Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  After six hours, I was wrecked. My brain was clearly not used to this kind of exercise. I don’t even like crossword puzzles. Gilbertson offered me some coffee and then sat me down to discuss the results. He pulled up the results of the pool test from that morning. Men normally do better on these kinds of tests, which measure spatial processing, among other things. “So you’re already working with a handicap,” Gilbertson said. I supposed that was reassuring. He showed me screen after screen of drawings retracing the routes I took to the submerged platform. Some were fairly direct; others look exceptionally loopy. “This is quite good,” Gilbertson said. “It’s actually remarkable. You clearly know where the platform is.”

  I figured he was just being nice until he showed me the results of an anonymous combat vet. The vet sometimes got it right, plowing straight toward the platform. But more often, he went round and round, tracing hexagons in the water and sometimes zigzagging back and forth far from the platform. His hippocampus was not reliably making sense of where he was and where he needed to go.

  Of course, this was not a fair comparison. I was younger than Gilbertson’s normal participants and female, not to mention the fact that I had never been to war. But for all these reasons, it was especially reassuring that the results were promising.

  A week later, Gilbertson got the results of my brain scan. My total hippocampal volume was 7.38 milliliters, or about the size of a small marble, Gilbertson informed me several weeks later. That is significantly larger than the vets with posttraumatic stress disorder. Of course, we are talking about very tiny numbers here. On average, the vets with posttraumatic stress disorder had a hippocampal volume of 6.66 milliliters. So my measurement was only about 10 percent larger. What does this all mean? Well, the implication is that my brain, thanks to the relatively large size of my hippocampus, may be more resilient in certain ways during and after a life-or-death situation. Theoretically, at least. When compared with soldiers who went to war and never got posttraumatic stress disorder—men who were, in other words, quite resilient—my hippocampal volume was very similar (only about 1–2 percent bigger, which is not significant).

  As for the other tests, my level of overall cognitive functioning ranked in the ninety-fifth percentile for the general population in my age group. That is also a good predictor of resilience. My concentration and memory scores were also very high, even though it hardly seems obvious to me in real life. Both skills also correlate with resilience.

  I’d done better than I had expected. It was a good reminder that our presumptions about how we might behave in a disaster are not necessarily reliable. “If I had to put money on it, I’d probably say that your hippocampus is operating pretty darn well!” Gilbertson wrote in an e-mail. The inclusion of the word darn reminded me all over again that Gilbertson is fundamentally a very nice guy. Maybe he had been unable to tell me the truth about my teeny hippocampus. Maybe I was part of a whole new psychological experiment. Either way, I was grateful.

  From Israel to New Hampshire, I’d observed an impressive spectrum of human performance. There are people who have been damaged by trauma, and people who seem to have been susceptible to the damage before the trauma began. I met unusually resilient characters like Nisso Shacham, the Israeli police commander, who get energized and focused under extreme duress. Then there were the troubled Vietnam veterans who found themselves reliving nightmares again and again, as their brains struggled to put what they were seeing and hearing in context.

  The evidence for biological resilience was strong. But if the topography of our brain and the chemistry of our blood have such significant effects on our ability to deal with fear, then how many choices does that leave us to do better? Do we all walk into disasters with a probability attached to our names? Surely other things matter more—like our lifetimes of experience and the people fighting for survival right next to us.

  Taking an MRI exam is a lonely experience. We quietly offer up our brains, lying passively under a magnetic eye, trying not to move. But disasters don’t happen to us when we’re alone. Disasters happen to groups of strangers, coworkers, friends, and family who persuade, bolster, and distract each other. I have yet to meet anyone who made it out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 without having memorable interactions with at least one other person. Which parts of their brains lit up when they had those conversations? How did their behavior change after they exchanged bits of information and helped each other up off the ground? Disasters, by definition, do not happen to individuals. The only way to fully understand our behavior, then, is to look around at the people beside us.

  5

  Groupthink

  Role Playing at the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire

  THE BEVERLY HILLS Supper Club sat up on a bluff five miles south of Cincinnati, regal and unexpected, like an exiled queen. Pale statues were profiled on the long driveway. The labyrinth of dining rooms, ballrooms, fountains, and gardens covered one and a half acres. The architect had visited Las Vegas for inspiration, and it showed. The lobby was a collage of mirrors and tiger-striped fabrics. There used to be illegal gambling here too. Back in the 1930s, six men with submachine guns forced a car full of club employees off the road and made off with $10,000.

  By the 1970s, the Beverly Hills had become the Midwest’s Tavern on the Green. There were bar mitzvahs and fashion shows in the private dining rooms, and Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Jerry Lewis, and Milton Berle had all played in the ballrooms. “An atmosphere of refinement,” proclaimed an advertisement. “Show Place of the Middle West.” It was the kind of place women bought a new dress to go to.

  Darla McCollister was about ten years old when she first went to the Beverly Hills. Her father wore a tuxedo, and the club sparkled like a Christmas ornament in her eyes. It was the first time she ate a Caesar salad. The waiter made it right at the table with the flourishes of a symphony conductor, and she ate it slowly, like something to be taken very seriously. “It was very elegant,” she remembers. “It was what Las Vegas used to be when the gold was real gold, not plastic.” When she was in high school, she told her boyfriend she dreamed of getting married at the Beverly Hills one day. “He got that panicked look,” she remembers. “‘Maybe not to you,’” she told him.

  On the night of May 28, 1977, McCollister pulled her white dress, which she’d designed and made herself, over her head. She was twenty-one and getting married—to a different boyfriend—at the Supper Club. It was a humid spring night, and nearly two hundred of her friends and relatives were gathering in the garden below. Her six bridesmaids buzzed around her, getting their own hair and dresses ready. That was when they noticed how unusually warm it was in the room. By then it was almost 7:30 P.M., time for the ceremony to begin, and they bustled downstairs, holding McCollister’s train aloft.

  Under the gazebo in the garden, McCollister got married. She remembers being excited and nervous. In the photographs, she looks like she was crying as she walked down the aisle. After the ceremony, the couple sat for pictures by the fountain as the guests milled about, eating appetizers. Then came the receiving line, and just before 9:00 P.M., the party began to move inside for dinner. The band began to play. That was when a waitress appeared at McCollister’s side and told her there was a small fire in the building.

  The electrical fire had started in the Zebra Room, adjacent to the bride’s dressing room. The flames would tear through the Beverly Hills, led by a roiling advance of smoke. There were nearly three thousand people packed into the sprawling club on this Saturday night of Memorial Day weekend. Upstairs, ninety members of the Afghan Dog Owners Club were having a banquet in the Crystal Rooms. A group of doctors dined together in the Viennese Room. About four hundred people had gathered for an awards banquet in the Empire Room. But the vast majority of guests were in the Cabaret Room, the ballroom located off the garden. Most of the people who died that night would die in the Cabaret Room. All told, the fire would kill 167 people.

  Everyone at the Beverly Hills that night h
ad arrived with friends and family, and they would try to leave the same way. No one in the club that night would act alone. People would look to one another for direction and support. Their individual profiles mattered, but the group, and the parts they played in it, mattered just as much.

  “I’m a Survivor. I Hope You’re a Survivor Too”

  Contrary to popular expectations, this is what happens in a real disaster. Civilization holds. People move in groups whenever they can. They are usually far more polite than they are normally. They look out for one another, and they maintain hierarchies. “People die the same way they live,” notes disaster sociologist Lee Clarke, “with friends, loved ones, and colleagues, in communities.”

  So far, we’ve watched human beings grope their way through denial and then deliberation. We’ve seen how genetics and experience can make certain people more or less risk-averse—or resilient. But disasters happen to masses of people, not individuals. Disaster victims are members of a group, whether they want to be or not. And we all behave differently in a group than we would on our own.

  When people are told to leave in anticipation of a hurricane or flood, most check with four or more sources—family, newscasters, and officials, among others—before deciding what to do, according to a study by sociologist Thomas Drabek. That process of checking in, or milling, sets the tone for the rest of the evacuation. Who you’re with matters a great deal.

  On April 18, 1906, psychologist William James was awakened in his Stanford University apartment by a violent shaking. As he wrote later, in an essay titled, “On Some Mental Effects of the Earthquake,” his reaction to the shaking was nothing like he would have imagined. “My first consciousness was one of gleeful recognition. I felt no trace whatever of fear; it was pure delight and welcome.” Once the “waggling” stopped, James did what everyone does in a disaster: he sought out other people. “Above all, there was an irresistible desire to talk about it, and exchange experiences.”

  In airplane crashes, passengers have died because they ignored a closer exit to follow the rest of the crowd. Others have risked their lives because they climbed over seats to regroup with the rest of their family before evacuating. On 9/11 at least 70 percent of survivors spoke with other people before trying to leave, the federal government’s study found. They made thousands of phone calls, checked TV and Internet news sites, and e-mailed friends and families. Many people even took milling breaks on their way down the stairs, stopping off on random floors to call their spouses again and check CNN one more time.

  That morning, Louis Lesce was on the eighty-sixth floor of the North Tower. He was a career counselor teaching a class to Port Authority employees. Before class started, he was sitting alone in a conference room reading through resumes. He felt the initial shake when the plane hit the tower. Having lived in Tokyo, he figured it was an earthquake. He kept reading. But then there was an explosion, and tiles started falling from the ceiling. The resumes scattered into the air. He remembers that they seemed to float through space in slow motion, so that he could read the name on top of each one. Lesce jumped up, jolted out of denial and into deliberation. He didn’t know anyone very well in the office, since he’d been teaching there only for a few months. But he immediately flew into the hallway in search of companions.

  In a disaster, strangers are not strangers anymore. John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, has analyzed group behavior in a wide range of disasters—from sinking ships to stadium stampedes. He had assumed that crowds with a common connection (like soccer fans) would behave very differently than anonymous strangers. But it turned out that the disaster itself created an instant bond between people. “Even if they started out quite fragmented, they came together and showed an enormous amount of solidarity,” Drury says.

  Lesce’s floor was relatively empty on the morning of 9/11, but he did find five others. They walked through another door toward the elevators and ran into black smoke. They turned back, moved into an office, sat on the floor, and started caucusing. “What’s going on? What are we supposed to do?” Lesce asked.

  “An airplane hit the building,” someone said, after getting a cell phone call. “Remember in 1948?” Lesce interjected. “A DC-8 crashed into the forty-second floor of the Empire State Building.”

  The smoke was getting worse. “Maybe we should break a window,” someone else suggested.

  Lesce wasn’t sure. “Are we going to be sucked out?” But he seemed to be in the minority, so he backed down. This is the very definition of groupthink: human beings do not generally like to go against the consensus of the group. So group members will work hard to minimize conflict. Dissent is uncomfortable. “If anyone wants to break the window, be my guest,” he said.

  “How do we break it?” someone else asked.

  “We could throw this flowerpot through the window. That should do it.”

  Again, Lesce was worried. “Well, we could hurt someone down below,” he said.

  Someone else noticed a ball-peen hammer in the room. “We could use this.”

  Lesce and the rest of the group stepped back into the hallway while one man smashed the window. There was a whooshing sound, but no one was sucked out.

  Now there were new problems, however. Smoke from outside seemed to be channeling in through the window. Hot shrapnel flew into the room, burning people’s skin. Still, the group kept exchanging theories and ideas. No one discussed looking for a staircase, according to Lesce’s recollection. “It was odd,” he says. After about a half hour, a man knocked on the door to the floor and yelled, “Anyone in there?” Lesce’s group followed the voice to the stairs and started descending, at last.

  The stairway was dark and crowded, but people kept treating each other like old friends. “You know, you look kind of tired, buddy,” one man said to Lesce. “Let me hold your jacket.” Another man offered to carry his briefcase. Lesce had had a quadruple bypass, so he was grateful. As they made their way down, people passed bottles of water through the crowd. “I never saw so much drinking water. Bottles just kept coming up.” Finally, they made it out of the tower. Lesce remembers looking at the shattered windows of a Gap store and thinking there would be a hell of a sale the next day. “Geez, I wish I could fit into those clothes,” he said to himself. But then a massive explosion of soot and concrete threw him to the ground. The first tower had collapsed. Everything went black.

  A man, another stranger, helped Lesce up and directed him toward the light, out of the shopping concourse. Finally, he emerged onto Nassau Street and tried to call his wife. At that moment, there was another explosion and the second tower fell. Once again, Lesce was slammed onto the ground. And once again, a stranger helped him up.

  Eventually, with the help of still more people, Lesce made his way to a hospital. When he got home, he had a message on his answering machine. “Hi, my name is Peter. I’m a survivor; I hope you’re a survivor too.” The man had found Lesce’s briefcase in the stairway of the Trade Center and wanted to return it.

  From beginning to end, Lesce was held up by the people around him. When I ask him what he would have done if he had been alone on the eighty-sixth floor, he says he doubts he would have made it out. “If no one had been there, I would’ve wet my pants. I would’ve yelled. I would’ve done whatever I possibly could to communicate with somebody. Then I would have sat there and waited to die.”

  The Sociology of the Beverly Hills Fire

  At 8:45 P.M., a waitress had opened the door to the Zebra Room in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Thick black smoke roared out at her. But she did not call the fire department or try to fight the fire. She ran to find the club managers. Like the office workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11, she followed the preexisting chain of command. As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role.

  Servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated, but bypassed other sections. Cooks and busbo
ys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving. Age mattered too. The younger cocktail waitresses seemed more confused. But the banquet waitresses, who tended to be older, were calm and reassuring.

  And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the room. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills. Most people became surprisingly passive. The newspapers the next day would proclaim mass hysteria. MANY TRAPPED IN PANIC, read the headline of the Associated Press story. But later investigations would show that the vast majority of people were well behaved. In fact, children, wives, and the elderly were among the most likely to survive.

  As the smoke intensified, Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the club, stumbled into a hallway jammed with a hundred guests, of all ages, from all different parties. The lights flickered off and on, and the smoke started to get heavy. But what he remembers most about that crowded hallway is the silence. “Man, there wasn’t a sound in there. Not a scream, nothing,” he says now. Standing there in the dark, the crowd was waiting to be led.

  The Beverly Hills employees had received no emergency training, but they performed magnificently anyway. Dammert directed the crowd out through a service hallway into the kitchen. There were too few exits in the club, and they were hard to find. The place was like a maze, actually. He remembers having to repeatedly scream at certain patrons to “get the hell out!” He risked his life because he felt obligated to do so. “My thought was that I’m responsible for these people. I think most of the employees felt that way.”