More Than Milling

Abstract

During crisis events, emergency responders must verify the particulars of an event before sending out warning messages. The gap between an event's occurrence and official notification is often used by those impacted by that event to verify what is happening before taking action. The addition of information communication technologies has had an impact on what we term the verification pause. This pause is the amount of time it takes to verify what has happened before messages are received and before reaction can begin. More than milling about post notification, this understudied period of time is rarely visible for researchers. The present case study contains an analysis of a verification pause between an earthquake event and the actions taken by students in a classroom in a large university in the United States. The students in the classroom felt the earthquake and immediately began to search for verification that what they felt was indeed an earthquake. The authors conclude with a discussion of the utility of case studies and call for more focused analysis of the similarities between cases.