The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

I met Jack Rowley, who spent thirty-three years as a firefighter in Columbus, Ohio. When I told him about Zedeño, he told me that he saw this kind of curious indifference all the time. In fact, he came to consider one particular kind of fire a regular Saturday night ritual. His station house would get dispatched to a bar; he would walk into the establishment and see smoke. But he would also see customers sitting at the bar nursing their beers. “We would say, ‘Looks like there’s a fire here,’” he says. He’d ask the customers if they felt like evacuating. “They would say, ‘No, we’ll be just fine.’”

Laughter—or silence—is a classic manifestation of denial, as is delay. Zedeño

We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. Psychologists call this tendency “normalcy bias.” The human brain works by identifying patterns.

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.)

she’d expected to see normal life, bustling on indifferently. Here is how Zedeño describes this powerful presumption that the trouble was limited to her immediate vicinity, which psychologists call the “illusion of centrality”: When you’re in trauma, the mind says, this is a very local problem. This is your little world, and everything outside is fine. It can’t afford to say that everything outside is horrible. The sound that I heard on the seventy-third floor should have told me, this is bad. The feeling of the building shaking should have told me, this is bad. The explosion when I was on the forty-fourth floor: bad. The smell of debris in the lower stairways: bad. Yet in every single moment, I made it my little world here. And nothing else exists.

But it was also wrong. And this is where we come to the truth-telling moment: we all make mistakes when we judge risk. Our risk formula, especially when it comes to disasters, almost never looks this rational: Risk = Probability × Consequence No, if we could reduce our risk calculation to a simple formula, it might look more like this: Risk = Probability × Consequence × Dread/Optimism

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

Elderly people don’t like to evacuate. In 1979, after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, retirees and people over age seventy were least likely to evacuate—regardless of how close they were to the reactor. That’s partly because, even if they have a good means of leaving, older people do not like change, generally speaking. Turner had lived in his house for over three decades. Like his old shotgun house, it was well built, and it had survived many hurricanes. So why wouldn’t it survive this one?

Overconfidence When it comes to old-fashioned risks like weather, we often overestimate ourselves. Of the fifty-two people who died during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, for example, 70 percent drowned. And most of them drowned in their cars, which had become trapped in floodwaters. This is a recurring problem in hurricanes. People are overconfident about driving through water, even though they are bombarded with official warnings not to. (This tendency varies, of course, depending on the individual. One study out of the University of Pittsburgh showed that men are much more likely to try to drive through high water than women—and thus more likely to die in the process. But more about the individual profile of a risk taker in Chapter 4.)

Trust is the basic building block of any effective warning system. Right now, it’s too scarce in both directions: officials don’t trust the public, and the public doesn’t trust officials either. That’s partly an unintended consequence of the way we live. “Our social and democratic institutions, admirable as they are in many respects, breed distrust,” Slovic wrote in his 2000 book, The Perception of Risk. A capitalist society with a free press has many things to recommend it. But it is not a place where citizens have overwhelming confidence in authority figures. Distrust makes it harder for the government to compensate for its citizens’ blind spots—one of government’s most vital functions.

Fire, as it turns out, is mostly about money. “I never fought a fire in a rich person’s home,” says Denis Onieal, who became a firefighter in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1971 and is now superintendent of the National Fire Academy. Fires are more likely in places with shoddy construction where people use portable heaters to stay warm and where smoke detectors are absent or not working. In poor neighborhoods, then, fire is part of the hazardscape, says Onieal. “You got addicts on the corner, you got people who steal your lunch money, and you got fires.”

When you think about it, panic is not a very adaptive behavior. We probably could not have evolved to this point by doing it very often. 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.

Panic can happen even without a crowd, in wide open space, as we’ll see. But in almost every case, it is a symptom of a larger problem. In fact, the reason that so many disaster researchers are loath to talk about panic is that the word is a conversation killer. The crowd panicked, end of story. But there is a problem underneath the panic. But the problem was almost always preventable. Just like hurricanes don’t have to kill people, crowds don’t have to crush.

Panic occurs if and only if three other conditions are present, Quarantelli concluded. First, people must feel that they may be trapped. Knowing they are definitely trapped is not the same thing. In fact, in submarine disasters, such as the horrific sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000, humans are not likely to panic. The crew knows there is no way out. At submarine depths, even if they were to swim out of the hatch, they would not survive. But if people worry that they might be trapped, that is a trigger for panic—even in wide open spaces. “War refugees caught in the open by strafing planes can develop as acute a sense of potential entrapment as individuals in a building during an earthquake who see all exits becoming blocked by debris,” Quarantelli wrote. Second, panic requires a sensation of great helplessness—which often grows from interaction with others. What starts as an individual sense of impotence escalates when people see their feelings reflected around them. One person caught in explosions in a factory explained it this way to Quarantelli: “I can truthfully say that when I heard the moaning and crying of the others, I did get quite panicky.” 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 following the Lake Wobegon effect, the psychological phenomenon named after Garrison Keillor’s above-average town, most peopl...

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I would do (and have done) that are not to be found on most traditional preparedness lists. Each follows from one basic idea: You matter more than you think. 1. Cultivate Resilience: It turns out attitude really does make a difference. People who perform effectively in crises and recover well afterward tend to have three underlying advantages: • They believe they can influence what happens to them. • They find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil. • They are convinced they can learn from both good and bad experiences. We tend to think of a healthy attitude as fixed: You have it or you don’t. But the more we learn about the brain, the more we realize that most abilities are like juggling or reading: We have potential, and practice makes us much better. We can build resilience through rehearsal, just as we learn a new language by practicing it over and over again. When you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by everyday trials, tell yourself you can influence what happens to you. Tell yourself there is meaningful purpose here, and repeat over and over that you can learn from this ordeal. Even if you don’t entirely believe it, your brain is listening. Nobody in the first week of a foreign-language class believes comprehension will come, but it happens anyway, eventually, with enough practice.

2. Get to Know Your Neighbors: If you know that an elderly man lives alone three doors down and a woman with a generator lives around the block, your community will be better equipped to handle most disasters than if you had a bunker full of canned goods. In most major disasters, as this book illustrates, the people who will save you will not be wearing badges. They will be your neighbors and your coworkers. Towns across the country (such as Ashland, Oregon, and King County, Washington) have mapped their neighborhoods to help identify assets and vulnerabilities. One way to do this is the formal way, through your local Community Emergency Response Team (CERT: citizencorps.gov/​cert/ [inactive]). Or you could buy a case of beer and throw a block party. Pass around a sign-up sheet, have people write down what they might need help with in an emergency and what help they might be able to offer. Make sure everyone has a list of everyone else’s phone numbers and e-mail addresses—and an assignment for whom they are supposed to check on the next time the sky opens up or the sun melts the asphalt. Every year, people are saved from destruction because they knew their neighbors. This is a tradition that has kept our species thriving for many millennia, and it is nothing but foolish to abandon it now.

3. Lower Your Anxiety Level: People with higher everyday anxiety levels may have a greater tendency to overreact or to misread danger signs, as I explain in chapter 6. If you can learn to control your anxiety, you will benefit in all kinds of ways. Your health should improve and, if you ever find yourself in a life-or-death situation, you have a better chance of being able to control your fear response—and maintain your ability to make decisions and process new information. Thousands of books have been written on how to lower anxiety. I find that the best place to start is with the activity we do every minute of every day. As I explain in more detail in the chapter on fear, the breath is the only reliable bridge between the conscious mind and the subconscious. So it makes sense to learn how to manipulate it to your advantage. Police officers are now trained to do rhythmic breathing whenever their guns are drawn. They perform better as a result. Yoga or martial arts can achieve the same ends. The best at...

Lose Weight: I hate to nag, but there is no workaround here. The harsh truth is that obese people move more slowly, are more vulnerable to secondary injuries such as heart attacks, and have a harder time physically recovering from any injuries they do sustain. There is no need to say much more, since there are entire industries devoted to this particularly modern and maddening challenge. But it’s worth remembering that on 9/11, people with low physical ability were thr...

5. Calculate Your Risk: Make a list of your biggest risks. Try to use data, not just emotion. The chapters on Risk and Resilience in this book document how your vulnerabilities vary depending on who you are right now: young, old, male, female, rich, poor. But geography matters too. Check the website for your state or county homeland-security or emergency-management office in order to get a short list of local hazards. If that doesn’t work (and it often doesn’t, sadly), enter your zip code at floodsmart.gov to get an estimate of your flood risk. Try earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/byregion to map your earthquake risk. The website for this book (amandaripley.com/books/the-unthinkable#blog) lists other tools—on the blog under “Preparedness.” Honestly, the government should make this easier for us. I hope that happens one day. For now, it’s still easier than it ever has been. One rule to live by: the most deadly, underappreciated threats in most places are fire, flood, and lightning. Get a smoke detector, replace the batteries every time you change your clocks (or sooner), evacuate well in advance of a major storm, and do not, I repeat do not, drive or walk throu...

6. Train Your Brain By far, the best way to improve performance is to practice. Once you know your real risks, think creatively about how to give yourself or your family a dress rehearsal. The brain loves body memory. It is much better to stop, drop, and roll than to talk about stopping, dropping, and rolling. For example, we know that fires generally kill more people than all other disasters combined. (If you are poor or African American, your chances of being in a fire are particularly high.) So give your brain something to work with. Make surprise drills an annual tradition in your office or home. Take the stairs down to the ground—don’t just stare at the stairwell door. Create incentives so that people want to do this. This is not hard, but it is still rare. For example, have the boss tell everyone they have to go on a fire drill. That is absolutely essential. Have the boss explain why it matters (because our brains turn to mush in a real fire, and we often lose our eyesight because of smoke). Then announce that the official meeting spot will be the coffee shop two blocks away, where the boss will buy everyone cof...