bruycker et al., 1985; Durkin,
1988; Durkin et al., 1989; Noji et al., 1990) and
accidents (Quon and Laube, 1991) documenting the
importance of quick response in saving lives, the limited
evidence that we have shows that most of the victims in
Guadalajara that were rescued alive were rescued during
the first two hours immediately after the explosion. And
as in other disasters (e.g., Lechat, 1976; Drabek et al.,
1981; Abrams, 1989), they were rescued by their
neighbors, kinfolk, and after the first hour, by Mexican
Army, Guadalajara Police and Fire, and Red and Green
Cross personnel.
Very few people were pulled out of the earth alive
after the first two hours. A man was extricated alive 8
 24

days after the explosion, but his rescue was an unusual

event. Indeed, none of the 43 victims we contacted
reported being trapped more than two hours. The
testimony of the four rescuers that could remember the
figures corroborates the victims's experiences. Among
them they found seven dead and thirty two persons alive
before noon. From noon until nightfall they report
finding one person alive and thirty seven dead. Records
from the Mexican Red Cross in Guadalajara indicate that
in the first two and a half hour after the explosion 265
victims were admitted to their facility. 49 were dead on
arrival (31 males, 18 females) and 3 died after arrival.
The Green Cross reports finding, near their field
operation center, 5 victims after 7 p.m., all dead.
While incomplete, this evidence is in agreement with what
is known from other disasters about the importance of
quick extraction for rescuing people alive.
Reportedly, SAR dog teams arrived from Mexico City
26 hours after impact, helping find corpses throughout
the impact area. A local SAR dog team was more
successful, for it movilized three hours after the
explosion and found 2 live and 3 dead victims.
Emergent Organizational Patterns of SAR Groups.
During the first phase of the search and rescue
activities most of the rescuers were the neighbors,
associates, and relatives of the victims, as well as
personnel from the Mexican Army, Red and Green Cross, and
Guadalajara Fire and Police departments, the agencies
that had sustained and dispersed involvement in the
societal response to the explosion. We were very
interested in understanding the division of labor,
leadership structure, and role relationships
characterizing the groups they formed. The evidence
shows that the degree of formalization in these search
and rescue groups was minimal. Apparently, high levels
of formalization were neither necessary to achieve the
tasks at hand nor possible under the typical
circumstances.
Initially, the primary social formation that carried
out search and rescue activities were the people residing
in the neighborhoods impacted by the explosion. This
pattern is similar to the immediate reactions of people
impacted by disasters elsewhere in the world
(Quarantelli, 1988). Neighbors grouped themselves by
city block and cooperated with each other in searching
and rescuing victims of the explosion. Neighbors,
friends, and relatives had privileged information about
the customary activities, habits, and probable
whereabouts of known or potential victims and of the
layout of their residences. This knowledge was of
paramount importance in the search and rescue process,
and is an important advantage these emergent groups have
over formal SAR organizations. It allowed its possessors
to act as keynoters who distributed the volunteers and
personnel from service agencies that quickly arrived from
outside their city block into the various searches that
were being conducted in it.
The division of the neighbors into city blocks and
the ability of the resulting SAR groups to distribute
subsequent volunteers into their SAR activities was a
 25

very important form of division of labor that emerged to

respond to the crisis. It was an emergence characterized
to varying degrees by both new social norms and new
social relationships (Weller and Quarantelli, 1974). The
rudimentary divisions of labor that emerged among SAR
groups included a number of ephemeral roles. For
example, in Guadalajara, as is true of other cities in
Mexico and the developing world, houses have their own
gas tanks which are used for cooking. Immediately after
the explosion, the potential leaks in these tanks
presented a real threat to the searchers. To deal with
the threat some of the searchers volunteered and would
enter the homes throughout their city blocks to
disconnect the tanks. Yet another rough division of
labor occurred in the control of pedestrian traffic into
and out of the impacted city blocks. Some of the
neighbors, in conjunction with social control personnel,
took over this responsibility, which at time involved
challenging people they did not recognize as neighbors,
requiring them to justify their presence and insisting
that they would leave the premises if they could not
state a legitimate purpose for being there.
Still another example of division of labor centered
on the actual search activity. The removal of rubble
necessitates both the picking up of the pieces of debris
as well as their transportation away from the places in
which the digging is taking place. These tasks required
two types of workers acting in close coordination.
Characteristically, there would be three of four people
picking up the pieces. And surrounding them would be
other rescuers ordered in lines, usually away from the
center in each of the four cardinal directions. These
people actually moved the piece of rubble, passing it
hand to hand away from the dig. During the Mexico City
1985 earthquake response, most of the volunteers removing
the rubble were males (Dynes et al., 1990, 86-90). Our
impression is that a similar pattern occurred in
Guadalajara, although we do not have the survey
information to determine the gender composition of the
volunteer searchers in Guadalajara during the immediate
post-explosion phase.
This rough division of labor existed in places where
medical personnel was not available. Thus, as is typical
of disasters elsewhere, during the first 45 minutes or so
after the explosion the people at the center of these
search and rescue formations also extracted the victims,
and they, or other volunteers, would transport them in
private automobiles to places where the victims could
receive medical treatment. However, once Red and Green
Cross and other medical personnel arrived at the scene of
the disaster, they ceased doing so, and paramedics would
carry out the actual removal and transportation of the
victims.
During the initial phase of the response simple,
hand held, small mechanical tools were most effective in
helping people do their rescue work (e.g., Abrams, 1989).
Lechat (1989) also reports that almost 97 percent of the
injured victims trapped by the 1980 earthquake in Italy
and evacuated to medical centers were rescued with bare
hands, shovels, and ladders. In Guadalajara, some of
these simple tools were heavy gloves to protect the
hands, ropes to wrap around searchers as they entered
 26

particularly dangerous places; lumber, especially 4 by 4

and 2 by 6 pieces with which to construct temporary
retainers needed in some of the rescue sites; Wire
cutters, small hydraulic jacks with wheels, used to
remove heavier pieces of concrete, rock, and steel
columns, metal buckets used to remove sand and loose
earth, metal bars used to remove heavy objects, and heavy
hoes used to remove debris and commonly used in
agricultural work. Many of the respondents that had
participated in the search thought that hydraulic arms or
small excavators, mostly unavailable during the initial
response phase, would have been very helpful in the SAR
work.
Upon arrival at the site, formal rescuers used the
knowledge of neighbors to locate victims and made use of
the volunteer manpower to remove debris and help in all
phases of the rescue efforts, while volunteers relied in
their specialized knowledge of extrication and transport
of the victims. Paramedics were heavily engaged in
victim transport, and cooperated with volunteers and
personnel from other agencies in the SAR activities.
Some of these volunteers were medical doctors and nurses
who very rapidly joined the rescue efforts at the site of
the explosion. Thus, the organization of SAR activities
and their location at the site of the explosion changed
rapidly, for it was supplemented by the efforts of formal
organizations. For example, the Red and Green Cross
teams began to organize civilians into SAR groups of 20
persons or so, and these teams were augmented by
military, fire, and police personnel.
The excellent integration of the Mexican Red and
Green Cross personnel with the SAR volunteers was
facilitated by the semi-formal organizational structure
of these agencies. In contrast to EMS organizations in
the US, these organizations are heavily manned by
volunteers who often have limited training and few
resources for on-site medical treatment. Many of these
paramedics are local citizens; in Mexico, the name
paramedic itself does not indicate the para-professional
status and training that it does in the US. Thus, the
social distance between paramedics and informal groups
was considerably less than it would have been in the US,
and led to greater degrees of cooperation and less
conflict among the rescuers.
Paralleling the response of volunteers, the response
of official agencies involved in SAR was dominated by
intra and inter-organizational normative and role
emergence. All agencies were augmented by volunteers.
The Fire and Police deparments also received sustantial
assistance from neighboring departments. The impacted
city blocks were divided among them. Thus, the Red and
Green Cross sectored off the impacted area for systematic
search and extrication of victims, while the Army,
Police, and Fire departments similarly sectioned off the
same city streets, creating overlapping jurisdictions
with the Red and Green Cross organizations. In the
absence of an interorganization plan, these geographical
subdivisions helped the agencies assign responsibility
for the SAR effort and distribute the needed resources.
 27

This division of labor among the various agencies

was unplanned prior to the explosion, for while
Guadalajara had a written disaster plan it had not been
implemented in the past. Interagency cooperation and
coordination emerged from the bottom up rather than from
the top down. Feedback from the teams in the field
guided the relationships between agencies in their
response rather than pre-established, planned procedures
providing the context of coordination.
Reminiscent of Form and Nosow's (1958; see also
Quarantelli, 1988) findings regarding the importance of
family and gender roles on disaster-relevant activities
of volunteers, the evidence we have show that the
concerns of people engaged in search and rescue was first
for their kin, second for their immediate neighbors and
other nearby residents, and finally for residents of
nearby blocks; people farther removed from their spheres
of everyday interaction. People did not participate in
the search and rescue efforts at random. Instead, their
participation was a function of the strength of their
preexisting social linkages and interdependencies with
the victims and fellow rescuers. Their search and rescue
efforts were part of a stream of ongoing social relations
in which people participated, and from which their
activities on behalf of their relatives, friends,
acquaintances, or even strangers obtained meaning. The
rescuers prioritized life; all human life was precious
for them but the lives of those socially closest to them
was deemed more important.
One of the most important findings of the field work
is that the chances of people surviving the blast were
directly proportional to the presence among the searchers
of a person or persons who cared for the victim and who
knew the victim's likely location at the time of the
blast (e.g., Barton, 1969, p. 129; Abrams, 1989; Mileti
and O'Brien, 1991). The accuracy of the information they
provided about the likely location in the rubble of the
persons presumed buried by the explosion very importantly
determined the length of their entrapment and the
relative effectiveness of SAR efforts in rescuing victims
alive. In Guadalajara, these people often were kin or
neighbors of the victims, although at times they were
people who worked in the same establishment, or who had
religious or other stable and primary relations with the
victim. This pattern is reminiscent of the findings of
research that indicate that family context is an
important determinant of the death rate of victims
trapped by earthquakes (Lechat, 1989).
In an important pattern, these significant others
acted as proxies for the victims. The victims were
assumed to be in the rubble and could not act to direct
their own search and rescue, and so their proxies did it
for them. They served to remind the neighbors and others
in the immediate environment that the victim was missing
and that they had an ongoing pattern of reciprocity with
the victim and the proxy which at this critical juncture
demanded their attention and enactment. The proxy actors
injected meaning into the search, helping define the
situation in terms of their own priorities. Moreover,
many of the proxies constituted the nucleus around which
search and rescue groups formed. Some examples will help
elucidate the general pattern.
 28

A. Residents of a "casa de vecindad" alert others

and begin searching for their neighbors, an elderly
couple buried in their one-room apartment. They
eventually find them in a semi-conscious state after
more than two hours of entrapment in more than one
meter of rubble, and are able to pull them out
alive.
B. A lawyer is a life-long resident of the
neighborhood. He hears the explosion and runs from
his house, two city blocks away from the impacted
area, to the house of his father-in-law, where his
wife and children are visiting. Once he gets there
he verifies that no one is severely hurt. However,
he is informed by his wife that his nephew is
missing. She tells him that the boy had left to buy
candy at the corner store. The store, part of the
landscape, is gone. Nevertheless, he remembers that
there was a tree in front of the store, finds the
remaining tree stump, and from its position
reconstructs in his imagination the most likely
place where his nephew is buried. He begins to dig
through the rubble. Others see him, ask him who is
missing, and begin to work with him. Eventually,
they find the boy and are able to rescue him alive.
Immediately thereafter, his wife arrives and tells
him that his daughter and niece are also missing.
He asks his nephew to remember where he saw the
girls last. Eventually, the child tells him that
they had told him that they were going to play an
electronic game at the nearby parlor. Soon,
neighbors and other friends of the man learn through
word of mouth that the girls are missing, approach
him, and ask him where he wants them to search for
them. He begins to distribute them along the route
which the girls were presumed to have taken. He
uses the remains of housing plumbing exposed by the
explosion to reconstruct the location of buildings
and other elements in the now transformed landscape.
All during the day he receives information through
word of mouth about other families in the
neighborhood known to him that are also searching
for missing relatives, but he cannot join others
helping them because of his own troubles. Six hours
later all hope is lost that the girls are still
alive and he and his wife are interviewed by a
television crew covering the disaster. It is only
then that his daughter learns that she is presumed
dead and sends a message with another friend that
she and her cousin have survived the explosion and
have found shelter in the home of yet another friend
of the family.
C. A man, born and raised in the neighborhood, is
at work as a security officer in a major retail
store away from his house situated in one of the
city blocks which would be destroyed by the
explosion. Before going to work he has been
concerned with the gasoline threat, and now makes a
telephone call to his home. As he is talking to his
mother the explosion occurs. He rushes home in
uniform and becomes the leader in organizing the
search and rescue activities of the neighbors in his
city block. All the time, his little son is
 29

missing. The boy was on the street at the time of

the explosion, and it is unclear to anyone the
location where he could be buried. His father
continues to search for him even as he coordinates
the search for others in the block. Eventually,
after more than 24 hours have passed, he and the
friends that have helped him in the search are able
to locate and rescue his remains. In the interim,
he and his friends searching for his son
successfully block the entry into their city block
of heavy earth removing equipment for fear that it
will accidently mutilate and kill his son.
D. An engineer is a lifelong resident and a member
of a large extended family unit in the neighborhood.
He rushes to his home immediately after the
explosion. His mother has escaped uninjured. One
of his cousins tells him that yet a third cousin is
unaccounted for and presumed buried in the rubble.
He then joins the entire family in searching for the
missing member. Eventually, after a couple of hours
of searching for him they find the missing cousin
helping neighbors in an adjacent block. Once he
learns that his cousin is safe he joins one of the
human chains removing rubble from a site in which a
search is taking place.
E. An automobile mechanic is talking to two of his
friends in the shop where he works. His twenty one
year old son leaves the group to retrieve a tool in
his nearby house. The explosion occurs when the son
is inside the house, and he returns to where he left
his father, only to find that the shop has
disappeared. Since he knew where his father and
friends were immediately before the explosion, he
begins to dig for them. He is joined by other
neighbors. Eventually, he and his father are able
to talk to one another. However, the son cannot
determine the location of his father in the pile ot
rubble. By accident, he finds a carburetor hose his
father had bought that morning, and he begins to use
it to probe the pile of rubble for his father. From
below, the father eventually sees the light of day
through the debris, and begins to direct the probe.
After some misses, he grabs a hold of the hose. The
son then uses the hose to direct the rescue effort,
and the father is rescued alive.
F. A group of Red Cross paramedics joins others in
digging for a man who is presumed buried inside his
automobile. They help dig the car out of the rubble
but the man is not found in it. As the excavation
is almost completed someone removes a heavy slab of
concrete, and to everyone's surprise a dog emerges
from the small cavity thus revealed. The dog rushes
to a puddle of water nearby, and after dipping in it
returns to the pile of rubble and begins to dig.
The men then begin to dig where the dog indicated,
and eventually they succeed in finding the dead man.
Afterwards, neighbors identify the dead man and
Rambo, his dog.
Another example also shows, by its absence, the
importance, in rescuing people alive, of quick
 30

identification of their likely position in the rubble.

In this case, the mother is at work and the father and
his three children are buried by the explosion in the
rubble of their two-story home. The father is able to
escape and calls for help in locating his missing
children. A SAR group is formed. It is led by an army
officer and composed of Army, Red Cross, and Green Cross
personnel as well as neighbors. Unfortunately, however,
their work is hampered by the man's inability to give
them an accurate identification of the location of the
children in the house at the time of the explosion; the
father is disoriented and is unable to give accurate
information to the rescuers, telling them to dig in the
wrong place. Eventually, after more than one and a half
hours of trial and error by groups of people digging in
various parts of the rubble, the children are found.
They had been sleeping in the same bed, and are now found
one on top of the other. The third, at the bottom of the
pile, is dead. Her two brothers survive.
Implications. These patterns show the importance of
pre-existing social organization in the formation of
emergent social organization. The fact that people
grouped themselves by city block or neighborhood subunits
in carrying out SAR activities extends social science
understandings regarding the structure of emergent,
volunteer search and rescue groups. Perhaps more
significantly, the observation that the chance of being
rescued alive were directly proportional to the presence
among the searchers of a person or persons who cared for
the victim and who acted as social proxies for them, is a
powerful testimony to the influence of social integration
upon physical well being. These results document once
again the validity of the principle of continuity
advocated by Quarantelli and Dynes (1977).
The empirical generalization supported in this and
other studies of SAR in disasters, to the effect that
most victims are saved by volunteers rather than by
professional rescuers, is at first sight an interesting
conundrum, for the greatest effectiveness is achieved
with the least amount of technical know-how. The
conundrum is solved once the social organization of the
emergent collectivities of people involved in the first
phase of the SAR activity is understood. Pre-existing
social relations provide the foundations for emergent
social relations and organizations in the immediate
aftermath of disasters. This emergent social
organization is the most important tool for saving lives.
There is considerable urgency in understanding such
emergent organizations so as to plan for it, making them
part of disaster preparedness measures.
Zurcher (1968) analyzed an emergent ad hoc group of
volunteers that formed 36 hours after the massive impact
of the 1966 Topeka tornado. A number of the
characteristics of Zurcher's model also apply to the
present case. Thus, our respondents experienced a sudden
and unplanned disruption to their social world, felt the
need to act to reasert their control of the situation,
took on new roles, and constituted ephemeral, short-lived
SAR groups that experienced rapid albeit limited
conventionalization. In contrast to the Topeka SAR
emergent group, however, and replicating the findings of
research on collective behavior, in Guadalajara the
 31

cohesion of the SAR groups and relationships we studied

often came from preexisting social identities rather than
from the shared need of their members to "restructure
activities." Preexisting social identities and
relationships oftentime determined the occurrence and
type of participation in the search and rescue activities
that took place.
There are important continuities between
institutionalized social life and the collective behavior
of SAR activities. The emergent noninstitutionalized
nature of volunteer SAR groups provides a vivid example
that such collectivities do not emerge from a vacuum.
Not only are there always elements of the traditional
social structure embedded within collective behavior
entities, but their emergent division of labor, role
structure, activities, and effectiveness, are also
dependent upon prior social relationships and forms of
organization.
Dynes and Quarantelli (1980) identified four types
of disaster volunteers, what they term organizational
volunteers, group volunteers, volunteers in expanded
roles, and volunteers in new roles. Clearly, as Dynes
(1970) theorized years ago, in the aftermath of the
Guadalajara explosion there was a great deal of group
emergence involving extending, expanding, and emergent
organizations. We have shown that preexisting networks
of human relationships were used to alleviate novel and
unexpected collective problems that demanded immediate
attention. Thus, while it is probable that volunteers
representing all of these types could be found
participating in the SAR during the days following the
explosion, during the period immediately following the
explosion the last two types of volunteer appeared to us
to have predominated in the SAR efforts, albeit not in as
clearly differentiated a form as represented in the
analytical types. Instead, people expanded their sense
of responsibility towards each other, and often they did
so by becoming members of new emergent groups which
carried out SAR activities.
Second, our findings once again seriously question
the validity of "breakdown" models of social
organizational patterns in disaster. As is true in other
disasters, television reports of the Guadalajara disaster
depicted throngs of people moving seemingly at random at
the sites destroyed by the explosion. From these
depictions it is relatively easy to assume that the
people were disoriented immediately after the explosion
and had lost their ability to enact social roles.
Indeed, in light of the marked absence of formal planning
and organization, it might have been expected that
widespread confusion, lack of coordination, and civil
panic had occurred. Our data suggest a considerably
different picture, one in which naturally occurring
social networks provided an effective and fluid framework
for the formation of a relatively successful search and
rescue effort. The social organizational patterns of the
SAR activities that occurred in Guadalajara reaffirm once
again our understanding regarding collective behavior at
the sites of disasters. As opposed to breakdown, panic,
or antisocial behavior, the seeming disorganization and
aimless movement of people was the result of persons
acting individually or as part of collectivities who were
 32

trying to accomplish multiple individual and collective

goals in a reduced and relatively well defined space
under important felt time constraints (c.f., Fritz and
Mathewson, 1957). Creative problem-solving and
rationality were much more appropriate descriptions of
their actions than panic (Aroni and Durkin, no date, p.
30).
Third, we have observed the important role played by
a person's imagination in survival--whether it is to
reconstruct a destroyed area, to adopt tools for new
uses, or to forget pain and fear by talking to the saints
or to dead relatives.
Fourth, these findings provide a comparison with
what has been reported about the search and rescue
efforts in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. In
describing the initial search and rescue effort following
the earthquake, Dynes, Quarantelli, and Wenger (1990)
describe patterns of activities that are very similar to
what was observed in Guadalajara. In both disasters the
initial search and rescue activities were undertaken by
volunteers and emergent citizen groups. The vast
majority of those who were rescued and survived were
extricated within the first two days. Pre-existing
social relationships, such as neighborhood and work place
relationships, served as a basis for the emergence of new
SAR groups.
The major difference in the search and rescue
efforts in the two disasters appears to focus upon the
formal established organization, not the volunteers. In
the Mexico City earthquake it took about three days for
the formal, professional rescue and response
organizations to become operational. For the first two
days there was little involvement and no overall
coordination by formal organizations. In Guadalajara the
formal units were involved much more rapidly, perhaps
because the impact area was more concentrated,
communication and transportation lifelines were not
severely affected, damage assessment was facilitated by
the ecology of the impact zone, and considerably more
national attention had been given to emergency planning
in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City disaster.
Fifth, there is a pressing need in the planning for
disasters to reestructure the societal reaction to
massive disasters so as to give more weight to the
emerging social organizations that volunteers create in
the aftermath of disasters (Forrest, 1978; Drabek, 1987).
This social organizational emergence should be seen as
the most important societal resource available in the
immediate aftermath of disasters. Disaster planners
should facilitate the work of search and rescue
collectivities. The recognition of its importance should
help reevaluate the function of volunteers, which until
now have been commonly seen as appendages to the work of
official agencies or as impediments to the work of these
agencies.
Part of the needed reestructuring should involve an
international program of public education. For example,
the cities of Los Angeles and Oakland, California, USA,
have begun extensive public education and training
 33

programs to prepare citizens and neighborhood groups to

undertake post-impact tasks, including search and rescue,
and international programs based on these and similar
efforts are needed. There is a clear need to provide
populations throughout the world, perhaps through
cartoons or other graphic despictions, with guidance for
the appropriate behavior of potential victims, and in the
principles of sound SAR activities, especially in the
excavation of unstable and demolished structures.
Victims need to know what behaviors increase their
chances of being rescued alive, and searchers need to
know how and whom and what to ask (and search). Not all
SAR efforts in Guadalajara benefitted the victims. We
learned of one instance in which volunteers climbed a
pile of rubble in which a woman was trapped. Their
collective weight collapsed the internal cavity that had
protected her, killing her. Much thought should be given
to organizing an SAR educational campaign that would
prove effective in preparing people to act collectively
on their own behalf in case of massive disasters.
There is also an international need to rethink
public investment and use of disaster preparedness
technology, to give greater importance to the purchase
and effective distribution of hand-held tools used in SAR
by emergency management agencies and volunteers, and to
the pre-positioning, rapid deployment, and use in
communities of appropriate light-weight, easily
maneuverable machines such as hydraulic arms, jacks, and
drills that could be easily integrated into the work of
volunteer SAR groups.
Currently, considerable planning has been undertaken
at the national level in the US to create teams of
mobile, stand-by teams of professional rescue personnel.
While they obviously have an important role to play in
difficult extrications and complex operations,
professional SAR teams face the barrier of time and the
lack of localized knowledge so critical for successful
SAR operations. I would argue for increased attention to
local and citizen training and capabilities. For
example, one of those areas of capabilities involve
rescue technology. We have found that simple hand tools
and other "low tech" implementations were judged most
effective by those who rescued alive most of the victims.
The policy implication is obvious. Greater importance
should be given to the purchase and distribution of hand-
held tools used in SAR, and to the use and rapid
deployment of appropriate light weight easily
maneuverable machines, such as hydraulic arms.
CONCLUSION. The foregoing review of the planning,
warning, evacuation, and search and rescue literature is
not exhaustive. Rather, it is intended to convey the
range of social science work that has taken place mostly
in the US in each of these preparedness topics. The
findings presented herein reflect primarly US culture and
social organizations, and I have not reviewed the social
conditions of implementation of social science knowledge
about these topics conveyed in the preceeding pages
elsewhere in the world. This review has not attempted to
answer the problem that disaster planners in developing
and Eastern European countries must ask themselves,
 34

namely, how can they use this information in their own

work.
It is generally understood that the effective
transfer of knowledge from one society to another is a
delicate and complex matter. And so it is in the area of
disaster studies. Thus, I would like to conclude this
paper with the thought that implementation is very much
linked to the social and cultural matrix in which
disaster planners operate (Mileti and Sorensen, 1989b).
My work on disaster preparedness and mitigation in Puerto
Rico (Aguirre and Bush, 1992; see also Ali, 1992)
illustrates this issue quite well, for the failure of
disaster programs in the island is very much explained by
their sociocultural inappropriatedness. In Puerto Rico
disaster programs are based on conceptual schemes
developed in North America. The programs are organized
in accordance with administrative and sociocultural
assumptions appropriate to the US and other core
societies. When some of the programs, such as the one
protecting the Puerto Rican shoreline, fail, the
explanation for their failure is couched in terms of
cultural resistance to modernization. The more mundane
fact that the planners do not consider the effects of the
social organization of Puerto Rican society on the
likelihood of success of their disaster programs is not
seen as relevant!
Based on these experiences and on the results of
other research efforts, and at the risk of sounding
normative, I would like to venture the following
observations. Planners should resist the impulse to use
programs and technology that do not have a local support
base. Thus, instead of depending on sophisticated state-
of-the-art technology they should prefer, to the extent
that it is available, the use of simpler, reliable, and
proven native techniques.
Planners need to become good ethnographers of
previous local responses to disaster events. They need
to know the history of community responses to disasters,
the successes of previous plans, warnings, evacuations,
and search and rescue efforts, and the political dynamics
existing among the significant local institutions,
neighborhoods, ethnic groups, social classes, and
leaders. The importance of this type of knowledge for
planners is a central theme in Drabek's excellent primer
for North American disaster planners. It is an important
principle for disaster planners elsewhere as well, worth
repeating.
Planners need to know how the people of their
communities responded to the challenge of disasters.
They also need to know the power structure of their
communities, so as to organize constituencies to carry
out the disaster agenda (e.g., Seitz and Davis, 1984;
Tierney, 1992). Successful planning requires knowledge
of the history of previous disaster events so as to
derive improved solutions that, given the political
realities of communities, have a good chance of
implementation. There is a tremendous amount of
innovation and human inventiveness in the societal
responses to disasters, and some of that human creativity
is worth preserving. Planners should try to
 35

institutionalize the best of this ethno-knowledge, so as

to make them available for future crises.
Planners can derive from their studies of past
disaster experiences an understanding of the social
organization implicated in those experiences and the sort
of planning that is feasable and has a chance of doing
some good for their communities. In their work, planners
will need to build consensus, sharing their tentative
answers with local key informants before attempting to
put them into practice, obtaining support through a
multiplicity of strategies and tactics from the key
players in the communities.
Only from such ethnographic basis and from an
understanding of local politics will planners be able to
evaluate the extant principles of good planning, such as
D. Wenger's directive that they should not plan for the
worst possible case scenario but rather that they should
plan for the average generic disaster event. To repeat,
the problem with these directives, as with the knowledge
base presented in this paper, is that most of them have
been derived from studies in the US and that many of them
assume the presence of interventionist, public-service
oriented government bureaucracies and programs. Their
generalizability to other countries is still not known,
and should be an important goal of future research.
In sum, my view is that the improvement of disaster
preparedness programs in much of the world must come from
below, not from the national governments but from the
experiences of the people, as such experiences are
assessed and researched by planners. At this stage the
disaster community should follow the lead of the Latin
American Catholic Church in its decision to build
"comunidades de base" as the nucleus from which to
improve the lot of the people. These base communities
generated social power for the Church and created for it
the resources to reshape the world to better reflect
Christian ideals. The creation of base communities was
not a chance event. Instead, it resulted from a thorough
analysis by the Church of the society and culture of
Latin America and Central America in the second half of
the 20th Century (Smith, 1991). Similarly, disaster
planners must build their own local constituency and
their own source of political support from which to
effect social change.
 36

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