Basic Themes Derived from Survey Findings on Human Behavior in the Mexico City Earthquake

Abstract

Two population surveys of Mexico City residents were conducted, the first three weeks after the earthquake of September 1985 and the other a year later. We found that: (1) small percentages, because of the size of the metropolitan area population, translated into large absolute numbers for personal disaster behavior; (2) social class (or socioeconomic status) was important as a differentiating factor in earthquake-related behavior; (3) there was little dissatisfaction with organizational efforts to deal with the earthquake consequences along with (4) no noticeable increase in dissatisfaction from the time of the initial impact up to the year's anniversary of the disaster; (5) the earthquake-related sheltering and housing of people was not as problematical as the extensiveness of the activity might suggest; (6) the volunteering pattern of individuals was quite complex; (7) there was extremely heavy mass media usage in the earthquake aftermath; and (8) earthquake victims learned little from their experience on how to prepare for future disasters. The paper primarily uses these generalizations from the survey findings to advance eight basic themes about human behavior in disasters that might be comparatively examined in future cross-societal studies.