The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

Standing there in the dark, the crowd was waiting to be led.

An estimated 60 percent of the employees tried to help in some way—either by directing guests to safety or fighting the fire. By comparison, only 17 percent of the guests helped.

Grown men trapped underground would rather make a potentially fatal decision than be left alone.

Evolutionary biology has a hypothesis to account for small conspicuous acts of kindness,” says animal behavior expert John Alcock. “My guess is that the people who assisted others in the World Trade Center knew that others were observing. They were not calculating, but their desire to commit some nice act—commiserating, directing, guiding others to safety, might have had a substantial payoff in terms of improved reputation.” There may have also been something calming about helping others that day; it lent a sense of normalcy and orderliness to the abnormal and disorderly.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of her other friends leave with her husband. They had medical training, but they left. She was appalled. “You just don’t leave.” The women had been close friends, and McCollister was supposed to be in the woman’s wedding shortly after her own. But she never spoke to her again. The woman had abandoned the group.

Fire modeling had only just begun, and the United Kingdom led the world. After London burned down twice—in 1212 and 1666—the country became a world model for fire safety.

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.

The United States has been “very backward in adopting this kind of technology in the design stage,” he says. “It’s very dangerous.” Before 9/11, most U.S. buildings were constructed without the help of any evacuation modeling at all, he says. Now, models are in vogue, but they vary dramatically in quality. Many of them still treat people like water.

One thing most people don’t understand about fires is that the smoke is the main event. It is what makes it nearly impossible to find your way out. Your eyes literally close to protect you from the smoke, and you can’t get them open again. It’s an involuntary defense mechanism. Smoke is also by far the thing most likely to kill you. Firefighters rarely see a burned body. Toxic smoke from a smoldering fire can kill you in your sleep before any flames are even visible. That’s why it’s so important to have a smoke detector with a working battery.

Noise is the other thing most people do not expect in fires. In general, noise dramatically increases stress, and stress, as we know, makes it much harder to think and make decisions.

Every ninety seconds, a fire roughly doubles in size. Flashover,

That’s why Gist spends much of his time trying to get people to put batteries in their smoke detectors and practice evacuating before a fire, so that escaping becomes automatic. Echoing every disaster expert I’ve ever met, Gist says, “If you have to stop and think it through, then you will not have time to survive.”

Instead, he did something remarkable, something many other people would not do. He went into the bar next to the Zebra Room and shouted, “Everyone out! There’s a fire.”

I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There’s a fire at the front of the building.” Then he walked back off the stage.

They were guests, and guests aren’t generally expected to go back into burning buildings.

If disasters breed groups, then groups need leaders. In a study of three mine fires published by the U.S. government in 2000, the eight groups that escaped each had a leader. 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; in many of the escape groups, a sort of second lieutenant emerged to help the leader.

When facing an enemy, they become even more militaristic. They have a better chance of surviving if they obey without hesitation, says chimp expert Frans de Waal. A strong leader can make decisions fast, which is what you need in a crisis. “Hierarchy,” says de Waal, “is more efficient than democracy.”

And in plane crashes, remember, you usually have a matter of seconds, not minutes, to get out.

People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster.

a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study

If they don’t, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. “We try to get their attention. And we don’t always use the prettiest language,”

‘When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!’ she tends to listen.”

The healthier an office culture or family, the better it can absorb stress and recover. High-functioning groups know how to communicate and help one another, and they have the resources to do it. Even at the cellular level, camaraderie promotes survival. Multiple studies have found that people with supportive social networks tend to have stronger immune systems.

Human beings have dealt with killer waves for thousands of years, as have animals. Hours before the 2004 tsunami, a dozen elephants being ridden by tourists started suddenly trumpeting. One hour before the wave hit, the elephants headed to high ground—some of them even breaking their chains to get there. After the tsunami, wildlife officials at Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park were shocked to find that hundreds of elephants, monkeys, tigers, and deer had survived unharmed.

Panic is one of those words that change shape depending on the moment. Like heroism, it is defined in retrospect, often in ways that reflect more about the rest of us than about the facts on the ground. The word comes from mythology, which is appropriate.

This chapter is about panic, the behavior, as manifested in a stampede—one of the most frightening and extreme versions of panic.

For him, the decisive moment was, among other things, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” It happened when his camera managed to capture the essence of a thing or a person in a single frame.

Likewise, the last stage in the survival arc is over in a flash. It is the sudden distillation of everything that has come before, and it determines what, if anything, will come after.

But the enduring expectation that regular people will panic leads to all kinds of distrust on the part of neighbors, politicians, and police officers. The idea of panic, like the Greek god for which it is named, grips the imagination. The fear of panic may be more dangerous than panic itself.

Jamarat is a stretch of land surrounding three stone pillars, which are required stops on the hajj. In a ritual known as the “stoning of the devil,” pilgrims must pelt the pillars with pebbles three separate times. It is a cleansing ritual, meant to commemorate the way Abraham, in the Islamic version of the story, repelled Satan each time he tried to stop him from sacrificing his son Ishmael. In the 1970s, the Saudis built an overpass to allow two levels of pilgrims to participate in the stoning at once. As the crowds grew, jamarat became the most dangerous bottleneck in the world.

They had been in intense crowds since their arrival. For Westerners, it can be especially unnerving to be so close to so many strangers. The men’s bare shoulders touch, and the women’s scarves can get entangled. If a shoe falls off, you don’t dare try to salvage it. At the pillars themselves, it can be hard to even find the space to raise your arms and toss the pebbles. As the crowd pushed onward, Hussain and Sadiq clasped each other’s hands tightly. They knew they needed to stay together.

Imagine a million people seeking enlightenment. As frightening as the sheer density of the crowd could be, Aleem remembers, the crowd could also be surprisingly soothing: “You are in this sea of humanity, and when it is not threatening, and people are just moving calmly, it is one of the greatest feelings of being connected.”

He learned to just let the crowd carry him along, something he’d never done before.

He had hours to watch the crowd move. “My friends were getting very angry, and I thought it was just fascinating,” he says now. He went to graduate school and wrote his thesis on crowd dynamics.

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.

One of the big problems in a crowd is the lack of communication.

People who die in stampedes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Their lungs get compressed, and their blood runs out of oxygen. The compounded force of just five people is enough to kill a person.

They can die without ever falling down.

Once you are in a crowd crush, there is little you can do to save yourself. If possible, Still recommends gradually working your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backward.

As with a herd of cattle, something else has to happen to start the stampede.

the Ministry of Information launched a clever series of advertisements depicting “correct British behavior” under stress: “What do I do in an air raid? I do not panic. I say to myself, ‘Our chaps are dealing with them,’ etc.” (Note the wonderfully blasé use of the word etc.) After

Panic occurs if and only if three other conditions are present, Quarantelli concluded. First, people must feel that they may be trapped.

Second, panic requires a sensation of great helplessness—which often grows from interaction with others. What starts as an individual sense of impotence escalates

Perhaps the Blitz and the Three Mile Island accident, like most disasters, did not cause panic because people did not feel very helpless. They could take shelter or evacuate, after all. And

Panic is, in a way, what happens when human beings glimpse their own impending mortality—and know that it didn’t have to be so.

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.

A better word for panic might be overreaction, says G. Keith Still, the expert on hajj crowds. Something happens, some sudden stimulus, to cause a dangerously dense crowd to overreact. In the Manchester crash, it might have been the rush of heat or the slowdown caused by the confusion at the exit. In some cases, all it takes is one or two people to panic, dooming everyone.

So psychology matters, even though physics matter more.

One of the easiest fixes is to allow more time for the crowd to pass through. Also, traffic should be one-way, to avoid the turmoil of counterflow.

Putting a column in front of an exit is an elegant way to help prevent clogging. In every case, communication between organizers and with the crowd is critical. Officials need to constantly monitor the crowd’s movement and quickly relieve pressure points. The New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square in New York City is a model event, Still says. Police funnel over half a million revelers into separate viewing pens. Once people leave a pen, they cannot come back. That rule reduces the amount of traffic flow. At police headquarters, meanwhile, about seventy officers monitor live feeds of the crowd from dozens of cameras.