Development of a Database of Emergency Evacuations in Airport Terminal Buildings: Methodology and Description

Emergency evacuations are mitigative measures that can be used to protect the life safety of people when dangerous events occur in buildings. They are now commonly employed in response to a variety of events such as fires and security incidents, and planning evacuations is a regulatory requirement in large, complex, public occupancy buildings like airport terminal buildings. Presently, little research has been conducted aiming to better understand emergency evacuations in these buildings, especially their causes, largely due to a lack of data. In an attempt to fill this gap, this paper presents a description of the methodology used to develop a new database recording details about these events. Online news articles were used as the primary data source. Relevant incidents were identified through searching an online news platform, and information extracted from the articles by coding. Also presented are descriptive statistics detailing both the incidents and news articles recorded in the database, which currently covers the period January 2016 to December 2017. 235 entries were derived from 530 articles, a mean of 9.79 evacuation records per month, and an average of 1.75 events at each airport. Security and terrorism concerns, predominately unattended or suspicious luggage items were found to be the primary cause of emergency evacuations. The methodology described in this paper is useful to those wanting to create any topical open source database, whilst the description of the database contents are beneficial reference material for those concerned with emergency and contingency planning in airport terminals, and other similar buildings.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV090 Standing Committee on Aviation Security and Emergency Management.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Bateman, Georgia
  • Majumdar, Arnab
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2019-1-13 to 2019-1-17
• Date: 2019

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Airport terminals; Contingency planning; Databases; Descriptive statistics; Emergency management; Evacuation; Methodology; News
• Subject Areas: Aviation; Planning and Forecasting; Security and Emergencies; Terminals and Facilities;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01697483
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 19-05160
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:51PM