By Asbjørn Lein Aalberg & Rolf Johan Bye
SINTEF Digital
During the terrorist attacks in Norway 22th of July 2011, 77 people were killed and many more injured. The attacks led to massive, multifaceted efforts of civil society, especially concerning the attacks at Utøya. The officially appointed investigation commission acknowledged that more lives would had been lost if civilians had not taken spontaneous action and helped rescue victims from the island during the attack, providing crucial information to the official emergency responders and assisting in transporting the SWAT team to the island.
The spontaneous volunteering during and after the Utøya attack could be further be seen as a kind of societal or community resilience, in which the citizens demonstrated the ability to self-organize and adapt, when faced by major disasters.
Less is known, however, about what the civil society actually did during the attack, which leads to multiple important questions:
- How we can understand the mechanisms of such spontaneous volunteering?
- Once we understand these mechanisms, how should or could we integrate such efforts in more formal, traditional crisis management?
- Is it is possible or advisable to integrate these mechanisms into formal crisis management practice?
First, we wanted to check the characteristics of the academic articles on the Utøya attack. Were there any scientific efforts directed towards volunteer efforts during and immediately after the attack? We conducted a literature search in various sources and found 154 peer-reviewed items. In short, the answer is that we found only one relevant article. Second, we wanted to map the actions taken by volunteers and their perceptions of the events using various document sources, including a free-text-questionnaire issued by the official investigation commission, autobiographical books, newspapers and various reports.
Third, based on the mapping of the actions and perceptions of the volunteers, we tried to identify factors that appears to have contributed to their actions and influenced the efficiency of their rescue operations.
In the next paragraphs, we briefly summarize some of our findings so far.
Spontaneous volunteering during and in immediate aftermath of Utøya terror attacks
Spontaneous and voluntary rescue operations emerged at the landside of Utøya during the attack. Actions taken during the attack included: 1) evacuating victims from the island by boat, 2) distributing life jackets and rescuing victims by boats in the water during gun fire, 3) providing physical and psychosocial first aid, 4) organizing ad hoc emergency care centres and transporting victims to hospitals and an initially ad hoc emergency centre at a nearby hotel. These actions emerged spontaneously and informally, before any formal emergency organizations arrived at the disaster area. With the arrival of the different emergency services volunteers did offer and provide their assistance. This included 1) intelligence based on local knowledge, 2) transportation by boat, 3) first aid and psychosocial support, 4) transportation of victims to the positions of ambulances, emergency centres and hospitals. In the immediate aftermath of the attack (after the perpetrator has been captured) both convergent non-affiliated and affiliated volunteers showed up at official emergency centres offering services like psychosocial support and administrating the registering of victims.
Based on information from the island (sounds and observation), telephone calls and messages, social media and official media coverage, several civilians in the proximity of the island (local residents, campers, drivers passing by etc) initiated – quite independently from each other – different types of rescue operations. The efforts in the first phase of the attack were conducted by both individuals operating by themselves and individuals that informally organised responses together with fellow non-affiliated volunteers. When the formal emergency organizations arrived at the site, some spontaneous volunteers provided their assistance. Some volunteers received orders from the police and ambulance to terminate their operations and evacuate from the area but chose not to comply with these orders.
Contextual factors that influenced the volunteers’ rescue operations
There seems to have been an alertness among the volunteers due to information about the first attack in Oslo. This might explain both the outcome of the volunteers sensemaking when they heard about and/or observed unusual activity on the island, and their willingness to act on this knowledge. Community alertness and unsolicited initiative taken by individuals inclined to act seem to have been a prerequisite for the fast response among the volunteers. The same applies to the spatial proximity to the attack. The spatial proximity had probably an impact on the outcome of the volunteers sensemaking and their choice of adequate actions. Access to resources and the ability to utilize resources relevant in the specific situation (such as boats, life jackets, showers, buildings, clothing, cars were essential) was decisive for the type of tasks that could be performed by the volunteers, as well as providing necessarily resources for the police (e.g., boats). Local knowledge among the volunteers regarding accessible resources (equipment and personnel) contributed to the efficiency of the operations. Intelligence based on local knowledge about the local geography was also crucial for giving the Police ability to efficiently localize and navigate to the island. Established social bonds between individuals was important for both recruiting more personnel and to establish efficient ad hoc emergency organizations. Several independent ad hoc organizations of volunteers with limited coordination contributed to focus on handling tasks based on the volunteer´s situational awareness in the area they were operating. This contributed to fast tactical adaptions to the perceived needs in the area they were operating. Further, the redundancy in both organizations and task performance did ensure the efficient continuation of certain tasks in cases when volunteer resources were reallocated to new tasks (due to their own choice or due to commands from formal organizations). The disregarding of orders from the police to evacuate from the area meant that rescue operations continued, and that several lives among the escaping victims were saved.
Dilemmas of spontaneous volunteering
In the Utøya case, the spontaneous volunteers have been highlighted as “heroes who saved the day”, when the efforts of some of the formal organizations failed in several areas. The volunteers have received praise from the official investigation commission, and some have been given medals of honor.
Hypothetically – although the volunteers’ definitely showed ability to self-organize and adapt – several of volunteers could have been killed or wounded by the perpetrator when performing their tasks, and/or performed tasks that would harm the victims, or even hampered and delayed the formal operations. For example, volunteers rescuing victims with boats were shot at, and volunteers operating at the shore-side were within the shooting range of the perpetrator. Further, non-professional volunteerism may also represent a dilemma in terms of exposing civilians to situations that may provoke post-traumatic reactions. If the outcome of the action taken by several volunteers had led not successful in terms of rescuing the victims, several of the contextual factors contributing to the volunteers’ actions could also be considered as problematic in an emergency. Factors such as lack of coordination and reluctance to submit to the command of the formal organizations could hypothetically be used to explained negative outcomes of an emergency situation.
Conclusions so far
We may briefly conclude our preliminary results and notions
- There was a massive mobilizing of volunteers a Utøya, including individuals and groups, and their operation was largely autonomous and detached from the formal response.
- Despite the impactful participation by citizen, there has been little effort on volunteerism in the literature on the Utøya attack, particularly from a scholarly perspective, where we identified that only one of the 164 academic articles was related to spontaneous volunteers. Thus, one can hypothesize that societal and community perspectives on resilience related to such events is somewhat lacking.
- Contextual factors like spatial proximity, local knowledge, social bonds and reluctance to submit to the command of the formal organizations seems to have influenced the volunteer efforts.
- Volunteering represents dilemmas with regards to relation with formal crisis management, and their own physical and mental health. First, whereas formal first responders operate within a safe zone, spontaneous volunteers could often find themselves in proximity of real danger, both during the event as well the experience of traumatic events have potential psychosocial and mental effects. Second, whereas integration and coordination of spontaneous volunteers into formal crisis management could increase control and overview of a particular situation, our findings show that in this case, the autonomous and parallel performance contributed to “successful” outcomes of rescue missions – thus balancing between autonomy, coordination and control is an interesting aspect. Finally, acknowledging hindsight bias and counterfactual thinking, the coping actions that “went well” could hypothetically had led to catastrophic outcomes in slightly different circumstances. In sum, these dilemmas are important to acknowledge and further investigate in relation to how we can understand volunteerism within the theoretical notions of resilience.
We propose to further investigate how the identified contextual factors, as well as the dynamic and multifaceted nature of volunteerism during crisis, implicate the design and operation of crisis management models – to leverage the potential of civilian efforts to societal resilience.