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April 3 - April 3, 2022
“Catastrophe and Social Change,” published in 1920, was the first systematic analysis of human behavior in a disaster. “Life becomes like molten metal,” he wrote. “Old customs crumble, and instability rules.”
His thesis opened with a quote from St. Augustine: “This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.”
They felt so lucky—or guilty or scarred—that they hadn’t wanted to make too much noise. But there were tens of thousands of these survivors out there, people who had gone to work in a skyscraper one morning and then spent hours fighting to get out of it. I was curious to hear what had happened to their lives.
terrorist attack, and there was urgency in the room. The survivors were from all different neighborhoods, professions, and ethnicities, but they said very similar, surprising things. They had learned so much that morning, and they wondered why no one had prepared them.
Watching them, I realized these people had glimpsed a part of the human condition that most of us never see.
In firehouses and brain research labs, I learned that if we get to know our disaster personalities before the disaster, we might have a slightly better chance of surviving.
Ironically, after writing a book about disasters, I feel less anxious overall, not more. I am a much better judge of risk now that I understand my own warped equation for dread.
These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time.
For example, did you know that most serious plane accidents are survivable? On this point, the statistics are quite clear. Of all passengers involved in serious accidents between 1983 and 2000, 56 percent survived. (“Serious” is defined by the National Transportation Safety Board as accidents involving fire, severe injury, and substantial aircraft damage.) Moreover, survival often depends on the behavior of the passenger. These facts have been well known in the aviation industry for a long time. But unless people have been in a plane crash, most individuals have no idea.
Why don’t we tell people what to do when the nation is on Orange Alert against a terrorist attack—instead of just telling them to be afraid?
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.
The official report on the response would find one “overarching, fundamental lesson”: emergency plans had been designed to meet the needs of emergency officials, not regular people.
But there are two kinds of evolution: the genetic kind and the cultural kind. Both shape our behavior, and the cultural kind has gotten a lot faster.
We are isolated in our codependence, paradoxically.
We evolved through passing on our genes—and our wisdom—from generation to generation. But today, the kinds of social ties that used to protect us from threats get neglected. In their place, we have substituted new technology, which only works some of the time.
The technology was there but the traditions weren’t. A total of sixty-one people died in Hawaii that day.
It is, however, quite likely that you will be affected by a disaster.
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.”
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,
We have more control over our fates than we think. But we need to stop underestimating ourselves.
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.
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.
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.
This denial can take the form of delay, which can be fatal, as it was for some on 9/11.
But for every gift the body gives us in a disaster, it takes at least one away—sometimes bladder control, other times vision.
“Actual human behavior in fires is somewhat different from the ‘panic’ scenario. What is regularly observed is a lethargic response,”
believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. Psychologists call this tendency “normalcy bias.”
But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor.
So we err on the side of underreacting.
This “milling” ritual is part of the second phase of deliberation. How and with whom you mill can dramatically influence your chances of survival. For now, it’s fair to say that milling is a useful process that can take a painfully long time to complete.
This gathering process is common in life-or-death situations. Facing a void of unknown, we want to be prepared with as many supplies as possible. And, as with normalcy bias, we find comfort in our usual habits. (In a survey of 1,444 survivors after the attacks, 40 percent would say they gathered items before leaving.)
Since the first skyscraper was built in 1885 in Chicago, these monuments to human engineering have been designed without much consideration for how human beings actually behave. The people who work in skyscrapers have never been required to undergo regular full-evacuation drills, which could dramatically improve their escape times. When they do have drills, most people see them as a waste of time. They overestimate how well their minds will perform in a real crisis. When the alarm goes off, they know they are being interrupted and inconvenienced, but they don’t necessarily know how much they
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As Zedeño puts it, “I could not afford to dwell on it. My job was to just take it one step at a time.”
She doesn’t know what happened to them. “Their voices stayed with me. I can still hear them now. Their voices haunted me for a long time.”
Logically, the study’s authors concluded: “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.” It wasn’t enough to rely upon volunteer fire marshals or even firefighters. People needed to be able to get out on their own.
Information and responsibility remained the province of the exclusive few—the building’s fire safety director, the Port Authority police, and other first responders. The role of regular people was to await orders.
Meanwhile, the relatively cheap addition of glow-in-the-dark strips along the stairs after 1993 made the evacuation much easier, survivors reported. But many thousands of people did not even know where the stairs were. Fewer than half the survivors had ever entered the stairwells before, the NIST report found. Only 45 percent of 445 Trade Center workers interviewed after 9/11 had known the buildings even had three stairwells, according to the early results of a study conducted at Columbia University.
Denial is the most insidious fear response of all. It lurks in places we never think to look. The more I learned, the more denial seemed to matter all the time, even long before the disaster, on days that pass by without incident.
He was hedged every which way. “I never have blown up, and I never will,” he likes to say.
But today, we live in a place Taleb calls “Extremistan,” subject to the “tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen and the unpredicted.” Technology has allowed us to create weaponry that can strafe the planet in minutes. Lone individuals can alter the course of history. People kill each other every day without much physical exertion. And, at the same time, we have become ever more interdependent. What happens on one continent now has consequences for another.
As it turned out, the victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor; they were disproportionately old. Three-quarters of the dead were over sixty,
“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.”
Now ask yourself whether these most-likely scenarios are also the ones you worry about more than any other. Are these the risks you actively work hardest to avoid? Do you start each day with twenty minutes of meditation? Do you work out for at least thirty minutes a day? When you swim in the ocean, are you more terrified of getting sunburned than you are of getting bit by a shark?
The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability.
Risk = Probability × Consequence × Dread/Optimism
Dread. Rarely does a label used by scientists so aptly fit the emotion it describes. Think of dread as humanity in a word. It represents all of our evolutionary fears, hopes, lessons, prejudices, and distortions wrapped up in one dark X factor.
So here, with apologies to those experts for reducing their findings to a formula, is what I think the equation for dread might look like: Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness
“The greatest cost of terrorism may be the public’s response to the attacks rather than the attacks themselves,” the authors note.
People who drive because they fear flying are not really looking for physical safety, explains Tom Bunn, a former commercial airline pilot who now counsels people with a fear of flying. “What they’re looking for is emotional safety.”
Some of the most common disasters are the least feared. Fire, for example, usually kills more Americans each year than most other disasters combined.
