The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

“Training should not be limited to members of the fire safety team. Many fire marshals weren’t even in their areas when the incident occurred…. All building occupants need some level of training or education if they are going to react safely to a fire in a high-rise.”

thousands of people did not even know where the stairs were.

the victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor; they were disproportionately old.

sunshine strongly correlated with daily stock returns—in ways that couldn’t easily be explained by any other factors. If it was sunny in the morning, stocks were more likely to go up.

(Sharks kill an average of six people worldwide every year. Humans kill between 26 and 73 million sharks. This is not a battle humans are losing.)

(Police have also learned to exploit tunnel vision in others by intentionally stepping to the side to get into a suspect’s blind spot.)

when I ask combat trainers how people can master their fear, this is what they talk about. Of course, they call it “combat breathing” or “tactical breathing” when they teach it to Green Berets and FBI agents. But it’s the same basic concept taught in yoga and Lamaze classes. One version taught to police works like this: breathe in for four counts; hold for four counts; breathe out for four counts; hold for four; start again. That’s it.

For a long time, engineers assumed people would move out of a building like water. They would fill the space they had, coursing down the staircases and flowing out to safety like a river of humanity. Buildings were constructed accordingly. The problem is, people don’t move like water.

Water molecules don’t make decisions, and they don’t stumble or fall. 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. Groupthink has a momentum of its own.

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

Flashover, when the flammable smoke in the air ignites, thereby igniting everything in the room, usually occurs five to eight minutes after the flames appear. At that point, the environment can no longer support human life.

Construction materials are far less fire-resistant today than they were just twenty-five years ago.

As long as human beings have at least one square yard of space each, they can control their own movements. With less than one square yard of space per person, people lose the ability to counter the jostling of others. Small lurches get amplified.