The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

He understood the danger of denial, the importance of aggressively pushing through the denial period and getting to action. He had watched the employees wind down the staircase in 1993, and he knew it took too long. He had made sure he was the last one out that day, so he saw the stragglers and the procrastinators, the slow and the disabled.

Rescorla also had an unusually keen sense of dread. He knew that the risk of another terrorist attack did not diminish with each passing, normal day. And he knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another. From then on, no visitors were allowed in the office without an escort. Rescorla hired more security staff. He ordered employees not to listen to any instructions from the Port Authority in a real emergency. In his eyes, the Port Authority had lost all legitimacy after it failed to respond to his 1990 warnings.

The end result is that people from the upper floors—who have the farthest to walk and therefore face the most danger—will get out last. Training people to resist this gallantry was smart and wonderfully simple.

His military training had taught him a simple rule of human nature, the core lesson of this book: the best way to get the brain to perform under extreme stress is to repeatedly run it through rehearsals beforehand.

“Proper prior planning and preparation prevents piss-poor performance.”

He also lectured employees about some of the basics of fire emergencies: they should always go down. Never go up to the roof. Ever.

Even though the chances were slim, Rescorla wanted them ready for an evacuation. He understood that they would need the help more than anyone else. Like the patrons in the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire, they would be passive guests in an unfamiliar environment—a very dangerous role to play.

In a September 5, 2001, e-mail to an old friend, Rescorla spoke about kairos—a Greek word for an existential or cosmic moment that transcends linear time. “I have accepted the fact that there will never be a kairos moment for me, just an uneventful Miltonian plow-the-fields discipline,” he wrote, “a few more cups of mocha grande at Starbucks, each one losing a little bit more of its flavor.”

“One thing you don’t ever want to do is have to think in a disaster.”

Rescorla knew war. His men did not, yet. To steady them, to break their concentration away from the fear that may grip a man when he realizes there are hundreds of men very close by who want to kill him, Rescorla sang. Mostly he sang dirty songs that would make a sailor blush. Interspersed with the lyrics was the voice of command: “Fix bayonets…on liiiiine…reaaaa-dy…forward.” It was a voice straight from Waterloo, from the Somme, implacable, impeccable, impossible to disobey. His men forgot their fear, concentrated on his orders, and marched forward as he led them straight into the pages of history.

On 9/11, between songs, Rescorla called his wife. “Stop crying,” he said. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”

Rescorla had his kairos moment. His remains have never been found.

When people believe that survival is negotiable, they can be wonderfully creative. All it takes is the audacity to imagine that our behavior matters. It can happen in a moment, with a phone call or an idea muttered aloud.

You give people the opportunity to be part of something

Just like the changes the Port Authority made after the 1993 bombings, the reforms focused on technological fixes and experts, not regular people.

Two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin delayed calling for a mandatory evacuation. He had to check with his lawyers, according to a New Orleans Times-Picayune story from that day, to make sure the city wouldn’t be held liable by business owners forced to shutter their shops.

Every line of legalese breeds distrust. We start to confuse real safety warnings with legalistic nonsense. We

“Fear of liability—like most fear—is, in my opinion, based largely on ignorance,” Nicholson says. In fact, most government employees are protected from lawsuits if they are doing their jobs in good faith, according to sound training. But not enough people understand emergency management law. “The ignorance of public officials, from leaders of government to emergency managers, is compounded by the ignorance of the attorneys who advise them.”

Teenagers taught by their parents are more than twice as likely to be involved in serious accidents than those taught by professionals, according to a 2007 study by the Texas Transportation Institute.

Then he opened a school called MasterDrive. He wanted to teach people that handling three thousand pounds of metal in motion is not intuitive. Like Rescorla, he wanted to make people better survivors by rewiring their brains for their modern age.

In a safe environment, he re-creates the feeling of losing control and teaches the students to recover. MasterDrive students spend twenty-six hours behind the wheel of a car; in most states, the requirement is less than ten hours. They learn crash-avoidance techniques and how to dial up and dial down their personalities to cope with what’s happening on the road. Five thousand kids come through the Colorado locations each year. Some wet their pants or freeze up behind the wheel, which, in Langford’s mind, just means the training is sufficiently realistic. Like Rescorla, Langford understands that realistic practice brings out our faults and then makes us stronger.

“Skill is my ability to do something automatically, at the subconscious level. I don’t have to think about it. It is programmed. How do I get that? I do that by repetition, by practicing the right thing. The

“The ability for change is phenomenal,” says Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the child psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. Throughout our lives, the geography of our brains literally changes depending on what we

Without training, the brain falls back on its most basic fear responses in a crisis.

On the skid pad, the goal is to experience a skid enough times that your brain knows what to do: squeeze the brakes and steer where you want the car to go.

The website for this book (www.amandaripley.com/books/the-unthinkable#blog

about the history and science of the risk and try to conduct a dress rehearsal for your brain. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can just mean taking the stairs out of your office building once a week.

The more control you feel you have, the less dread you will feel day to day. And the more control you feel, the better your performance will be, should the worst come to pass.

FAA human factor analysts always look for their nearest exit when they board planes, for example. And they read the safety briefing cards that most people think are useless. They do this because each plane model is different, and they know they may become functionally retarded in a plane crash.

Every time Robyn Gershon, who is leading a study of the World Trade Center evacuation, checks into a hotel, she takes the stairs down from her room. She knows that most hotel stairs take a confusing path through back rooms and empty onto unexpected streets. (I once did this in a hotel in Manhattan and ended up in the kitchen. A supervisor, assuming I was an employee leaving for a break, asked to search my bag. Apparently not very many guests took the stairs.)

Once a disaster begins, people who have some familiarity with their disaster personalities have an advantage. First, they know that if something does go terribly wrong, the odds favor their survival. Just knowing there is hope can help people muster the presence of mind to push past denial and deliberation and act. “The important thing is to rec...

Now that you know you are likely to delay evacuating or to waste time grabbing your carry-on bags from the overhead bin, you have a chance to override your own worst instincts. Above all, it is essential to take the initiative—to remember that you and your neighbors must save yourselves. Now that you

“You’ve got to practice stuff that’s important,” Nicolini says. “I hope this will allow people to think less about tsunami. You have a plan, and you don’t have to worry.”

Where were the thundering trucks and the flashing lights? It was an excellent question, and the answer might have been the most important part of the drill. The firefighters and police officers were absent by design. Because in a real tsunami, they will not be there. It will just be us, on our own, carrying one another to high ground.

So as you drive to work tomorrow, on top of long buried sewer pipes or across fault lines strained by the weight of our ambition, as you walk home tonight under low-flying airplanes and over frozen rivers, take a minute—just a minute—to contemplate your disaster personality. You’ve made each other’s acquaintance, after all this time, by finishing this book. Now that you have, you should keep in touch. You might need each other one day.

This book relies on the knowledge of experts, from neuroscientists to pilot instructors to police psychologists, who have altogether taken hundreds of hours of time to explain to me what they have learned in words I can understand.