Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  Our obedience to authority in a disaster can be an asset, if the people in charge understand it. For years, aviation safety experts could not understand why passengers did so little to save themselves in plane crashes. They would sit in their seats instead of going to an exit. Those who did get up had an infuriating tendency to reach for their carry-on baggage before leaving. Then, once they made it to the exit door, they would pause for a dangerous amount of time before jumping down the slide. And in plane crashes, remember, you usually have a matter of seconds, not minutes, to get out.

  In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren’t nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn’t matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

  On August 2, 2005, Air France Flight 358 skidded off the runway in Toronto, Canada, during a violent storm. The plane, arriving from Paris and full of passengers, slid into a gully at a speed of 92 mph. The fire was immediate and intense. Half the exits of the Airbus A340 were either blocked or unusable due to malfunctioning slides. Cable TV broadcast live images of the smoking hulk of metal. But all 297 passengers and 12 crew members got out alive. The passengers moved fast and deliberately. Some jumped from more than fifteen feet above ground. Then they ran fifty to hundred yards away from the plane. One man carried a passenger with a broken leg up to the highway. By the time the airport fire department arrived, fifty-two seconds after the crash, three-quarters of the passengers had already evacuated. Before three minutes, everyone was off. When the plane exploded in flames, no passengers were in the immediate vicinity.

  It was called a miracle, but it was also a tribute to good training. On the Air France flight, the crew gave loud, clear directions from the moment the plane crashed. The copilot came over the intercom system and told the passengers to calmly exit the plane. The flight attendants screamed at the passengers, just as they’d been trained: “Everyone out the exits at the back! Do not go forward. Move out now!” They did not snuff out all misbehavior; some passengers still insisted on taking heavy carry-on baggage with them. But the plane emptied in remarkably little time. Afterward, passengers told reporters that the crew’s orders had saved lives. Maria Cojocaru, an Ontario resident who escaped with her two small children, remembers the crew guiding her, even as the cabin filled with thick black smoke. “All the time they speak to us and tell us, ‘Move, move, move,’” she told the Canadian Press. “At the end, they saved our lives.”

  Leadership can save the life of the rescue worker, too. In river rescues, members of the Kansas City Fire Department rescue squad yell profanity-laced threats at victims before they get to them. If they don’t, the victim will grab on to them and push them under the water in a mad scramble to stay afloat. “We try to get their attention. And we don’t always use the prettiest language,” says Larry Young, a captain in the rescue division. “I hope I don’t offend you by saying this. But if I approach Mrs. Suburban Housewife and say, ‘When I get to you, do not fucking touch me! I will leave you if you touch me!’ she tends to listen.”

  As the Beverly Hills burned to the ground, Bailey gave the guests in the Cabaret Room clear directions, accompanied by hand gestures, showing them how to get out. He did exactly the right thing. But even so, there were some people who did not leave. Perhaps they didn’t hear the warning. Or maybe they did, but they didn’t believe it. Quite possibly, like so many disaster victims, they were in denial. Or maybe they couldn’t get out, so they decided to wait until the crowd had thinned. Whatever the case, not everyone got up to leave. When firefighters finally got the blaze under control and entered the Cabaret Room the next day, they found one table with six burned corpses still sitting in their chairs. All told, 167 people died from the fire at the Beverly Hills. It was one of the deadliest fires in U.S. history.

  The bride, McCollister, stayed on the hillside until 1:00 A.M., trying to help. She finally walked to a nearby hotel, still wearing her charred dress and holding her bouquet. “People did weird things,” she says, remembering how someone had rescued her veil for her that night. The next day, she had to call everyone on her guest list to see if they had survived. That, she says, was the most excruciating part of the whole ordeal. “It was gut-wrenching. You didn’t know what you were going to get hit with. Someone hysterical, someone angry.” One woman, the wife of a family friend, died of smoke inhalation, and McCollister was devastated by guilt. “You feel like a real schmuck. I knew I had nothing to do with her dying, but you cannot look yourself in the mirror and say you’re not accountable.” After the fire, she says, her new husband was never the same. They got divorced four years later.

  McCollister declined to discuss the fire with reporters until 2007. That spring, on the thirtieth anniversary of the fire, some of the survivors and relatives of the victims gathered for a ceremony at the site of the Beverly Hills Supper Club. The grounds were overgrown with weeds and honeysuckle, so it was hard to imagine what had once been there. One by one, people got up to speak and remember those who had died. One woman stood at the microphone and cried and cried. McCollister recognized her. It was the singer from the band that had played on her wedding night. After the ceremony, the former bride walked up to the former singer and gave her a long hug.

  The Grand Bayou Model

  Just as individuals can be more or less resilient, so can groups. Groups perform as well during a disaster as they performed before it. The healthier an office culture or family, the better it can absorb stress and recover. High-functioning groups know how to communicate and help one another, and they have the resources to do it. Even at the cellular level, camaraderie promotes survival. Multiple studies have found that people with supportive social networks tend to have stronger immune systems.

  Recently, psychologists and disaster researchers have become obsessed with this idea of group resilience. Where does it come from and how can we make more of it? Instead of just studying people who are traumatized by disasters, psychologists have turned their attention to the healthy majority—the people who don’t need their help. There are even software applications designed to create resilience through social networks. If every town had a sort of emergency MySpace community, the reasoning goes, then everyone would fare better in an actual emergency. And, in fact, during the 2007 wildfires in southern California, some of the best information came from neighborhood blogs—and photos taken with cell phones. “This is a neighbor-helping-neighbor situation,” San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders told a crowd of evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium.

  In 2005, the citizens of Grand Bayou, a remote Louisiana coastal town, had very little advanced technology. What they had were long traditions, close relationships, and a culture of self-sufficiency. For three hundred years, this Native American and Cajun fishing community had occupied a treacherous stretch of the Gulf, accessible only by water. Grand Bayou was there before the levees, before the oil tankers, before the National Weather Service.

  In all that time, Grand Bayou never lost anyone to a hurricane. Rosina Philippe grew up in Grand Bayou. When storms approached, no one waited for an official evacuation order. “We know how to get ourselves out of harm’s way, announcement or not,” says Philippe. Residents would talk with one another and decide when it was time to leave. All of them would pile onto about twelve oyster, fishing, and work boats, hitching them all together in a long convoy. They had done it many times before. Grand Bayou was not an affluent community, but t
he connections between the people who lived there were strong. “Everyone has family,” Philippe says. “If someone didn’t want to go, we would make them go.” The children of Grand Bayou loved evacuating. It was like a big slumber party. “You’re going out on a big ol’ boat ride with all your friends,” says Philippe’s teenage daughter, Anisor Philippe Cortez.

  Grand Bayou’s 125 residents evacuated two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, before the mayor of New Orleans had called for a mandatory evacuation. Philippe, her daughter, her sister, and her sister’s family, along with a few friends, piled onto a work boat with plenty of provisions. Then they hooked onto the rest of the Grand Bayou convoy and headed out. The trip to a safe harbor took about two hours, and no one was left behind.

  The citizens of Grand Bayou had the resilience to survive Katrina. They had maintained the ties that keep groups strong—the kind of ties many Americans have lost. But over the previous fifty years, builders and oil companies had changed the landscape around Grand Bayou, destroying the wetlands that normally protected it. The town’s residents had fought against this development for years, to no avail. They had elevated their houses above flood level, only to see their houses sink again as the development marched on. In 1980, you could walk on land from one house to the next in Grand Bayou. By the end of the twentieth century, the land was gone. Grand Bayou, like Venice, was gradually sinking.

  When Katrina came, it swept all of Grand Bayou away. There was literally nothing left but battered boats and scraps of metal—the ruins of a fine civilization. Since then Philippe has moved nine times. Now she lives about an hour and a half from her old home, hoping to one day go back. Ironically, she is now in more danger than she ever was. The community has scattered across many states, and Philippe and her daughter live in a FEMA trailer.

  But the citizens of Grand Bayou intend to come back. The first house was finished in July 2007. All the houses will be “soft-build”—simple wooden structures that are cheap to rebuild. The community is still fighting to restore the wetlands and create a more sustainable civilization. But in the meantime, they plan to evacuate with each storm and then clean up the mess, as they always have. “We try to protect life, that’s the most important thing,” says Philippe. She now thinks that the population of Grand Bayou will be bigger after Katrina than it was before. “I know that we’re going to survive,” she says. “We’ve learned to depend upon each other.”

  A Tale of Two Cities

  Places like Grand Bayou are models of resilience because the residents proactively help one another survive. They value their community more than their possessions, and they also trust the group’s collective decisions. But that is a rare accomplishment in the modern era of large cities and anonymous neighbors. It is certainly the goal, but it is not the only option.

  There are smaller, simpler forms of resilience. Sometimes the groups that survive disasters are the ones that preserve a single piece of vital information. One lesson, widely shared, can make all the difference, a fact both heartbreaking and hopeful. Life and death shouldn’t be determined based on the preservation of one fact. But if it is, at least we know it is eminently possible to do better.

  The 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia killed an estimated two hundred thousand people. The real number is bigger or smaller; it was literally too big to count. The missing pictures in local newspapers went on for pages and pages, on and on, until it seemed there must have been some kind of printing mistake.

  A crushing wall of seawater seems like one situation in which death is nonnegotiable. And it’s true: for many of the victims, there was literally no chance of avoiding death—barring a sophisticated, multinational warning system, which the Indian Ocean did not have. But for thousands of people, the best warning system was old and homemade.

  Consider two cities, both very close to the epicenter of the earthquake that set off the 2004 tsunami. Jantang was a coastal village on the northern coast of Sumatra. The residents felt the ground shake, and about twenty minutes later, a roaring wave swept their lives away. The water reached heights of forty-five to sixty feet. All of the village’s structures were destroyed. Over 50 percent of the people were killed.

  Langi, on the island of Simeulue, was even closer to the quake. Islanders had just eight minutes after the ground shook to get to high ground—the shortest interval between earthquake and tsunami anywhere and too fast for a buoy-based warning system, had there been one. Waves there reached thirty to forty-five feet—slightly less than the height in Jantang, but still decidedly deadly. As in Jantang, all the town’s buildings were decimated.

  But in Langi, 100 percent of the eight-hundred-person population survived. No one—not a child, not a grandmother—was lost, as Lori Dengler, a geology professor from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, discovered when she visited in April of 2005. Why? In Langi, when the ground shook, everyone left for higher ground—and stayed there for a while. That was the tradition, no matter what. In 1907, the island had experienced a tsunami, which locals say killed about 70 percent of the population. And the survivors had passed this lesson on through the generations in Langi and other towns. Everyone knew the word smong, the word for tsunami in the Simeulue language.

  When Dengler asked the locals where they went when the ground shook, they pointed to a nearby hill, about a hundred feet high, or, says Dengler, “right about where I would have told them to go.” They seemed proud of their devotion to evacuating and said they never considered a false evacuation a waste of time. (Interestingly, on the entire island of Simeulue, only seven people out of seventy-eight thousand died from the tsunami. And they all died, Dengler says, because they were trying to save their belongings. They were gathering, a tendency that is, as we have seen, common in disasters.)

  When Dengler’s team visited Jantang, however, they found a totally different skill set. Before the disaster, “No one had ever heard anything about tsunami,” she said. When residents heard what sounded like explosions coming from the ocean, many locked themselves in their houses, fearing gunfights between rebels and the Indonesian military.

  Long before guns, there were tsunami. Human beings have dealt with killer waves for thousands of years, as have animals. Hours before the 2004 tsunami, a dozen elephants being ridden by tourists started suddenly trumpeting. One hour before the wave hit, the elephants headed to high ground—some of them even breaking their chains to get there. After the tsunami, wildlife officials at Sri Lanka’s Yala National Park were shocked to find that hundreds of elephants, monkeys, tigers, and deer had survived unharmed. But people don’t seem to have retained these survival skills as well as other mammals.

  We have the ability to do better, and in some places, we clearly have. That is very good news. In communities with survival traditions, like Grand Bayou and Langi, precious time spent in the deliberation zone can be extremely productive. And it must be. Because now we are out of time. We have passed through the denial and deliberation phases, and there is nothing left to do but act. What happens next will be, as we will see, very hard to undo. The decisive moments are the cumulative results of the delay and dread, of the influences of fear, resilience, and groupthink. They can be years in the making, and they can play out in a flash.

  Photo Insert

  The devastated Port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, one of the busiest in the world, seen after a ship carrying explosives blew up on December 6, 1917. The blast killed 1,963 people. Credit: U.S. Army Signal Corps

  In 1917, Reverend Samuel Prince opened up his church to treat the injured in Halifax. Later, he wrote the first serious study of human behavior in disasters. Credit: Alan Ruffman Collection

  Two minutes before a tsunami obliterated Khao Lak, Thailand, in December 2004, tourists stared at the strange behavior of the sea, unaware that vanishing water is a sign of an imminent tsunami. Credit: Charles De Pierre

  In Koh Raya, Thailand, the water also receded before the first tidal wave came. This shot was taken moments later, a
s a giant wave silently barreled inland. Credit: John Russell

  Taken ten days after the tsunami, this shot of the coast of Banda Aceh in Indonesia shows the epic reach of the disaster. Credit: Choo Youn-Kong, Pool/AP

  Before Hurricane Katrina in 2005, elderly people were among the least likely to evacuate—partly because the brain values experiences over official warnings, and older people had survived many storms. Here a Coast Guard rescue swimmer helps load survivors into a helicopter. Credit: U.S. Coast Guard

  A view of the Louisiana Superdome taken two days after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate Airman Jeremy L. Grisham

  The first phase of the survival arc is the reckoning stage, which takes precious time. On 9/11, people in the World Trade Center took twice as long to descend as safety engineers had predicted. Firefighter Mike Kehoe, who survived, was in the stairwell of Tower 1. Credit: John Labriola/AP

  Deliberation is the second phase of the survival arc. As we contemplate our options, fear alters the way our brain works. Former U.S. Ambassador Diego Asencio was taken hostage in Bogotá, Colombia. He remembers feeling time speed up and then slow down—and thinking about a Norman Mailer book he’d once read. Credit: © The Washington Post. Photo by Harry Naltchayan. Reprinted with permission.