The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

Only after everything goes wrong do we realize we’re on our own. And the bigger the disaster, the longer we will be on our own. No fire department can be everywhere at once, no matter how good their gear.

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 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.

In hindsight, it’s always easy to craft a narrative for any disaster: to see all the signs stacking up like dominoes, if only we’d been paying attention. But that’s not what happened with Hurricane Katrina. It was that most unusual of fiascoes: almost nothing was a surprise. “This was not a comet hitting us,” says Stephen Leatherman, director of the International Hurricane Research Center in Miami. “This is Hurricane Alley.” Leatherman has studied hurricanes for thirty years. In 2002, he wrote a paper warning that Louisiana had lost many of its natural defenses against storms and New Orleans was particularly vulnerable.

We gauge risk literally hundreds of times per day, usually well and often subconsciously. For more predictable calamities, the first phase of disaster think actually begins with this calculus. We start assessing risk before the disaster even happens. We are doing it right now. We decide where to live and what kind of insurance to buy, just like we process all kinds of everyday risks: we wear bike helmets, or not. We buckle our seat belts, smoke a cigarette, and let our kids stay out until midnight. Or not.

As it turned out, the veteran Louisianans were half right: Katrina was indeed less powerful than Camille. Had the world stood still since then, they would have been just fine. In Mediocristan, they would have survived. But since Camille, rapid development had destroyed much of the wetlands that had created a natural barrier against storm surge. The force field, in other words, was down. Humankind had literally changed the shape of the earth, and we had done it faster, thanks to technology, than we could have throughout most of history. This fact was well reported in popular media. But the firsthand experience of Camille was more powerful than any warning.

As it turned out, the victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor; they were disproportionately old. Three-quarters of the dead were over sixty, according to the Knight Ridder analysis. Half were over seventy-five. They had been middle-aged when Hurricane Camille struck. “I think Camille killed more people during Katrina than it did in 1969,” says Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center. “Experience is not always a good teacher.”

The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability. If we really were just concerned with preventing the most likely causes of death, we would worry more about falling down than we would about homicide. The nightly news would feature back-to-back segments on tragic heart-attack deaths. And we might spend more money on therapists than police (you are twice as likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime). It’s as if we don’t fear death itself so much as dying. We fear the how, not so much the what.

By 2010, an estimated 70 percent of Americans will live within a hundred miles of a coast—where hurricanes, floods, and tropical storms are annual rites. Floridians, in particular, live dangerously. But they aren’t alone. Texas and California are the country’s other riskiest states. (The least hazardous are Vermont, Delaware, and Rhode Island. Fabulously boring places.)

you have heard flight attendants explain how to put on an oxygen mask, should it drop down from the ceiling of the plane. “Secure your own mask before helping others,” the warning goes. But the flight attendant does not tell you why. Imagine if you were told that, in the event of a rapid decompression, you would only have ten to fifteen seconds before you lost consciousness. Aha. Then you might understand why you should put your mask on before you help your child. You might understand that if you don’t put your mask on first, you’ll both be unconscious before you can say, “how does this thing work?” Suddenly the warning would not just sound like a nagging legalese; it would sound like common sense. It would motivate.

If Asencio responded like most people, the chemistry of his blood literally changed so that it would be able to coagulate more easily. At the same time, his blood vessels constricted so that he would bleed less if he got hurt. His blood pressure and his heart rate shot up. And a slew of hormones—in particular cortisol and adrenaline—surged through his system, giving his gross-motor muscles a sort of bionic boost. (The hormones are so powerful that, after a life-or-death situation, many people report having an odd, chemical taste in their mouths.) But the next rule of fear is that for every gift it gives us, it takes one away. Like a country under attack, the human body has limited resources. The brain must decide what to prioritize and what to neglect. Our muscles become taut and ready. Our body creates its own natural painkillers. But our abilities to reason and perceive our surroundings deteriorate. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. We suddenly have trouble solving problems, even simple ones—like how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seat belt. All of our senses are profoundly altered.

Some reflexes cannot be entirely overridden, of course. The human startle response, for example, is something we possess from the womb. The first 150 milliseconds of the startle response begin with a very small but reliable reaction. We blink. Like almost all of the fear responses, blinking serves a useful purpose—by potentially protecting our eyes from harm. (In laboratory experiments, people blink even more rapidly when they see unpleasant images.) Meanwhile, our head and upper body automatically lean forward, and the arms bend at the elbow—positioning the body to fight, cower, or flee. Instantly, the hands begin to tighten into fists—generating about twenty-five pounds of pressure in adults.

How could something so simple be so powerful? The breath is one of the few actions that reside in both our somatic nervous system (which we can consciously control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot easily access). So the breath is a bridge between the two, as combat instructor Dave Grossman explains. By consciously slowing down the breath, we can de-escalate the primal fear response that otherwise takes over.

There are people whom psychologists call “extreme dreaders”—people who have a tendency to live in a state of heightened anxiety. Then there are people like Shacham. What makes him able to negotiate extreme fear so well? How does he navigate through the fog of deliberation without a map? When I ask him this question, he says it’s not that he doesn’t feel fear; he does, every time. But a calmness resides just adjacent to the fear. “You have to be very cold-blooded,” he says. But what makes someone “cold-blooded”? Is it genetics? Experience? A chemical imbalance? What makes the difference?

Resilient people aren’t necessarily yoga-practicing Buddhists. One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear. A few recent studies have found that people who are unrealistically confident tend to fare spectacularly well in disasters. Psychologists call these people “self-enhancers,” but you and I would probably call them arrogant. These are people who think more highly of themselves than other people think of them. They tend to come off as annoying and self-absorbed. In a way, they might be better adapted to crises than they are to real life.

But Gilbertson found something different. When he looked at the images, he saw that, within the twin sets, the hippocampi were about the same size. The trauma of war had not significantly altered the size of the hippocampus in the brothers who had gone to Vietnam. But there were significant differences between sets of twins. The twin sets that included vets with posttraumatic stress disorder had smaller hippocampi than the twin sets that included veterans without the disorder. In other words, a smaller hippocampus seemed to predate the trauma. Certain people were at higher risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder before they even left for Vietnam. We can deduce, then, that certain people will likely have a harder time processing fear in a disaster—and recovering from that trauma later.

This is the deadly “faster-is-slower” effect, as crowd experts call it. Above a certain speed, people moving for an exit will actually get out much later than if they had moved more slowly. An arch of bodies is created around an exit as everyone tries to get out at the same time. The friction leads to a clog, which slows down the entire evacuation. Imagine trying to walk out a narrow door moving shoulder to shoulder with five other people. You would knock into one another as you tried to gain access to the opening, spending time and energy squeezing past the other bodies before even getting to the door. If one of you tripped, the jam would become exponentially worse. The faster you tried to leave, in other words, the smaller the doorway would essentially become.

Generally speaking, anxiety comes in two flavors: the first is “state anxiety,” which describes how a person reacts to stressful situations, like a big exam or a traffic jam. The other kind is “trait anxiety,” which refers to a person’s general tendency to see things as stressful to begin with. Trait anxiety, in other words, is your resting level of anxiety on any given day.

Animals that go into paralysis have a better chance of surviving certain kinds of attacks. But why? Why would surrender lead to survival? Wouldn’t it tend to lead to certain death? Well, the explanation, as with all of our fear reactions, goes back to evolutionary adaptation. A lion is more likely to survive to pass on its genes if it avoids eating sick or rotten prey. Many predators lose interest in prey that is not struggling. No fight, no appetite. It’s an ancient way of avoiding food poisoning. And, in turn, prey animals have evolved to try to exploit this opening—by simulating death or illness when they are trapped. It’s not a sure thing; many animals will still get killed this way. But when there are no other options for escape, it’s a reasonable strategy. Paralysis, like heroism, may be more adaptive than it seems.

Some people, like some animals, are clearly more likely to freeze. The behavior is built into their fear response. No one knows exactly why. Genetics are undoubtedly important.

Human beings do not tolerate temperature extremes very well. Other animals—like rats and pigeons—do much better. If you stick one finger in sixty-four-degree Fahrenheit water, you will feel a deep ache after about one minute. With lower temperatures, the pain comes on faster and is more intense. The water Olian jumped into was thirty-four degrees. Here’s what it would feel like to jump into water that cold: first, your heart rate would spike. Your blood pressure would immediately shoot up. Your body would automatically reduce blood flow to the surface of the skin by constricting your blood vessels. Blood travels, so the cold blood on the surface of your skin would eventually make its way to your heart. The constriction of the blood vessels slows down that process, but it also hurts. At the same time, you may experience a sudden urge to urinate. That’s your body’s way of trying to reduce the total fluid volume in your system. Meanwhile, your heart rate would begin to fall, beating fewer times per minute until, without warming, it would eventually stop altogether. As your skin temperature continues to cool, the pain would get worse. It would build up to an almost unbearable intensity. Then suddenly the pain would fade, and it would feel like the water had miraculously gotten warmer. In fact, in order to keep your skin supplied with oxygen, your blood vessels would have dilated, bringing a wave of blood back to the surface of your skin. That’s why your cheeks and nose look re...

Self-sufficiency was a religion for Rescorla. He once told a friend that every man should be able to be sent outside naked with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of the year, he should have a business and a savings account. Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only thirteen Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe.

The website for this book (www.TheUnthinkable.com) has clear-eyed, specific advice based on relative risk—a thinking-person’s survival guide.