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June 25 - July 2, 2023
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. Having studied dozens of plane crashes, I’m more relaxed when I’m flying. And no matter how many Code-Orange-be-afraid-be-very-afraid alerts I see on the evening news, I feel some amount of peace having already glimpsed the worst-case scenario. The truth, it turns out, is usually better than the nightmare.
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.
All across the nation we have snapped plates of armor onto our professional lifesavers. In return, we have very high expectations for these brave men and women. 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.
World War I, Taleb points out, was expected to be a rather small affair. So was Vietnam. In fact, the twentieth century was, and now the twenty-first century is, characterized by wars of unforeseen results.
For example, just like Turner, many of Louisiana’s oldest residents had survived Hurricane Betsy in 1965. They had also survived Hurricane Camille, a category 5 storm that struck in 1969. Turner rode out both storms without a problem. So he saw no reason to leave for Katrina. He hunkered down in denial.
As it turned out, the victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor; they were disproportionately old. Three-quarters of the dead were over sixty, according to the Knight Ridder analysis. Half were over seventy-five. They had been middle-aged when Hurricane Camille struck. “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.”
About one hundred lightning strikes hit the earth every second, and in many years, these bolts of fire kill more people than any other kind of weather. But lightning is not something most of us worry about very much.
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.
The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted.
Most people have no concept of how little they will be able to see in a fire, and how much harder the brain will have to work as a result.
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences.
Life is simpler when lived alone. That may be why far more creatures roam the planet alone than in groups. Male elephants, which have no real predators, do not bother with other elephants except to mate. They stomp across the land unburdened by others.
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.
Just to make things even more challenging, fires grow exponentially. Every ninety seconds, a fire roughly doubles in size. Flashover, when the flammable smoke in the air ignites, thereby igniting everything in the room, usually occurs five to eight minutes after the flames appear.
