Tag Archives: safety communication

Lahar awareness research will help save lives – Massey University

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Many skiers and snowboarders on Mt Ruapehu do not know how to get to safety if a potentially deadly lahar came rampaging down the mountainside, research from Massey graduate Leleiga Taito shows.

Source: Lahar awareness research will help save lives – Massey University

Many skiers and snowboarders on Mt Ruapehu do not know how to get to safety if a potentially deadly lahar came rampaging down the mountainside, research from Massey graduate Leleiga Taito shows.

It is believed to be the first international research that has documented a disconnect between safety information about lahars (the volcanic flow of ash, snow and rocks) and the key 18-30 year-old age group of young adventure sport enthusiasts.

“Many people didn’t know what a lahar is, or that they may have less than two minutes from the warning siren to escape,” Ms Taito says.

The Upper Hutt woman, who is the first in her family to graduate from university, will be conferred with a Bachelor of Communication honours degree (First Class) at the Michael Fowler Centre on Thursday.

Her research, investigating barriers at Whakapapa ski field that may be stopping young people from following safety instructions, was partly made possible by the awarding of a GNS Science scholarship arranged in partnership with Massey’s School of English and Media Studies and the Joint Centre for Disaster Research. It is hoped Massey students will help to develop further resources based on Ms Taito’s research to address the issue in the future.

There are plans also for Ms Taito’s findings to be used by GNS Science, the Department of Conservation and Ruapehu Alpine Lifts to communicate better with young skiers and snowboarders.

Twice-yearly tests of the Eruption Detection System over the past five years showed up to 50 people per test failed to get out of the valleys.  Those people were asked to fill in a survey, which showed some didn’t know they were in danger zones, or thought they had traversed high enough out of the valleys to be out of danger.

Ms Taito had only ever been on the snow once, joking: “Samoans don’t do snow”. She spent three months working for the ski lift operator while living at Whakapapa village at Mt Ruapehu last winter. Describing herself as a “Samoan population of one”, she conducted in-depth research observing the behaviour of 257 mountain users and interviewing 29 of them about their awareness of lahar risk.

She found the sub-culture of young experienced snowboarders and skiers have their own lingo and use euphemisms that normalise crashing and unsafe behaviour on the mountain. They deal with serious situations such as accidents, hazards and emergencies using humour and friendly teasing.

“Skiing is such a hazardous sport and they become desensitized to the danger factor. They are there to have fun and don’t want to think about anything happening- they call it a buzz kill. Anti-authoritarian framing is the norm for a subculture such as adventure sports enthusiasts,” she says.

The research participants offered a range of safety suggestions, including better locational identification on trail maps and creating a cellphone app that provides safety information.

Ms Taito attended a pre-season briefing with emergency service staff from the mountain to share her insights.  Her recommendations include better signage and using digital technology to inform and remind people they are on an active volcano and what to do when the lahar warning siren sounds.

“Young skiers and snowboarders’ love of speed could also be turned into a positive communication feature,” she says.

Safety communications could tap into their own group values by featuring a great skier speeding down the mountain contrasted with the speed of a lahar to show that nobody can outrun a lahar.”

After five years of study at Massey, Ms Taito is looking forward to visiting family in Australia, going back to the mountain to see her new snow buddies and looking for her first permanent communications’ job.  But first of all there is going to be a big party this week when her large family celebrates her graduation. And she hopes to get her family up to the snow this ski season.

Summer Scholarship win for Leleiga’s Safety Communication Project

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Congratulations to Bachelor of Communication Honours student Leleiga Taito who has won a second award for her potentially life-saving Mt Ruapehu safety communication research.  In January, Leleiga received an award from GNS Science to conduct research into safety communication on Mt Ruapehu.  Now, Leleiga has received a Summer Scholarship to work with Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley over Summer in order to produce creative digital research outputs from her Mt Ruapehu ethnographic video data.

Leleiga has just spent three months living in Whakapapa Village on Mt Ruapehu gathering written and audiovisual ethnographic field data about safety culture – you can see her fantastic blog about her experiences here: http://www.esocsci.org.nz/social-science-snow-and-safety-communications-why-do-people-ignore-safety-warnings-guest-blogger-leleiga-taito/

Over Summer Leleiga will be busy in post-production, editing and finalising film footage so as to make her research findings easy to share with others, and spread the word in creative ways about mountain safety communication. The 2-minute sample of raw video footage posted with this blog shows a real-time view of just one ski slope during a lahar warning test – the video shows that many people don’t move out of the way and, had the test been real, could have been in the path of a boiling river of mud, water and rocks with the viscosity of wet concrete, moving at up to 65 kilometers per hour down the valleys of the mountain and destroying everything in its path.

Leleiga’s field work aims to crack the puzzle of why people don’t move quickly when the warning sounds, or why some move into the valley floor instead of to higher ground, so that the effectiveness of mountain safety communication can be improved.  Her research is part of a broader collaboration between the School of English & Media Studies and Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research on disaster safety communication, and was funded by a scholarship from GNS Science.  Her Summer Scholarship is funded by Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.  Leleiga’s research is innovative and transdisciplinary, looking at safety research from new angles to add to our existing understanding.  She is supervised by the cross-disciplinary team of Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley (School of English & Media Studies) and Dr Mimi Hodis (School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing).

See more about the project at:

Skitrip yields important safety information

Leleiga’s first scholarship win

Ruapehu on the radio

Congratulations Leleiga for scholarship win!

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Leleiga

Leleiga Taito reads her work at a recent Creative Writing Student Writers Read event at Massey Wellington campus.

Congratulations to Expressive Arts student Leleiga Taito who has just been announced as the winner of a $5000 scholarship to research safety communication on Mt Ruapehu in 2015.

Leleiga is currently finishing her final year of the Bachelor of Communication (Public Relations and Expressive Arts), and will start postgraduate studies (BC Honours) in 2015. Her Honours research project (supervised by the School of English & Media Studies and co-funded by GNS and Massey University through the Joint Centre for Disaster Research) will be a real-world life-saving project that looks at how to improve safety awareness for mountain users, particularly about the risks of lahars and avalanches.

Leleiga will have the opportunity not only to investigate practical safety communication challenges in depth, but also to develop creative multi-media solutions to the communication challenge. She has past experience of similar projects during her Bachelor of Communication (BC) studies, and will now extend these skills in-depth with her Honours research.

Leleiga’s prior study achievements include creative writing, digital media production, media releases, strategic communication plans, and service learning for community organisations.  For example, she created an awareness campaign for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation in her second year of the BC. She says “Through my research I discovered that breast cancer education and prevention messages were not reaching Samoan women. I conducted a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods to establish why women in this culture were not receiving these messages. After compiling the information that was gathered I then made suggestions on what appropriate communication strategies could be put in place. I also implemented tactics, where I created four pieces of collateral to encourage Samoan women to have mammograms. One of the communication materials was a web video with Winnie Laban sharing her experiences with breast cancer.”  You can see Leleiga’s excellent breast cancer awareness video assignment, with compelling personal interview testimony from Winnie Laban, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzoX3Nd97so&feature=youtu.be

During her Honours year Leleiga will, under the supervision of her research report supervisor (Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley from the School of English and Media Studies) prepare a comprehensive qualitative investigation of mountain user culture and the communication norms and needs that exist around safety issues. She will have the opportunity to research in the field, living at Mt Ruapehu to gather data during the ski season. Part of her reporting for the research project may also take the form of a creative output (such as a short documentary film) that could in itself provide a useful way to respond to the research challenge by building awareness of relevant safety issues and responses.

Associate Professor Tilley said Leleiga’s success was indicative of the value of the public relations/expressive arts combination in a communication degree. “Most real-world research problems or workplace communication challenges are multi-faceted, and need both a scientific and a creative response to generate understanding and solutions. I think we are really seeing, with the success of our Bachelor of Communication students who all have both a business and a humanities preparation, just how valuable this is for the next steps after a three-year degree, whether that step is further study or the workplace.”

Associate Professor Tilley said study of Expressive Arts (which can include diverse combinations of different digital media production, creative writing and theatre papers) was proving particularly useful for students. “We live in a multi-modal world. Seldom is any public communication these days just a written brochure or poster. Inevitably there are multi-media and social media dimensions. And the work that students do in learning scripting, dialogue, filming, directing, lighting, editing and a whole range of production, post-production and performance-related skills in Expressive Arts sets them up really well for this kind of work after graduation.”

Leleiga’s scholarship includes $5000 for fees and stipend, plus additional coverage of direct costs of her research including accommodation and other research expenses covered at Mt Ruapehu. Other BC students have also been involved in the wider research project – click here for a previous story about the project and click here for a link to a Radio New Zealand story about the project.