The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

Now, having lived through the experience of the global Covid-19 pandemic, we are all disaster survivors,

warnings, whether they are about tsunamis or wildfires or floods, will only help us if we can trust them. And if we trust one another enough to act on them in a coordinated way, before disaster strikes.

Many of the worst disasters in history started quite modestly. One accident led to another,

resilience, that elixir of survival.

“In helping others understand,” she once wrote in an email, “I am reaffirmed as to the reason I survived.”

Some of the most common disasters are the least feared.

we trend toward arrogance. About 90 percent of drivers think they drive more safely than the average driver. Most people also think they are less likely than others to get divorced, have heart disease, or get fired. And three out of four baby boomers think they look younger than their peers.

The Lake Wobegon effect may be warped, but it helps us deal. We can process horrible events more readily if we assume we will be exempt from future suffering.

Hurricanes are especially tricky because we have to respond to them before things get ugly. We have to evacuate when the skies are clear and blue.

In a study in the United Kingdom, one volunteer suggested that flight attendants, instead of asking passengers to “leave all hand baggage behind,” tell passengers why they should do so. They could simply say this, the volunteer suggested: “Taking luggage will cost lives.”

five years before that crash, Japan Airlines had rolled out a new safety briefing video that used animation to show passengers why they should leave their luggage behind.

there’s a fine line between getting people’s attention and losing them to a sense of futility.

In general, TV makes us worry about the wrong things. Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it’s much healthier to read the news than watch it.

the more interpersonal trust in a given state, as measured by the proportion of people who said they trusted the federal government, the scientific community, and one another before the pandemic, the lower the cumulative death rate during the pandemic,

people perform best when their heart rates are between 115 and 145 beats per minute (resting heart rate is usually about 75 bpm). At this range, people tend to react quickly, see clearly, and manage complex motor skills (like driving).

Today, Shaw trains pilots to proactively scan their instrument panels, over and over again, to counteract the tendency to fixate on one problem.

The best way to negotiate stress is through repeated, realistic training.

By consciously slowing down the breath, we can de-escalate the primal fear response that otherwise takes over.

“The single strongest [weapon] is a mental plan of what you’ll do in a certain crisis.

There are people whom psychologists call “extreme dreaders”—people who have a tendency to live in a state of heightened anxiety.

For the human heart, the strain of a crisis can be far more deadly than the actual threat. That’s why more firefighters die from heart attacks and strokes than from fires.

On 9/11, people with low physical abilities were three times as likely to be injured while evacuating the Trade Center.

“Women tend to be more cautious,”

As it turned out, about 30 percent of white males saw very little risk in most threats.

On 9/11, women were almost twice as likely to get injured while evacuating, according to the Columbia study. Was it a question of strength? Confidence? Fear? No, says lead investigator Robyn Gershon. “It was the shoes.” Many women took off their heels halfway through the evacuation and had to walk home barefoot.

Of all the people who die in fires each year, 25 percent are Black—twice their share of the population. The disparity is most glaring when it comes to children: Black and Native American children are nearly twice as likely to die in a fire than white or Asian children. Fire, as it turns out, is mostly about money. “I never fought a fire in a rich person’s home,”

If a large nation raises its GNP from $2,000 to $14,000 per person, it can expect to save 530 lives a year in natural disasters,

Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.

Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they seem to have in abundance is confidence.

everyone, regardless of IQ, can boost their confidence through training and experience.

confidence comes from doing.

Special Forces soldiers were chemically. When Morgan analyzed their blood samples, he found that the Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called “neuropeptide Y,” a compound that among other things helps you stay focused on a task under stress.

disasters don’t happen to us when we’re alone. Disasters happen to groups of strangers, co-workers, friends, and family who persuade, bolster, and distract each other.

He had assumed that crowds with a common connection (like soccer fans) would behave very differently than anonymous strangers. But it turned out that the disaster itself created an instant bond between people. “Even if they started out quite fragmented, they came together and showed an enormous amount of solidarity,”

After all, humans’ greatest predators have always been other humans.

Human beings, on the other hand, fill a space unevenly, in clusters. They take shortcuts and pause to rest when they can. Once committed to a path, they don’t easily change course.

One thing most people don’t understand about fires is that the smoke is the main event.

fires grow exponentially. Every ninety seconds, a fire roughly doubles in size.

If you wake up in heavy, hot smoke and stand up, you’re already dead from scorched lungs. You have to roll out of bed and crawl to an exit,

The leaders had some things in common. They did not bully their way into power, but they got respect because they seemed calm and credible. They were, like Bailey, knowledgeable, aware of details, and decisive. They were also open to other opinions;

If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared,

The flight attendants screamed at the passengers, just as they’d been trained: “Everyone out the exits at the back! Do not go forward. Move out now!”

they never considered a practice evacuation a waste of time.

all over the world, divers are found dead with plenty of air in their tanks.

Panic is the leading cause of deaths among divers overall. Certain people experience an intense feeling of suffocation when their noses are covered. They respond to that overwhelming sensation by relying on their instinct, which is to rip out whatever is covering their airway.

people with higher trait anxiety are more likely to rip out their air supply,

certain people are slightly more likely to lose touch with their reality when under physical stress.

Even Nassim Taleb, the trader and risk expert, told me he has seen stock traders freeze—while they are losing all of their money. “They just stand there, doing nothing,”

In more modern disasters, in which the threat is not actually another animal, paralysis may be a misfire. Our brains search, under extreme stress, for an appropriate survival response and choose the wrong one, like divers who rip their respirators out of their mouths deep underwater. Or like deer who freeze in the headlights of a car.

The more important point, perhaps, is that the brain is coachable. It can be trained to respond more appropriately.