How to survive an earthquake while travelling

The 60 second rule

A large earthquake gives you very little notice. By the time the ground is moving enough that you are sure what is happening, you have already lost the safest two or three seconds. Of all the recommendations on this page, the single most important one is: the response is automatic. You do not deliberate. You do not run. You take cover, and you stay there.

The window from the first ground motion to peak shaking, in a near-field magnitude 7 event, is roughly 10 to 60 seconds. Most injuries during shaking come not from buildings collapsing but from objects falling, glass breaking, and people moving. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and FEMA both note that movement during shaking,running for an exit, standing in a doorway, trying to reach children in another room, is the dominant injury mechanism in moderate-to-strong earthquakes.

The bar is not heroism. The bar is: when the floor starts moving, your body has already done the right thing.

Drop, Cover, Hold On

This is the universally adopted safe-action protocol, endorsed by USGS, FEMA, the Red Cross, the Earthquake Country Alliance, and, translated into the local idiom, by every major seismology agency from Tokyo to Santiago. It is the consensus answer to a question that has been studied by structural engineers and emergency physicians for fifty years.

1. Drop to your hands and knees before the shaking knocks you down. This protects you from falling but lets you crawl to shelter.
2. Cover your head and neck with one arm and crawl under a sturdy desk or table. If no shelter is near, crawl against an interior wall away from windows.
3. Hold On to your shelter (or to your head if you have no shelter) until the shaking stops. If your shelter moves, move with it.

That is the complete protocol. Do not improve it. Do not modify it. Do not stand up to assess the situation. Do not collect children, pets, or possessions. Do not look out the window. The shaking will end, usually in well under a minute, and the protocol gets you through that window with the smallest available cross-section for falling debris.

Three dangerous myths

The reason this guide spends time on Drop-Cover-Hold-On rather than on more interesting topics is that the travelling public still acts on three myths that get people killed.

Myth 1: stand in a doorway

False since the 1980s, and explicitly contradicted by USGS and the Earthquake Country Alliance. The doorway advice is a relic of a 19th-century adobe-housing era when the door frame was the strongest part of an otherwise unreinforced wall. In a modern building, doorways are no stronger than any other interior point and they put you in the path of a swinging door, debris from above, and other people running. Take cover. Do not stand.

Myth 2: run outside

The most dangerous place during shaking is the perimeter of a building, the zone where façades, windows, parapets, signage, and air-conditioning units fall first. USGS post event injury studies are consistent on this point. Running for an exit through a moving building is also where most strain and head injuries occur. The interior is safer than the threshold; the threshold is safer than the immediate exterior.

The single, narrow exception: if you are already outside when shaking begins, stay outside. Move calmly to an open space away from buildings, power lines, and trees, and drop. Do not re-enter a building during shaking.

Myth 3: the “triangle of life”

A widely-shared internet recommendation tells people to lie next to (rather than under) furniture in the hope that a collapsing ceiling will form a survivable void. Both USGS and the Red Cross have explicitly rejected this advice. It is based on observations of pancake-collapse buildings, a failure mode that is rare in modern construction and that carries far higher overall mortality than the building types Drop-Cover-Hold-On is designed for. Do not follow the triangle-of-life rule.

Where you are matters

Drop-Cover-Hold-On is the universal answer. The thing that changes between a high rise hotel room in Tokyo, a beach restaurant in Bali, and a metro carriage in Mexico City is what counts as “cover” and what you do after the shaking stops. Eight scenarios, with the modification that matters.

Hotel room

Drop next to (or under) the bed if there is no sturdy desk or table. The bed frame deflects falling ceiling debris better than any other furniture in a typical hotel room. Cover your head and neck. Stay until shaking stops. Then evacuate via the stairs,never the lift, and bring shoes and a light source.

Hotel lobby, restaurant, mall, museum

Drop and crawl under the nearest sturdy table. If none is reachable, crawl to an interior wall away from windows, decorative panels, and the front-of-house glazing. Stay clear of large light fittings, hanging signs, and free-standing shelving. Wait out the shaking; do not run for the door.

Beach, harbour, low lying coastline

Drop, cover, hold on for the shaking. Then immediately self evacuate to high ground, the international consensus rule is 30 metres of vertical elevation, or 3 km inland, whichever you can reach fastest. Long or strong shaking near a coast is a tsunami self warning even before any siren or phone alert. New Zealand’s GeoNet teaches the rule as “Long or Strong, Get Gone”,if shaking lasts more than a minute or makes it hard to stand, do not wait for an official advisory.

High-rise hotel above the ground floor

Modern high-rises in seismic zones (Tokyo, Santiago, Wellington, San Francisco, Taipei) are engineered to flex. They feel terrifying on the upper floors during a moderate event but they are statistically very safe. Stay in your room or take cover in the corridor near a structural wall. Do not attempt to descend during shaking. After shaking, descend by stairs, lifts can fail, brake, or trap you.

Subway, metro, intercity train

Hold onto a handrail or pole and lower your centre of gravity. The vehicle itself is unlikely to derail at the slow speeds it will be travelling at by the time the operator responds to the shaking. The risk is being thrown by sudden braking. Listen for the operator’s instructions, Tokyo and Mexico City metros both broadcast in English on major lines. Do not exit onto the tracks.

Vehicle (you are driving)

Pull over as quickly as is safe. Avoid stopping under bridges, overpasses, power lines, billboards, large trees, or beside buildings. Set the parking brake. Stay inside the vehicle until shaking stops. Watch for road surface damage and downed lines before resuming driving. If a bridge has clearly buckled, do not cross it, even if it appears intact.

Outdoors / open space

Drop and remain prone in an open area. Stay clear of buildings, walls, glass façades, power lines, light poles, and trees. Stay clear of stone walls and chimneys. The biggest urban-outdoor risk is falling glass and masonry from the building line.

Stairwell, escalator, lift

Hold the rail. Do not run. If you are on an escalator, sit down on a step and brace. If you are in a lift, press every floor button so the lift stops at the next floor; exit when the doors open and take the stairs out.

After the shaking stops

The next 30 minutes are when most preventable secondary injuries happen.

• Expect aftershocks. They can be substantial and they begin within seconds. Stay in your sheltered position for an extra 15 to 30 seconds after motion ceases.
• Smell for gas; listen for water. If you smell gas in a hotel or restaurant, leave the building immediately. Do not use lighters, matches, or open-flame cooking equipment until the building is officially cleared.
• Check yourself, then others nearby. Bleeding, fractures, head injury, and respiratory distress in that order. Do not move people with possible spinal injury unless they are in immediate further danger (fire, collapse).
• Put shoes on before you walk. Broken glass on the floor is the single most common minor injury in post quake hotels.
• Take the stairs, always. Building lifts can be inspection-locked or trap occupants on unrelated floors during outages.
• Communicate by text, not voice. Networks are saturated immediately after a major event. SMS and messaging apps clear when voice cannot. Send one short message to a single trusted contact who can relay.
• Listen to local radio or the country’s official seismic agency app (JMA in Japan, BMKG in Indonesia, GeoNet in New Zealand, USGS/ShakeAlert on the U.S. West Coast, SASMEX in Mexico). They issue tsunami advisories and aftershock guidance ahead of news media.

Tsunami evacuation

A near-shore tsunami can arrive within five to ten minutes of the earthquake that generated it, long before any official alert. If you are anywhere on a coast and the shaking lasted long enough that you struggled to stand, you are already under a self evacuation order; the natural shaking is the warning. You have minutes, not tens of minutes. The international (UNESCO-IOC / ITIC) consensus rule is:

Move to high ground or far inland, aim for 30 m above sea level or 3 km inland, whichever is quicker. Stay there until the all-clear is officially issued. A tsunami is not a single wave; it is a train of waves that may arrive over hours.

Three additional natural warning signs that locals are taught to act on, with or without an official alert:

• The sea pulls out unusually far, exposing the bottom of the bay or harbour. This is the trough of the incoming wave; the crest is minutes away.
• An unusual roar from the ocean like an approaching train, even with the water still calm.
• Animals fleeing inland en masse.

When you see signage on a beach in Japan, Chile, Indonesia, New Zealand, or the U.S. West Coast that depicts a stylised wave with an arrow pointing inland-and-upward, that is your evacuation route. Walk it once when you arrive at any coastal hotel; do not wait for the day you need it.

Country brief: where travellers go

Country-by-country, what the alert system is and what shaking is like to experience.

Japan

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) operates the world’s most mature Earthquake Early Warning system, delivered to phones, televisions, and public-address systems within seconds of seismic detection, often giving 10 to 60 seconds of warning before strong shaking arrives at your location. Listen for it on your phone (it overrides silent mode in Japan and announces in Japanese; the JMA app provides English).

Japan uses its own intensity scale, the Shindo, running 0 (imperceptible) to 7 (severe structural damage). Shindo 5-lower (5弱) is roughly the threshold at which untrained people start to panic; Shindo 6-lower (6弱) is the threshold at which most modern buildings are still safe but many older buildings are not. Tsunami advisories are colour-coded (advisory / warning / major warning) and broadcast on every coastal siren and TV channel.

Mexico

SASMEX (Sistema de Alerta Sísmica Mexicano) is the national early-warning network. In Mexico City, you will hear it on public-address speakers as a distinctive rising tone followed by a verbal alert, typically giving 30 to 90 seconds of notice for events on the Pacific subduction zone. Mexico City sits on a former lakebed and amplifies long-period shaking, this is why the city feels distant, large earthquakes more strongly than the magnitude alone would predict. Drop, cover, hold on; expect the alert to ring before you feel anything.

Chile

The most earthquake-prepared country in the world: a 2010 magnitude 8.8 event killed 525 people, an order of magnitude fewer than would be expected for that magnitude in less-prepared nations, due to the 1972 building code. SENAPRED issues alerts; ONEMI handled emergencies historically. Coastal evacuation signage is among the clearest globally.

Indonesia

BMKG operates the seismic and tsunami network. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami led to the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System; coastal signage in Bali, Lombok, and the Mentawais now routes evacuees inland or to designated high ground. In rural areas, follow the natural-warning rule above, do not wait for sirens.

New Zealand

GeoNet (operated by GNS Science) provides public seismic data and the public guidance “Long or Strong, Get Gone” for tsunami self evacuation. Wellington and Christchurch have extensive signage. Fault rupture in the South Island can produce coastal subsidence as well as tsunami; if shaking is severe, evacuate without waiting for an official message.

U.S. West Coast

ShakeAlert (operated by USGS) provides early warning across California, Oregon, and Washington via the MyShake and similar apps and via wireless emergency alerts to phones. California and Oregon both teach Drop-Cover-Hold-On in public schools annually. Coastal Oregon and Washington are at risk of a Cascadia-subduction event with a tsunami component; evacuation maps are posted at every state-park trailhead on the coast.

Italy, Türkiye, Iran

The historical-cities risk: a large fraction of accommodation in these regions is in masonry buildings that predate modern seismic codes. The 2009 L’Aquila, 2016 Amatrice, 2023 Kahramanmaraş, and 2017 Kermanshah events were all heavy in older masonry. If you are travelling in a historic centre, consider requesting accommodation in a newer building when booking, especially if you sleep above the ground floor.

Magnitude vs intensity (and why a M5 in one place is a M5 in every place)

When you read a USGS or JMA alert, two numbers do different jobs.

• Magnitude (M) is one number per earthquake. It quantifies the energy released at the source. A magnitude 5.0 in Italy is the same magnitude as a 5.0 in Indonesia.
• Intensity,Modified Mercalli (MMI), or in Japan the Shindo scale, varies by location and describes how strongly the shaking is felt. A magnitude 6.5 might produce intensity VII in a city directly above the epicentre and intensity III a hundred kilometres away.

For a traveller, intensity is the more useful number. A USGS “Did You Feel It?” map shows reported MMI by region. JMA Shindo maps colour-code by district. If you are reading a post event map, find the intensity at your location, not the headline magnitude.

The traveller’s go bag

You are not preparing for a week-long disaster. You are preparing to walk out of a hotel that has lost power and water, find your travel partner, locate medical care if needed, and reach an airport or rail station that may be operating on limited service for the next 24 to 72 hours. The kit fits in a small daypack and lives beside your luggage.

• Closed-toe walking shoes beside the bed every night. Glass on the floor is the most common minor injury.
• A small head torch with fresh batteries, not your phone’s torch, which drains your battery.
• Power bank, charged. 10,000 mAh is enough for 3 to 4 phone recharges.
• 1.5 L of water per person in your hotel room.
• A photocopy of your passport and your country’s embassy contact, in your wallet, not just on your phone.
• Cash, in small notes, in two locations. Card networks fail in regional outages.
• Any prescription medication for at least 72 hours, in your day pack rather than checked luggage.
• An N95 mask or two. Post-event air can carry pulverised concrete dust at concentrations dangerous over hours.
• Whistle. 30g, useful only in the rare bad case but extraordinarily useful then.
• One paper map of the city you are in, with the embassy and the nearest hospital marked.

The single best preparedness habit is the cheapest: when you check into a hotel in a seismic country, read the evacuation map on the back of the door, and identify the nearest stairwell. This takes 90 seconds and saves you the worst-case mistake.

One more time

Drop. Cover. Hold On. Wait until the shaking stops. Move calmly. Stairs, not lifts. Text, not voice. If you are on a coast and the shaking was long or strong, get to high ground without waiting for an alert. The country specific apps and signage do the rest.