THE TIMING OF EMERGENCY DECISIONS - MODELING DECISIONS BY COMMUNITY OFFICIALS DURING CHEMICAL ACCIDENTS
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Protecting the public from airborne chemical releases is limited by the timing of the implementation of actions taken and the capacity of those actions to avoid or reduce exposure. This paper examines the community decision processes during emergencies to identify critical factors asso- ciated with the timing of emergency warning, and protective action recommendations. This research examines the decision process by tracing emer- gency response from the outset of the community decision process, through the decision to warn the public, including the communication of hazard to the public, and the all-clear at the end of the emergency period. Both community authorities and the public cycle through hazard detection, assessment communication, and behavioral response as they become aware of the hazard. A sample of emergency decisions during chemical emergen- cies was examined via post-emergency interviews with key community officials. Emergency responders in a systematic sample of events after 1984, but prior to 1990, were interviewed in the Fall of 1989. Finding that decisions in more recent events were more easily reconstructed, a randomly selected half of the significant chemical emergencies occurring during 1990 were interviewed within weeks of the chemical events. Previous work [1] shows that community decision processes are seldom immediate and often involve information seeking. This descriptive work is expanded herein to provide better models of the key factors effecting decision processes in chemical emergencies. Regression models of these data indicate that protective action and warning decisions occur more rapidly than all-clear decisions, and that each decision is influenced by different factors in the decision process. Moreover, these data indicate that the role of experts changes throughout the emergency response. When decisions lead to the active avoidance of exposure, officials seem to take evasive action more quickly, but when failure to decide results in passive avoidance of exposure and continued in convenience of the public, the decision process is often protracted. 1994.
