I know you didn't mean otherwise, but this isn't a trivial matter. Lives are dependent on following a safe course of immediate action during a major earthquake. What the people did in the Judge Judy instance was potentially harmful to them (they could trample each other, or run out to a much more vulnerable place) and people should know what to do -- as advised by the Red Cross and safety experts. And those in earthquake prone areas such as LA should know what to do.
The only problem with that is on those folks who come from out-of-town, from places where there is no known earthquake dangers and not knowing what to do, and as a previous post has said, in this post-9/11 age and what we had seen in China a few months back with its recent major earthquake disaster it is not suprising how the folks there responded.