Characteristics of emergency evacuations in airport terminal buildings: A new event database

Abstract Emergency evacuations are typically employed in airport terminal buildings to protect occupants against harmful events such as fires and security incidents. Despite the importance of ensuring the effectiveness of planned for evacuation procedures, little research has been conducted to obtain a better understanding of these events, largely due to a lack of data. This paper describes how a new database containing details of airport terminal building evacuation events (ATBEE) was created, and utilised to explore the characteristics of these events. Online news articles were used as the main source material to populate the database with events. The completed database was subjected to a data quality assessment procedure, and a new quantitative index was developed to assess the reliability of the news articles utilised as source material. The database currently contains situational and etiological details of 235 evacuation events that occurred during the period January 2016 to December 2017. Analysis of the database contents determined the majority of evacuation events recorded occurred in North America and Europe, and the main cause of these events were security and terrorism related incidents, such as the identification of suspicious items. Statistical testing indicated an association exists between the geographical location of the recorded evacuations and the cause of an evacuation, and also the evacuation’s cause and the total evacuation time. A significant correlation was furthermore found between the number of evacuation events occurring at an airport, and the size of the airport.