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1 November 2004
When
the heat is on
Do you have
a plan?
By Terry Riley
Being awakened in a hotel in the middle of the night by the sound of a
fire alarm is nothing new—certainly nothing new to me. Over the years,
I’ve evacuated a dozen hotels in three countries in response to fire
alarms. Sure, most of the alarms turned out to be false, but four—four!—were
the real deal: Lights, sirens, fire trucks, firefighters, smoke and
flames! There were no casualties in the fires I escaped, but people did
die in other hotel fires during those years.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, the number of
what it calls “civilian” deaths from hotel fires has been dropping over
the years, but there are still about two dozen people killed each year in
hotel and motel fires in the U.S. Earlier this year, for instance, nearly
half of the 46 registered guests at a Comfort Inn in Greenville, South
Carolina were killed or injured when that hotel caught fire.
Since most hotel and motel fires are survivable, why are people still
dying? The answer to this question is part technology, part psychology.
Thomas Olshanski, spokesperson for the United States Fire Administration (USFA),
points to the importance of technology. “Sprinklers and smoke detectors
are the two most important technologies to protect yourself from fire,”
says Olshanski. So important in fact that the staff of the USFA will not
stay in a hotel or motel that does not have fire suppression sprinklers in
the guest rooms. (And neither should you.)
The other part of the survivability equation is psychology. This is
where you must get involved in your own safety. The more you understand
about how you and others are likely to respond in an emergency, the better
your chance of coming out of it safe and sound.
An emergency is an infrequent, unpredictable event that requires an
immediate response to avoid further disaster. Unfortunately it is
precisely these characteristics of infrequency and unpredictability that
contribute to the confusion that unprepared people demonstrate in an
emergency. Without having given it some forethought, people simply don’t
know what to do. Consequently they make mistakes—often with fatal results.
Even worse unprepared guests may take their cues on how to behave in
an emergency from people who are as clueless as they. Indeed,
psychologists have found that in emergency situations it is common to find
that only about a quarter of the people affected take appropriate action.
What do the rest do? Interestingly, they are unlikely to become
hysterical. Instead they simply do nothing. They freeze.
They freeze because they don’t have a plan. And they don’t have a plan
because they believe, as do most people (and as did the fire victims in
Greenville), that tragedies happen to others, not to them. This is a very
human—and very perilous—characteristic.
But disasters play no favorites. Every one of us travelers is likely
to be caught in an emergency where we must act to save ourselves. As a
veteran hotel-fire survivor, I have a plan. Do you?
Can you survive a hotel fire?
Most hotels and motels have general fire survival information
available in their guest rooms and have evacuation routes posted near
doorways. But to survive a fire you need more than a few tips and
directions to an exit. You need a plan.
Information to help make a fire survivability plan is available from
the USFA (www.usfa.fema.gov/) and other emergency planning agencies and
companies. But keep in mind that your plan should have three elements:
Simplicity, action, and relevance.
Make it simple.
Any elaborate scheme of survival will be difficult to recall and hard to
implement.
Make it active.
Immediate action is required in an emergency. If you wait to see what
others do, you and they may well end up victims instead of survivors.
Make it relevant.
Before getting comfortable in your room, review your survival plan and
adapt it to your current situation.
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© 2004 Applied Psychology
Based on a column originally published in
Executive Travel magazine
Summer 2004.
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