A critique of the official report on the evacuation of the World Trade Center: continued doubts

• Published in: Disasters Vol. 37; no. 4; pp. 695 - 704
• Main Authors: Hotchkiss, H. Lawrence, Aguirre, B.E., Best, Eric
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.10.2013
• Subjects: building evacuation; Checks; Collective behaviour; Communities; Community; Cooperative Behavior; Data analysis; Data collection; Data replication; Dependent variables; Disasters; Errors; Evacuation; evacuation models; Evacuations & rescues; Government agencies; Humans; Least squares method; Methods; Missing data; Model testing; Models, Organizational; National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); New York; New York City; New York City, New York; New York, New York; Replication; Reproducibility; Rescue Work - organization & administration; Research Report - standards; Sampling; Sampling methods; Scalability; Scientific Community; September 11; September 11 Terrorist Attacks; Statistical methods; statistics; Studies; Technology; Terrorism; Theoretical problems; Trade; U.S.A; United States; United States Government Agencies; United States of America; Variables; Variance analysis; World Trade Center; New York City; United States; United States > US; collective behaviour; World Trade Center; evacuation models; National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); building evacuation; statistics
• ISSN: 0361-3666; 1467-7717
• DOI: 10.1111/disa.12029

This paper criticises the conclusions and the unanswered questions in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s official report on the evacuation of the World Trade Center in New York City, United States, on 11 September 2001. It reviews the extent to which the report disregards several conventional statistical methods and comments on the NIST's refusal to share the machine‐readable data file with the scientific community for replication and further analysis. Problems lie in the sampling methods employed, the treatment of missing data, the use of ordinary least squares (OLS) with binary dependent variables, the failure to document the scalability of the scales used, the lack of tests to check for constant error variance, and the absence of overall fit tests of the model. There are also conceptual and theoretical issues, such as the absence in the report of considerations of the influence of group‐level processes and their impact on the collective behaviour of evacuating collectivities.