The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

Even before a disaster occurs, the people in charge—of the hajj or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—use panic as an excuse to discount the public. People will panic, the legend says, so we can’t trust them with the information or the training—the basic tools of their own survival.

“Do you know how many Americans have died because someone thought they would panic if they gave them a warning?” says disaster expert Dennis Mileti. “A lot.”

Today, 2 to 3 million people descend upon Saudi Arabia for the hajj. In less than a week, they move en masse through the same twenty-five-mile course, all with the same itinerary, following in the steps of Muhammad: first, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a city of just eight hundred thousand people. Then, after a side trip to Medina, they proceed to Mina. The rest of the year, Mina is a quiet desert valley. During the hajj, it becomes a teeming tent city, organized by country. The

Those who die on the hajj are said to be guaranteed a place in heaven. So the hajj tragedies become cruelly self-perpetuating. In

The Saudis have invested $1.2 billion in rebuilding the jamarat bridge, creating a much bigger, four-story complex with many more entrances and exits. Today, when pilgrims arrive in the airports, officials hand them pamphlets instructing them how to behave safely in the crowd. The warning urges people to be patient and, above all, not to push. Perhaps most important, after the 2006 disaster, some Islamic clerics issued fatwas, or religious edicts, declaring that pilgrims do not have to wait until noon to carry out the stoning ritual. That way the crowd can be spread out over the entire day.

If we think of panic as an overreaction, it starts to make more sense. The way to avoid a panic, then, is to reduce the causes of overreaction—by reducing the density or turbulence of the crowd or by giving the crowd better information. But sometimes panic happens to just one person, all alone, and no one else. Sometimes a single exception is enough to change history. So what causes this kind of overreaction?

Dive sites become a laboratory for human behavior under stress.

But the remaining 40 percent were usually classified as “unexplained.” The

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.

Essentially, he found that certain people are slightly more likely to lose touch with their reality when under physical stress.

If mass gathering places are designed with physics in mind, then the prerequisites to panic should never develop. People will not feel potentially trapped, helpless, and alone. They will just feel crowded. Then, if something goes terribly wrong, they will be much more likely, as we will see next, to default to a far more common disaster response—which is to say, they will do nothing at all.

But this voice inside his head seemed to have experienced all of this before.

Gallup found that paralysis could be induced in all kinds of creatures—in every single one he tested, in fact. “In a nutshell, it’s been documented in crustaceans,

Every animal seemed to have a powerful instinct to utterly shut down under extreme fear. All you had to do was make sure the animal was afraid and trapped. The more fear the animal felt, the longer it would stay “frozen.” The question was why?

But all the while, the brain is consciously taking in all kinds of information about what is happening around it.

It caused a sort of dreaminess, in which there was no sense of pain nor feeling of terror, though quite conscious of all that was happening.

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.

Paralysis can also make prosecution of the rapist much more difficult, since the lack of struggle may look a lot like consent.

but we can say that it is a mistake to underestimate the complexity of doing nothing.

Violand was attacked by a lethal predator, and he experienced a radical and involuntary survival response. It may or may not have been the reason he survived.

They only snapped out of this stupor, they said, by thinking of their loved ones, especially their children.

All told, only 137 people survived the disaster. Investigators would conclude that the ship sunk because the bow door to the car deck

The more important point, perhaps, is that the brain is plastic. It can be trained to respond more appropriately. More fear, on the other hand, makes paralysis stronger. Animals injected with adrenaline are more likely to freeze, for example. Less fear, then, makes paralysis less likely.

So it makes sense that if we can reduce our own fear and adrenaline, even a little bit, we might be able to override paralysis when we need to.

But her husband, Paul Heck, sixty-five, reacted immediately. He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward the exit. “Follow me!” he told his wife. Hearing him, Floy snapped out of her daze and followed him through the smoke “like a zombie,” she said.

Unlike tall buildings, planes are meant to be emptied fast. All passengers are supposed to be able to get out within ninety seconds, even if only half the exits are available and bags are strewn in the aisles. As it turns out, the people on the Pan Am 747 had at least sixty seconds to flee before fire engulfed the plane. But 326 of the 396 people onboard were killed. Including the KLM victims, 583 people ultimately perished. Tenerife remains the deadliest accidental plane crash in history.

He made an important discovery. Before the crash, Paul had done something highly unusual. During the long delay before takeoff, Heck had studied the 747’s safety diagram. He even walked around the aircraft with his wife, pointing out the nearest exits. He had been in a theater fire as an eight-year-old boy, and ever since, he had always checked for the exits in an unfamiliar environment. Maybe this is a coincidence. But it is also possible that when the planes collided, Heck’s brain had the data it needed to take action.

The National Transportation Safety Board has found that passengers who read the safety information card are less likely to get hurt in an emergency. In a plane crash at Pago Pago three years before the Tenerife accident, all but 5 of the 101 passengers died. All the survivors reported that they had read the safety information cards and listened to the briefing. They exited over the wing, while other passengers went toward other, more dangerous but traditional exits and died.

After preparation, the next best hope is leadership. That’s one reason that well-trained flight attendants now shriek at passengers in evacuations—to break into thei...

“The amygdala will keep firing away,” says brain expert LeDoux. “Unless you have some way to overcome that, you’re going to be sort of locked in.” The easiest way to get a paralyzed animal to snap out of its daze is to make a loud noise,

But for almost every disaster, there is a hero. Sometimes there are hundreds. The following is not a celebration of heroes. That is the topic of many other worthy books. This chapter is an attempt to understand, not applaud; to look the hero straight in the eye and ask: what the hell were you thinking?

He needed to let those people know someone was trying to save them, he said later. That was all. “They had to see someone right now. If I was ever confident of anything in my life, it was this,” he says in his slow, methodical way. “Worst-case scenario, I would be totally ineffective in saving them, but at least I would give them hope.”

Like many of the survivors in this book, his military training had taught him to always make a plan. It probably saved his life. “There is a tremendous benefit to having that training,” he says. “You don’t sit there wondering what to do. You do it.”

During World War II, Nazi scientists subjected prisoners at Dachau to atrocious experiments in temperature extremes. To this day, much of what we know about human responses to cold water comes from the suffering of these prisoners.

Why do some people risk their lives to save strangers while other people just watch?

Rescuers tended to have had healthier and closer relationships with their parents. They were also more likely to have had friends of different religions and classes. Their most important quality seemed to be empathy. It is tricky to say where empathy comes from, but Oliner believes the rescuers learned egalitarianism and justice from their parents. When they were disciplined as children, rescuers were more likely to have been reasoned with; nonrescuers were more likely to have been whipped.

For all these reasons, perhaps, heroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can. “It’s something in your heart, your soul, and your emotions that gets a hold of you and says, I gotta do something,”

Perhaps because of their training and experience, heroes also have confidence in their own abilities. In general, like almost all people who perform well under extreme stress, heroes believe they shape their own destinies.

Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. “They pay scant attention to other people’s problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,” Oliner says. And bystanders, it’s worth remembering, are what most of us are.

the little-known Carnegie Hero Fund Commission has doled out over nine thousand medals and cash assistance to people who voluntarily risk their lives to an extraordinary degree to try to save others.

But Carnegie dreamed up the Hero Fund himself. For all his ruthlessness as a businessman, he had a soft spot for civility. He disdained football as a sport for savages, so he donated a lake to Princeton University to give athletes another outlet. He was a pacifist and railed against the traditional definition of heroes as warriors. “The false heroes of barbarous man are those who can only boast of the destruction of their fellows,” he wrote. “The true heroes of civilization are those alone who save or greatly serve them.”

A disproportionate number of Carnegie Heroes were also working-class men, like Olian. Of the 283 men who rescued someone other than a member of their family, only two had high-status jobs. Once again, it’s possible that most of these men were doing what they thought was expected of them, given their roles in society. They tended to be truck drivers, laborers, welders, or factory workers—physical jobs that required taking some risk, just like rescuing.

But it’s also true that in small towns, people tend to know one another. And, following the theory of reciprocal altruism, acts of kindness are recognized and remembered.

A sense of empathy, combined with an identity as someone who helps and takes risks, may predispose one for heroism.

The more heroes I interview, the more I realize that I’ve been asking them the wrong question. It’s not a matter of why they did something; the better question is, “What were you afraid would happen if you did not do what you did?”

“Basically, you’re doing it for yourself,” Olian says, “because you wouldn’t want to not do it and face the consequences internally.” In his case, he was afraid of disappointing himself. His determination at the crash site grew out of confidence—and insecurity, he says. Confidence because he knew he had the strength and skill to try to swim to those passengers, and insecurity because he needed to prove to himself that he could do it. He didn’t jump into the river to be a hero; he did it to avoid being a coward. Or, as he puts it: “It’s more a feeling of an emptiness than adding to something that’s already there.”

Heroes, put a different way, get all the girls. “Scratch an altruist, and you’ll find a hedonist underneath,”

What it means is that we all have the potential to be heroes at some point in our lives. Grace, in other words, is good for you. If we all have the potential, then we can encourage that potential in our culture, and we’ll see it more.

Heroism is more nebulous than other behaviors, it’s true. But it is also real, and, like so many of the other puzzling behaviors we have examined, a product of experience, aspiration, and fear. For certain people caught in rare circumstances, heroism may be just as much a survival strategy as freezing; it’s a survival strategy not for the body, but for the mind.

When he got there, he earned a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart in battles memorialized in the 1992 book by Lieutenant General Harold G. Moore and Joseph L. Galloway, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. The book is considered required reading for Army officers. That’s a picture of Rescorla on the cover, clutching an M-16 rifle and looking wary, exhausted, and most of all, young.