Source: Radio New Zealand
Firefighters spray water on flames, as a major fire engulfs several Hong Kong apartment blocks. –
For decades, the message for people caught in emergencies like fires remained the same – stay calm, don’t panic, wait for instructions.
According to a leading crowd-safety researcher, this sensible-sounding mantra is entirely wrong and, in some disasters, has likely cost lives.
Speaking to RNZ’s Sunday Morning, University of Melbourne associate professor Milad Haghani said disasters from London to Hong Kong showed a recurring pattern – authorities downplay danger, people hesitate and precious minutes are lost.
Official messaging had been shaped by outdated psychology, movie tropes and a deep mistrust of the public’s ability to cope with danger, said Haghani, who specialises in crowd safety and evacuation modelling, among other subjects.
Lessons in fire
Haghani was prompted to speak out, after the recent Hong Kong tower fires, now the deadliest building fire of the century.
The blaze killed at least 159 people, many of whom were inside their apartments, as flames raced up the exterior of the building.
He said the disaster echoed the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire in London, where 72 people died, after being advised to “stay put” in their flats.
Designed decades earlier for fires contained within single units, that guidance proved deadly, once flames spread externally through combustible cladding.
Many complied with the official advice – and died.
Fire engulfs Grenfell Tower, a residential tower block in west London. DANIEL LEAL/AFP
In both cases, residents were re-assured, soothed and urged not to overreact.
Hesitation kills
Research consistently showed that delay was one of the biggest predictors of death in fires and other emergencies, said Haghani.
“The delay that people exercise in reacting to the evacuation alarm correlates directly with their chance of survival.”
Yet official messaging often discouraged speed and urgency.
“The thing is that, when you say ‘stay calm’, the nuance gets lost.
“The way people interpret that is often, ‘I shouldn’t overreact’.”
Modern buildings, shorter survival windows
One issu- is that very few understand how little time there is to escape.
“Using vintage furniture, the time that it takes for a unit, for an apartment to get to the flash over state where everything catches on fire and survival becomes impossible is between 20-25 minutes.”
In modern apartments, this window was often only 4-5 minutes.
Sprinklers helped, but they were not universal. Combined with faulty alarms, blocked stairwells or poor materials, delays became deadly.
Panic is not to fear
The idea that crowds descended into chaos during evacuations was deeply ingrained, but Haghani said it simply didn’t match reality.
“The idea that people run over each other… panic and harm each other is, I’m afraid to say, kind of fallacy.”
In fact, research consistently showed that people behaved altruistically in emergencies, helping strangers, assisting the vulnerable and making rational decisions under pressure.
This applied, not only to fires, but also in shootings, stabbings and crowd crushes.
In these situations, who lived and who died is often determined in the first 3-4 minutes.
“The way people have reacted to the situation, in that early phase, is the biggest determinant of the number of people [who] survive.”
What we do wrong
Besides moving quickly, what could the public do to improve the odds of survival during a disaster?
Haghani’s research highlighted an issue in the way families typically evacuated. In real emergencies, families tended to move side by side, forming wide clusters or “polygons” that slowed everyone down.
“When we form those polygons, there is a lot of space that becomes unusable.”
Haghani’s experiments found that evacuation became significantly faster when families moved in single file, what he calls a “snake” or “platoon”, rather than shoulder to shoulder.
This could be done by holding hands, or gripping the clothes of those in front and behind.
The golden rule
For Haghani, the core issue was not public behaviour, but the tendency of authorities to withhold information.
“The golden rule is to tell it as it is,” he said. “If the threat is real, there should be somebody who has the courage behind that microphone to say that you guys need to get to safety as quickly as possible.”
He pointed to the Astroworld Festival crowd crush in 2021, where organisers and police exchanged messages warning that “somebody is going to die today”, yet chose not to stop the show or alert the crowd, resulting in the death of 10 people.
“That could have been easily prevented by simple messaging to people, interrupting the gig and telling people, ‘Look, there is a real risk of a crowd crush. We are going to cancel, or we are going to delay the show’.”
The same pattern appeared in Hong Kong, where residents were wrongly assured of safety, and in Grenfell, where people obeyed instructions that sealed their fate.
“It’s one of the silent killers… this idea that we need to withhold information in cases of emergencies.
“People are, in fact, capable of making good decisions for themselves… [if] given true information.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand