Research On Citizen Behavior Under The Background Of Sudden Power Outage In The Coastal Region Of South China

The frequency of meteorological disasters in the coastal region of south China is higher than the other places in the world because of its special geographic position. As a pillar energy in the national industry, the electric power has the characteristics of universality, irreplaceability and instantaneity. In consequence, every social system would be affected once the power went off. The urban system would collapse if the sudden power outage could not be restored for a long time. The citizens are the cells of the society. Their behaviors and movements would impact on the process and the progress of the restoration. However, the emergency management system of China is not yet perfect, and the research on citizen behavior in the context of power outage is nearly blank. Aims at providing the theoretical basis of emergency management under the situation of power outage for the administrative department of electric power, this paper studies the following aspects.In the first place, the formation and the transmission mechanism of a sudden electric supply failure caused by typhoon are introduced to lay a foundation for the following research. This paper pays attention to the influent factors of citizen behavior under the situation of severe disaster. Personal feature, material supply, information environment and psychological environment are extracted as the four key influent factors for citizen behavior based on theory and literature research, and the results of the on-site investigations. According to the evolutional characteristics of citizen behavior in different times of the power outage, the development of citizen behavior is divided into four stages: initial stage, developing stage, expanding stage and outbreak stage. The leading factor of each stage is studied. Afterwards, this paper analyzes the correspondence and the response weight between the four influent factors and citizen behavior in every stage by means of Analytic Hierarchy Process. The importance ranking of the influent factors in the power outage crisis is hence obtained.In the second place,after analyzing the influent factors, the citizens suffering from the power outage are divided into leaders, participants, followers and isolates on the basis of their personal behavior and characteristics. The forming process of the crowd is discussed in three aspects including institution and society, mentality of the victims and the emergency work of the government. Crowd behavior in the power outage could be classified as benign, neutral and vicious, and its developmental stages are comprised of independent stage, accumulation stage and outbreak stage. By means of the qualitative analytical method as QSIM, which is convenient and easy to apply, the behavior trends of the victims under the pressures from environment, society and livelihood in the power outage are analyzed. Through studying the relationship interactions among the four kinds of citizens, combined with the environment and government factors, the development of the crowd behavior can be mapped out.In the last place,this paper introduces the present emergency works of the governments in south China from institutional system, emergency capacity and linkage level. Compared with the former emergency work of the government, the present situation has changes much better, but still there are some problems cannot be ignored. On the basis of the characteristics of the participants and the evaluations of the government emergency work, integrated with the problems found in the investigations on the government and the power administrative department, this paper finally comes up with the suggestions for the government emergency work.