It is not a piece anyone wants to need. It is the piece that, on the small chance it does become relevant, is worth having read.
The five-second decision
Every active incident produces some warning before the centre of it reaches you. Gunfire is usually heard for several seconds before the shooter is in sight. A crowd surge reaches your block before it reaches you. An explosion is followed by 30–90 seconds of confused noise before the second wave (if there is one) develops. The first signal is the one that matters.
The five-second decision: orient on where the danger is, not on what just happened. People who freeze for ten seconds trying to understand the noise are people who become casualties. People who immediately face away from the noise and move in the opposite direction substantially improve their odds.
Specifically: identify which way is away, and start moving.
Run, hide, tell
The UK and US frameworks converge on the same three-step model for hostile-event response. It is worth memorising.
- Run. If you can put distance between yourself and the danger, do it. Drop bags, take off heels, abandon the meal, leave the laptop. None of it matters next to distance. If you can see the exit, use it. Move past the obvious choke points (front doors of shops, hotel lobbies) and into the side streets. Keep running until you cannot hear the danger.
- Hide. If you cannot run, hide. Inside a solid room (offices, hotel rooms, gym changing rooms) ideally with a lock. Turn lights off. Silence your phone (not vibrate, fully off). Get below window level. Stay there until law enforcement is clearly in control or the immediate noise has stopped for at least 10 minutes.
- Tell. Once you are safe, ring the emergency number (the Warnely country guides carry the local number; in the EU it is 112; in the US it is 911). Tell the operator your location, what you saw, and the direction the attacker was moving in. Stay on the line.
The order matters. The hardest discipline is not to default to 'tell' first. The phone call is what you do after you are out of the danger zone.
Specific scenario notes
Active shooter. Move away from open sightlines first. Concrete or brick walls stop bullets; interior plaster walls do not. Solid steel doors block, glass and panel doors do not. The vast majority of casualties happen in the first three minutes; getting out of the immediate building, even into the street, materially improves survival odds.
Vehicle-borne attack (truck/car ramming a crowd). The direction of attack is set by the direction of the road. Move perpendicular to the road, not along it. Get behind a fixed barrier (planter, bollard, parked van, masonry pillar) if you cannot clear the road, then keep moving once the immediate threat has passed.
Explosion. The first explosion is not necessarily the largest. Many sustained attacks involve a primary device to create a casualty cluster and a secondary device timed for the responding crowd. Get away from the bomb site, do not stop to film, do not gather to help unless you have medical training. The most experienced first responders evacuate every untrained person from a scene before they begin work.
Crowd surge or stampede. The killer is compression, not trampling. Stay upright. Move with the crowd rather than against it. If the crowd is moving fast, raise your arms (boxer's stance) to protect your chest cavity from compression. Identify a fixed object (lamp post, doorway) that can break the wave and head for it.
Civil unrest that escalates. Get off the main street and out of sight lines from police lines and protester groups. Both ends of a kettle become dangerous quickly. Move into a side street, a hotel lobby, a shop. Hotel lobbies and embassies have historically been willing to admit foreign nationals seeking shelter even if they are not registered guests.
Things not to do
Three patterns recur in after-action reports.
- Do not film. Phone-out tourists are the most common 'second-wave' casualties at incidents that develop over 15+ minutes. Get away first; the footage of the building from a distance is far more useful to investigators than a 90-second clip taken from 30 metres.
- Do not return to retrieve belongings. Passports, money, electronics, all replaceable. The five-minute decision to go back to the hotel room for the suitcase is the decision that has cost most of the foreign-tourist deaths in recent vehicle and shooter attacks.
- Do not believe the first 'all clear'. Operational pauses in active incidents are common. A 30-second silence does not mean the danger is over. Wait for clear law-enforcement instruction or 10+ minutes of continuous quiet, whichever is longer.
The 15-minute checklist after you are safe
Assuming you have made it out of the immediate danger zone:
- Confirm you are safe, in a location with a closing door and lighting, away from windows facing the incident.
- Account for the people you are with. A quick name-check now, not a search later.
- Ring the local emergency number with the location and direction information you have.
- Message one trusted contact at home with two words: 'I am safe', plus your location. This is more useful than a long explanation because it propagates faster.
- Open the country page on Warnely or the equivalent national service for the embassy contact and local advisories. The country-specific live-alerts page is refreshed continuously during active events.
- Avoid social media for at least an hour. The information environment in the first 60 minutes of an incident is dominated by inaccurate rumours, and posting a 'I'm safe' to public social can attract attention from criminal opportunists.
After 15 minutes you are into the 24-hour playbook: embassy contact, insurer notification, onward travel decisions, family communication.
The deeper point
Almost everyone caught in an active incident abroad has 90 seconds of warning before the decision becomes binary. Survival comes from the discipline to act on that 90 seconds rather than spend it processing what is happening. The 'run-hide-tell' framework exists for exactly that reason; it gives you a default action when your conscious processing has not caught up with the situation yet.
Most travellers reading this will, statistically, never need it. The minute spent reading it is the cheapest insurance available for the small chance that they do.