Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why Read online

  In May of 1960, the largest earthquake ever measured occurred off the coast of Chile, killing a thousand people. Luckily, Hawaii’s automated alert system kicked in, and tsunami sirens went off ten hours before the island was hit. The technology worked exactly as planned. But it turned out that most of the people who heard the siren did not evacuate. They weren’t sure what the noise meant. Some thought it signaled that they should be alert for more information. The technology was there but the traditions weren’t. A total of sixty-one people died in Hawaii that day.

  It’s hard to trace a single cause for why we do what we do under extreme duress. The chapters that follow allow us to test several hypotheses against real disasters. I’ve tried to resist the urge to concoct one grand narrative. But even in that complexity, simple truths emerge. The more disaster survivors I met, the more convinced I became that the solutions to our problems were not necessarily complicated. They were more social than technological. Some were old-fashioned. But we need to understand how our brain works in disasters before we can save ourselves.

  Before we go any further, it’s probably wise to acknowledge that the vast majority of Westerners do not die in disasters; they die of diseases that attack from within, not violence that comes from outside. Alzheimer’s disease kills many more people than fire. Even if you do make a particularly dramatic exit, it probably won’t be in a disaster. You are more likely to die of food poisoning than you are of drowning.

  It is, however, quite likely that you will be affected by a disaster. In an August 2006 Time magazine poll of one thousand Americans, about half of those surveyed said they had personally experienced a disaster or public emergency. In fact, about 91 percent of Americans live in places at a moderate-to-high risk of earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, high-wind damage, or terrorism, according to an estimate calculated in 2006 for Time by the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina.

  Traditionally, the word disaster refers to any sudden calamity causing great loss of life or property. You’ll notice that in this book I veer off into misfortunes that don’t technically fit: car accidents and shootings, for example. But I want to include these everyday tragedies for two reasons. First, because human behavior is the same, whether we are in a cruise ship or a Honda. We can, strange as it may sound, learn how we will behave in earthquakes from studying how we behave in a holdup, and vice versa. Car accidents and shooting rampages are, like airplane crashes, modern calamities that we did not evolve to survive.

  The other reason to define disasters broadly is that small tragedies add up to megadisasters. Cumulatively, car accidents kill forty thousand people in the United States each year. Everyone reading this book knows someone who died in a car accident. Guns kill another thirty thousand Americans every year. For the rippling circles of friends and families that the victims leave behind, a gunshot feels exactly like a disaster, without the national recognition. So I define the word broadly to include all kinds of accidents that kill too many people.

  One last caveat: disasters are predictable, but surviving them is not. No one can promise you a plan of escape. If life—and death—were that simple, this book would already have been written. But that doesn’t mean we should live in willful ignorance, either. As Hunter S. Thompson said, “Call on God, but row away from the rocks.”

  We need to get to know our oldest personality, the one that takes over in a crisis and even makes fleeting appearances in our daily lives. It is at the core of who we are. “If an engineer wants to know about what he’s designing, he puts it under great amounts of stress,” says Peter Hancock, who has been studying human performance for more than twenty years for the U.S. military. “It’s the same with human beings. If you want to find out how things operate under normal conditions, it’s very interesting to find out how we operate under stress.” Without too much trouble, we can teach our brains to work more quickly, maybe even more wisely, under great stress. We have more control over our fates than we think. But we need to stop underestimating ourselves.

  The knowledge is out there. In laboratories and on shooting ranges, there are people who know what happens to our bodies and minds under extreme duress. Scientists who study the brain’s fear response can now see which parts of our brains light up under stress. Military researchers conduct elaborate experiments to try to predict who will melt down in a crisis and who will thrive. Police, soldiers, race car drivers, and helicopter pilots train to anticipate the strange behaviors they will encounter at the worst of times. They know that it’s too late to learn those lessons in the midst of a crisis.

  Then there are the survivors of disasters, the witnesses who channel the voices of the victims. They were there, sitting next to them, seeing what they saw. And afterward, the survivors spend some portion of their lives thinking about why they lived when so many did not. They were lucky, all of them. Luck is unreliable. But almost all of the survivors I have met say there are things they wish they had known, things they want you to know.

  Unfortunately, all of these good people rarely talk to one another. Airplane safety experts don’t trade stories with neuroscientists. Special Forces instructors don’t spend a lot of time with hurricane victims. And none of these people have much opportunity to share what they know with regular people. So their wisdom remains stashed away in a sort of black box of the human experience.

  This book goes inside the black box and stays there. The Unthinkable is not a book about disaster recovery; it’s about what happens in the midst—before the police and firefighters arrive, before reporters show up in their rain slickers, before a structure is imposed on the loss. This is a book about the survival arc we all must travel to get from danger to safety.

  The Survival Arc

  In every kind of disaster, we start in about the same place and travel through three phases. We’ll call the first phase denial. Except in extremely dire cases, we tend to display a surprisingly creative and willful brand of denial. This denial can take the form of delay, which can be fatal, as it was for some on 9/11. But why do we do it, if it is so dangerous? What other functions does denial serve?

  How long the delay lasts depends in large part on how we calculate risk. Our risk analysis depends less upon facts than upon a shadowy sense of dread, as Chapter 2 details through the story of a man waiting for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

  Once we get through the initial shock of the denial phase, we move into deliberation, the second phase of the survival arc. We know something is terribly wrong, but we don’t know what to do about it. How do we decide? The first thing to understand is that nothing is normal. We think and perceive differently. We become superheroes with learning disabilities. Chapter 3 explores the anatomy of fear through the story of a diplomat taken hostage at a cocktail party. “There are times when fear is good,” Aeschylus said. “It must keep its watchful place at the heart’s controls.” But for every gift the body gives us in a disaster, it takes at least one away—sometimes bladder control, other times vision.

  We all share a basic fear response. So why do some people get out of a burning building while others do not? Chapter 4 investigates resilience, that elixir of survival. Who has it? Does gender matter? What about personality or race? But almost no one goes through a disaster alone. Chapter 5 is about groupthink, the effect of the crowd on our deliberation. How well our group functions depends largely on who is in the group. Whom we live and work with matters.

  Finally, we reach the third phase of the survival arc: the decisive moment. We’ve accepted that we are in danger; we’ve deliberated our options. Now we take action. We’ll start with the exception. Chapter 6 is about panic, the most misunderstood behavior in the disaster repertoire. What does it take to spark a panic? And what does it feel like to be caught in one?

  Many—if not most—people tend to shut down entirely in a disaster, quite the opposite of panicking. They go slack and seem to lose all awareness. But their paralysis can
be strategic. Chapter 7 will take us into the horrific Virginia Tech shooting rampage, the deadliest in U.S. history, through the eyes of a fortunate student who did nothing.

  Next, we will consider the opposite of nothing. Chapter 8 investigates the hero. What possible evolutionary explanation could there be for a man who jumps into a frozen river to save strangers?

  Finally, we think bigger: how can we turn ourselves into better survivors? We’ll meet revolutionaries who have trained regular people to survive, according to how our brains actually work—individuals who have taught entire towns to escape tsunami and major corporations to flee a skyscraper.

  The three chronological phases—denial, deliberation, and the decisive moment—make up the structure of this book. Real life doesn’t usually follow a linear arc, of course. Sometimes the path to survival is more like a looping roller coaster, doubling up and back upon itself as we struggle to find true north. So within each section you will notice that we often glimpse the other stages. There is, unfortunately, no single script in these situations. But it’s rare that anyone survives a disaster without pushing—or being pushed—through each of these three main stages at least once.

  On our tour of the black box, I will take you down a stairwell in the World Trade Center, onto a sinking ship in the Baltic Sea, and out of a burning airplane that forever changed the way safety experts thought about passengers. The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions: What happens to us in the midst of a disaster? And why do some of us do so much better than others? Our disaster personalities are more complex and ancient than we think. But they are also more malleable.

  Part One

  Denial

  1

  Delay

  Procrastinating in Tower 1

  ON FEBRUARY 26, 1993, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center for the first time, Elia Zedeño was in an express elevator carrying a slice of Sbarro’s pizza. She had taken a new temporary worker to the food court to show him around, and they were on their way back to their desks. When the bomb exploded, they heard a loud pop and the elevator stopped and began to descend. Then it stopped for good, trapping her and five other people. Smoke began to slowly coil in from below. Two men grappled with the door. A woman dropped to her knees and started praying, making Zedeño nervous. Then one of the men calmly directed everyone to get low and cover their faces. They all did as they were told.

  Zedeño concentrated on keeping her breathing shallow and slow. But the more she tried to calm down, the harder her heart seemed to pound. Then they heard a man screaming in the elevator next to them. “I’m burning up!” he yelled as he banged on the metal box around him. But soon he was quiet. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to be next,’” Zedeño says. She visualized rescue workers finding them dead inside the elevator later. Just then, she thought she would lunge for the doors and start banging herself. But before she could, the temp had started doing it for her. He was screaming and banging. So Zedeño took charge of quieting him down. “Robert, calm down. You’re going to inhale too much smoke,” she told him. He started to cough and returned to the floor.

  It was around then that Zedeño was filled with a wave of peace, inexplicably. “Regardless of the outcome, I knew everything was going to be OK,” she remembers. “My breath became effortless. My mind no longer wandered. Suddenly, I wasn’t there anymore. I was just watching. I could see the people lying in the elevator. The sounds were far away, and I was just hovering. I had no emotions.”

  When they’d been in the elevator for about an hour, a firefighter managed to rip open the door and pull them out. It turned out the car had returned to the lobby level, and that’s where they’d been all along. Zedeño could not see the face of the firefighter who pulled her out; the smoke was too thick. She did as he instructed, grabbing onto a rope and following it out through the lobby and out the doors. She was stunned by the darkness in the lobby and the emptiness outside. She thought that once she had made it out of her own private catastrophe, everything would be normal, bustling and bright. She never imagined that a place could look so different.

  In the basement below, a Ryder truck full of eleven hundred pounds of explosives had left a crater five stories deep. Six people had died. It was the largest full-building evacuation in U.S. history, and nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go. Smoke purled up the stairways. The power failed, rendering the emergency communications system useless and the stairways dark. People moved extraordinarily slowly. Ten hours after the explosion, firefighters were still finding people who had not yet evacuated in their offices.

  After the bombing, glow-in-the-dark tape and backup power generators were installed in the Trade Center. Both helped save lives eight years later. But still no one fully answered the fundamental question: why did people move so slowly? And what did it mean about all of our assumptions about skyscrapers—and the Trade Center in particular? The 1993 bombing became a story about terrorism, as would the attacks on the same buildings eight years later, and rightly so. But they were also stories of procrastination and denial, the first phase of the human disaster experience.

  A few days later, Zedeño was right back at work in a neighboring building. One month later, her office reopened on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. She started riding the same elevator to work. But it was months before she could get the taste of soot out of her mouth. She thought about leaving the towers, but not with any conviction. “I remember saying, ‘This could happen again.’ And someone said, ‘Lightning never strikes twice.’”

  “Don’t Worry. It’s in Your Head!”

  Zedeño has a small stature, round glasses, and Dizzy Gillespie cheeks when she smiles, which happens often. She came to America with her family from Cuba when she was eleven. Her parents had spent her entire childhood plotting to get away from Fidel Castro. When they finally got permission to leave in the early 1970s, they moved to West New York, New Jersey, where their daughter could see the brand-new Trade Center Towers sunning themselves almost everywhere she went.

  When she was nineteen, Zedeño visited the Trade Center for the first time. She came to apply for a secretarial job with the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. She had no idea what the Port Authority did—or even that it owned the Trade Center—but a girlfriend convinced her to fill out the application. When she returned for her second interview, her mother came with her. The boss hired her on the spot, and, on her lunch break, Zedeño ran to the plaza to tell her mother. “What will you do?” she asked her mother, who had no idea how to get home to New Jersey. “I will sit right here and wait for you,” her mother announced. They took the train home together that evening.

  Eventually, Zedeño got promoted to the finance section. Her office had regular fire drills, which consisted of gathering in the hallway to gossip. During a blackout in 1990, she and her office mates walked down the tower’s stairs. That’s how they learned that homeless people had been using the lower stairwells as bathrooms. “We were laughing and talking,” she remembers. When Zedeño talks, her voice goes up at the end of her sentences, like a child telling you something outrageous. “The whole thing was a joke!”

  Zedeño is a witness wherever she goes. She remembers life in surround-sound detail. When I ask her what it was like to leave Cuba as a little girl, she tells me about the day she left in April of 1971. Her mother was doing her hair when they heard the sound of a motorcycle. “Only one man in town had a motorcycle, and it didn’t sound like that,” she says. Suddenly, the sound stopped in front of their house. A soldier walked in the front door without knocking and told them to leave. Zedeño knew this was good news: they had finally won permission to go to America. Fifteen minutes later, they left their house forever. They were terrified the whole journey out, but they made it. When they arrived in Miami, Zedeño ran down the aisles of a supermarket yelling out descriptions of everything she saw.

  By September 2001, Zedeño had worked in the towers for over twenty-one years. She was forty-one years o
ld, and she managed five employees on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. Her group oversaw the Port Authority’s engineering consultants. On 9/11, Zedeño got to work a little after 8:00 A.M. She settled into her cubicle and listened to her voice-mail messages. In an hour, she would head up to the cafeteria to get some breakfast, as usual.

  The Trade Center did not feel like a cluster of seven buildings; it felt like a city. Every day, fifty thousand people came to work there, and another two hundred thousand passed through. The plaza underneath held the largest shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. “You didn’t need to leave for anything,” Zedeño says. The complex had 103 elevators—and its own zip code (10048). Bomb threats and small fires were not uncommon. The engine company across the street sometimes got called to the Trade Center eight times a day. Zedeño got used to seeing firefighters in the elevators. Days later, she would hear that there had been smoke somewhere in the building. It might have been two football fields away from her.

  At 8:46 A.M., an American Airlines Boeing 767 traveling 490 mph struck the building eleven floors above her. When the plane hit Zedeño’s building, the effect was not subtle. It obliterated four floors immediately. From her desk, Zedeño heard a booming explosion and felt the building lurch to the south, as if it might topple. It had never done that before, not even in 1993. This time, she grabbed her desk and held on, lifting her feet off the floor. “I actually expected the ceiling to fall and the building to cave in,” she remembers. At the time, she screamed, “What’s happening?”