CSUSM professor to study public's response to disasters

By: ANDREA MOSS - Staff writer
Effort will focus on area residents' reaction to potential terrorism | Saturday, March 15, 2008 10:33 PM PDT ∞

SAN MARCOS ---- Cal State San Marcos professor William Burns soon may be in a position to help people with emotional trauma such as those who still suffer anxiety because of the 2001 terrorist attacks that destroyed New York City's twin towers.

A research scientist who teaches technology management part-time in the university's College of Business, Burns heads a four-man team that recently won a $750,000, three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to study the public's response to disasters.

Burns said Friday that the team will focus on how San Diego County residents might react to terrorist attacks and other potential disasters, plus ways to ease the likely impacts.

Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic and economists Adam Rose and Garrett Asay, who work at the Department of Homeland Security's Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism at the University of Southern California, are the other team members.

The researchers will get their answers via public surveys that ask community members to imagine what they would do in hypothetical disaster scenarios, Burns said. The team will then use mathematical modeling to identify everything from the pace at which fear spreads through a community after a disaster, to the likelihood that people will cut back on spending so severely that it affects the economy, he added.

The potential for those effects to ripple outward to other cities and even across the nation also will be considered, the professor said.

"We need to better understand those things so we can help community leaders and first responders better cope with the public response should any of these events occur," Burns said. "We decided to look at San Diego because it's one of the big cities and its proximity to the (U.S.-Mexico) border."

The results will be applicable to other large urban areas, he added.

The public's reaction to 9/11, the devastation Hurricane Katrina caused in New Orleans and a host of other major disasters has been studied by analysts at multiple levels of government, various think tanks and other entities. And San Diego County officials gleaned valuable lessons from evaluations of the region's response to several series of wildfires that swept the area in recent years.

Burns said it is important to continue such efforts because they add to a body of information that helps community leaders and first-responders figure out how to motivate people to prepare for disasters, do a better job of coping with the collective response, and improve communications with the public during an incident.

"How we communicate about various events has a huge impact on how the public will perceive and will respond to those events," he said.

Burns also said terrorist attacks will be a big focus of the study because the public tends to have a far-greater fear response to terrorist attacks than to natural events, because terrorists are seen as being "malicious, cunning and out to get you." Citing a series of anthrax attacks that occurred shortly after 9/11 as an example, he said the public automatically assumed those incidents were terrorist acts and exhibited an exaggerated response.

"People, even out here, were afraid to go to their mailboxes for fear they would get anthrax in their mail," Burns said. "They were making demands to their doctors to get antibiotics. It was a huge, huge national response."

In reality, just a handful of people died as a result of the attacks, which were never specifically linked to terrorism.

The San Diego County Office of Emergency Services, which supported the team's grant application, will be involved in the study and hopes to put the results to good use.

"The findings could potentially improve our preparedness in the event of a terrorist attack," said Herman Reddick, assistant director of the agency. "And the information that could come from that project could be incorporated into our multidisciplinary hazard mitigation plan."

Contact staff writer Andrea Moss at (760) 739-6654 or amoss@nctimes.com.

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