Evacuation

The first building I entered was the girls' dormitory at the far end of campus. I didn't feel like knocking at every door, nor did I think I had the time, so I pulled the fire alarm to rouse the residents. As they began to pour down the stairs and out the doors, I ordered them to the beach beyond the sand dunes.

Then I moved to the men's dorm just up the path. A large number of students were reading or snoozing in the main lounge, and I informed them of the imminent danger. Some of them objected that there wasn't any problem or that I didn't know what I was talking about, but I just turned to the fire alarm box. I was hoping that a show of deliberate certainty would convince them that I was quite serious. I guess it worked; at least they began to move out.

This dormitory had the strangest fire alarm I have ever seen. Rather than a simple key or lever, there were three button: "ON", "OFF", and "GUTTER". Pressing "ON" sounded the fire horn, but it stopped as soon as the button was released. In order to make the horn stay on, one needed to press both "ON" and "GUTTER". I can't imagine where this system came from. I was glad that I was not trying to figure it out in a situation of panic. Leaving the fire horn sounding, I continued working my way back toward the space authority buildings.

I stopped at each building and sounded the fire alarm. It was an effective technique; everyone knows the sound of the fire horn and students have been well trained by years of school fire drills. The excessive volume of the alarms discourages independent thinking and encourages the kind of passive crowd response we needed if we were to clear the campus area. Once in the open air, there was the danger that people would begin to relax and mill around in exposed places. But as I reached more and more buildings, the multiple fire alarms increased the level of anxiety. Across the campus, Rob had obviously hit upon the same technique. The very strangeness of having alarms sounding all over the campus worked in our favor: People tended to obey us because we were the only ones around who weren't confused by the situation. Certainty in the face of the unfamiliar draws followers. I doubt that I would have thought of such an effective technique for evacuating the campus if I had had the time to plan the effort in advance.

As I was leaving the social sciences building I found a boy – a student – standing by the rear door. I reiterated that he needed to move on.

"I'm just waiting for my friend," he told me. "He's up in the lab building."

"You'll have to move away from here," I said. I didn't want to start giving ground. Not only would it be a bad example, but I didn't want to have to think about individual cases. Crises are not the time for individual cases.

"Well, can I go over and find him, so we can go down to the beach together?"

"No," I said. "Only officers are allowed beyond this corner." Immediately I realized how absurd that sounded. I wasn't in uniform and neither Rob nor I (nor, I think, the other two officers) were on official duty. Yet here I stood making distinctions on the basis on my official position. Fortunately, he accepted my order and turned, reluctantly, toward the beach. I went on up the street.

At the next corner, I saw Rob and the other officers converging. We had covered the campus. I took a deep breath and turned around to see the lines of people streaming raggedly toward the beach. I looked at the beach, where the crowds were milling about the low dunes. How could we believe that the short distance and those little ridges of sand were going to protect these people from a neutrino reactor disaster? Still, it was better than leaving them totally exposed.

We broke up again to help keep the people moving.

A group of girls was passing by across the street from me. They weren't college students; probably junior high school girls here for the beach. They were fooling around and, unfortunately, enjoying themselves. I didn't want people enjoying themselves here. The four of us couldn't control hundreds of people if they were too content with the situation.

One girl asked another to help with some package she was carrying. The other girl had her hands "tied" behind her back with a rubber and. Of course, she could have simply removed the rubber band, but it seemed more fun to them to pretend that she couldn't. So the whole group stopped on the sidewalk while she awkwardly manipulated her friend's package.

I was not amused. I stepped across the street, pulled the rubber band off her hands, and ordered them to move on. Perhaps I was more abrupt than necessary. Now that my evacuation plans were being carried out, my confidence in them was waning. The girls were obviously offended by my impertinence; at least they did move on, if only to get away from me.

By now the cacaphony of fire alarms had been joined by the sirens of emergency vehicles and the flashing lights of the police. The appearence of danger had been superceded by a certainty, and people were pushing farther down the beach. They were still curious and stood in exposed positions on top the the dunes to see what was going on. I think that they would have gradually crowded back to the scene except for the fact that campus police and Land Officers were now evacuating themselves to the beach, looking worried as they joined the crowds. Rob and I also started moving shoreward, but we moved slowly to encourage stragglers.