Behavior of Victims Trapped in Collapsed Structures: Summary of Findings

Abstract

The importance of knowledge of human behavior during disasters has been traditionally recognized at a meso level. Social scientists and other disaster researchers have mainly explored human behavior at the level of the community, and not of a particular individual. More is known about the performance of building structures during disasters than about the behavior of building occupants. Indeed, the search in the scholarly and professional literature yielded only a few results dealing extensively with the behavior of particular individuals located in specific buildings during various disasters (Aguirre 1995; Durkin 1984, 1987, 1988). Relevant information about trapped victims is found within an intersecting terrain of a range of disciplines: engineering, architecture, the social sciences, disaster epidemiology and other medical sciences.