The Organizational And Public Response To The September 1985 Earthquake In Mexico City, Mexico
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Date
1988
Authors
Dynes, Russell R.
Quarantelli, E. L.
Wenger, Dennis E.
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Abstract
Description
This publication, apart from meeting a formal NSF reporting
requirement, is intended for many audiences. As a general
statement, it is primarily aimed at disaster policy makers,
disaster planners, and disaster researchers. While we think what
is said can benefit many others ranging from at one end--social
and behavioral scientists abstractly interested in responses to
collective stress situations--and at the other end--to many
operational personnel concerned with the specifics of dealing
with human and social responses to earthquakes--some of our other
publications more specifically target them as prime audiences. Part I of the report provides an introduction to the study. It
gives a brief overall account of the sociophysical aspects of the
earthquake and its impact in Mexico City, discusses how a close
collaboration was developed with Mexican colleagues prior to DRC
doing any research on this disaster, and indicates the kinds of
data that were obtained and how they were analyzed by both DRC
staff members and our counterparts in Mexico.In Part II we use two major population surveys to describe and
analyze the behavior of individual citizens after the disaster.
The first survey, undertaken less than three weeks after the
earthquake, allows us to depict the impact consequences, the mass
communication behavior of the victims, their volunteer behavior,
and the attitudes and evaluations that the population had about
governmental and other impact-related activities. The second
survey, done about a year later, permits us to discuss the longer
run earthquake problems as seen by citizens, their attitudes
about the handling of disaster related problems, and what people learned from the experience of the disaster. Part III includes our discussion of organizational behavior in
the aftermath of the disaster. First we depict the very complex
governmental structure in Mexico City and the general lack of
prior disaster planning, both of which significantly affected the
organizational response to the earthquake. Then we present a
picture of the major organizational responses in the first three
days after impact, separately followed by a selective depiction
of the organized responses of both governmental and private
organizations up to the end of the emergency period, approximately a two week time span. In Part IV we further make explicit the major research findings
or themes of our study, briefly examine the extent to which they
might be applicable to an earthquake disaster in the United
States, and indicate what future research ought to explore.
Keywords
Organizational Response , Public Response , Mexico City, Mexico , 1985 Earthquake , Sociocultural Values , Organizational Behavior