Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  Some people, like Brigadier General Nisso Shacham, the police commander in the southern half of Israel, seem unusually resilient in the face of extreme stress. Credit: Samantha Appleton/Noor

  To understand resilience, military psychiatrists have studied U.S. Special Forces soldiers. Even their blood chemistry is different from that of other soldiers. Credit: David Bohrer

  Groups are just as important as individuals in a disaster. In 1977, a ferocious fire destroyed the glamorous Beverly Hills Supper Club outside Cincinnati, Ohio, killing 167 people. A study of the crowd behavior showed that most people performed according to their assigned role that night. Credit: Dave Horn Collection

  The last phase of the survival arc is the decisive moment. Given the right mix of conditions, catastrophes like a stampede can happen. Since 1990, more than 2,500 people have been killed in crowd crushes during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Islam’s holy places in Saudi Arabia. This picture shows the normally peaceful crowd outside Mecca. Credit: Khalil Hamra/AP

  Saudi security officers and rescue workers gather by the dead bodies after a stampede in Mina on January 12, 2006. At least 346 people were killed, and nearly 1,000 were injured. Credit: Muhammed Muheisen/AP

  The most common reaction to a life-or-death situation is to do nothing. A kind of involuntary paralysis sets in, as experienced by a young man trapped in a classroom during the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007. Here, students console each other at a campus vigil the night of the shootings. Credit: Stephen Voss/WpN

  Sometimes people will take seemingly inexplicable risks to save total strangers. After Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the frozen Potomac River in Washington, DC, on January 13, 1982, dozens of people watched from the banks as the survivors clung to the wreckage. Eventually, three men jumped in to help, and a U.S. Park Police helicopter pulled the survivors to safety. Credit: Charles Pereira/U.S. Park Police

  What causes heroism? Roger Olian jumped into the freezing water the day of the Potomac River disaster because he had something to lose if he didn’t, he says. “If you didn’t get anything out of it, I mean flat-out nothing, you wouldn’t do it.” He is pictured here beside the Air Florida crash site, twenty-five years later. Credit: Katie Ellsworth

  Every disaster holds evidence of the human capacity to do better. On 9/11, Rick Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley and a decorated Vietnam veteran, sang songs into a bullhorn to keep people moving. He had spent years training the company’s 2,700 employees to get out fast in an emergency. Credit: Eileen Maher Hillock

  Part Three

  The Decisive Moment

  6

  Panic

  A Stampede on Holy Ground

  FOR MORE THAN fourteen hundred years, Muslims have journeyed to Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad. The pilgrimage, or hajj, is required of every Muslim who can manage it. So the ritual has become one of the largest annual mass movements of human beings in history. People leave their homes with their life’s savings in their pockets, anxious about the adventure ahead, and they return with stories of finding peace in the most unlikely of places: in the middle of a scorched desert, deep inside an undulating crowd of strangers from all over the world.

  But over the past two decades, something awful has happened to the hajj. In 1990, a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel killed 1,426 people in minutes. The list of dead included Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Malaysians, Turks, and Saudis. Four years later, another stampede killed more than 270 pilgrims. After that, the tragedies began to follow a sickening rhythm, coming closer and closer together. In 1998, the count was at least 118. In 2001, at least 35 pilgrims were killed in a crush. In 2004, the body count rose to 251. In 2006, the crowd took more than 346 lives. All of the past five tragedies happened in the same area, called “jamarat,” around three pillars that all pilgrims must stone as a required ritual of the hajj. Somehow, a beautiful holy place became, for more than 2,500 people, a killing field.

  What happened to the hajj? Why were people getting crushed and asphyxiated, year after year, when they had come to pray? What was causing what appeared to be mass panic?

  Panic is one of those words that change shape depending on the moment. Like heroism, it is defined in retrospect, often in ways that reflect more about the rest of us than about the facts on the ground. The word comes from mythology, which is appropriate. The Greek god Pan had a human torso and the legs, horns, and beard of goat. During the day, he roamed the forests and meadows, tending to flocks and playing songs on his flute. At night, he devoted much of his energy to the conquest of various nymphs. But from time to time, he amused himself by playing tricks on human travelers. As people passed through the lonely mountain slopes between the Greek city-states, Pan made those strange, creeping noises that slither from the darkness, never to be fully explained. He rustled the underbrush, and people quickened their pace; he did it again, and people ran for their lives. Fear at such harmless noises came to be known as “panic.”

  Sometimes we use panic to mean a rippling kind of terror that robs us of self-control. But it can also be a reason for fear. There is panic, the emotion, and then there is panic, the behavior—the irrational shrieking and clamoring and shoving that can jeopardize the survival of ourselves and those around us. Both meanings get conflated in one short word, overloaded with implications. This chapter is about panic, the behavior, as manifested in a stampede—one of the most frightening and extreme versions of panic.

  This chapter also marks the beginning of the end—the final phase of the survival arc. After denial and deliberation comes what I will call the decisive moment. This is a phrase borrowed from Henri Cartier-Bresson, the French photographer who may be the father of modern photojournalism. For him, the decisive moment was, among other things, “the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.” It happened when his camera managed to capture the essence of a thing or a person in a single frame.

  Likewise, the last stage in the survival arc is over in a flash. It is the sudden distillation of everything that has come before, and it determines what, if anything, will come after. As in photography, what happens in this single moment depends on many things: timing, experience, sensibility—and, perhaps most of all, luck. What happens once we have accepted the fact that something terrible is upon us and deliberated our options? Panic is the worst-case scenario in the human imagination. All norms of behavior, all the things that make us human, dissolve, and all that remains is chaos. If we think back to the dread equation, panic scores high on every metric: uncontrollability, unfamiliarity, imaginability, suffering, scale of destruction, and unfairness. The only thing as dreadful as panic might be terrorism.

  The current fashion in disaster research is to deny that panic ever happens. But one exaggeration doesn’t fix another exaggeration. Yes, people rarely do hysterical things that violate basic social mores. The vast majority of the time, as we have seen, panic does not occur. Doing nothing at all is in fact a much more common reaction to a disaster, as we’ll see in the next chapter. Afterward, people may say they “panicked,” and the media may report a “panic,” but in truth almost no one misbehaved. They felt their breath quicken and their heart pound. They felt afraid, in other words, and it was an uncomfortable sensation. But they didn’t actually become wilding maniacs, because to do so was not in their interest.

  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.

  But just because panic is rare doesn’t mean we shouldn’t speak of it. Panic does happen. This chapter is a cautious exploration of the exception: What is panic? When does it happen, and why? How can you make it stop?

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sp; A Woman Down

  At the end of 2005, Ali Hussain, a driving instructor from Huddersfield, England, went on the hajj with his wife, Belquis Sadiq, a social worker for the elderly. The couple had been married for seventeen years and had four children, the youngest of whom was eight years old. Both Hussain and Sadiq had been on the pilgrimage before separately, and Islam requires only one hajj per lifetime. But they had always wanted to have the experience together. So on December 29, Hussain and his wife left for Saudi Arabia with an organized tour group of 135 other Muslims from their area.

  On January 12, Hussain and Sadiq gathered their pebbles together and left their hotel for jamarat, the location of the previous four stampedes. Jamarat is a stretch of land surrounding three stone pillars, which are required stops on the hajj. In a ritual known as the “stoning of the devil,” pilgrims must pelt the pillars with pebbles three separate times. It is a cleansing ritual, meant to commemorate the way Abraham, in the Islamic version of the story, repelled Satan each time he tried to stop him from sacrificing his son Ishmael. In the 1970s, the Saudis built an overpass to allow two levels of pilgrims to participate in the stoning at once. As the crowds grew, jamarat became the most dangerous bottleneck in the world.

  Hussain and Sadiq knew they were entering the most perilous part of the hajj. But it was a matter of degree. They had been in intense crowds since their arrival. For Westerners, it can be especially unnerving to be so close to so many strangers. The men’s bare shoulders touch, and the women’s scarves can get entangled. If a shoe falls off, you don’t dare try to salvage it. At the pillars themselves, it can be hard to even find the space to raise your arms and toss the pebbles. As the crowd pushed onward, Hussain and Sadiq clasped each other’s hands tightly. They knew they needed to stay together.

  That morning, the crowd approaching the pillars was extremely dense. Some of the participants had brought their luggage on rolling carts, in violation of the rules. But the throng was flowing fairly smoothly. At 11:53 A.M., however, something changed. The crowd began to lurch in stop-and-go waves, a pattern visible on the video footage. Hussain and Sadiq began to feel a surge of pressure from behind. The crowd was so tight that they began to have trouble breathing normally. But there was no way to turn back. They just had to make it to the pillars, throw the pebbles, and then get back to the hotel safely.

  At about 12:19 P.M., the situation became untenable. People began to be violently pushed in random directions by this amorphous force called the crowd. People stumbled, and then became obstacles for everyone else. Hussain’s wife gripped his arm tightly. The heat from the other bodies wrapped around them like a woolen shroud. Breathing became even harder. Then, suddenly, Hussain tripped over a luggage cart. He felt his wife lose her grip. Down on the ground, he saw bodies and heard screaming. People scrambled over his back, injuring his shoulder. He managed to pull himself upright, and he started yelling his wife’s name. It had been only a few seconds since he fell. She could not have gone far. But he could not see her anywhere in the thicket of humanity. It was 12:30 P.M. Soon Saudi soldiers arrived and cordoned off the area where the stampede had occurred. They’d gotten adept at cleaning up the carnage quickly. Hussain made his way to the entrance of jamarat and looked for his wife there. “I thought that perhaps Belquis had managed to get away,” he later told the Huddersfield Daily Examiner, “but she did not come. So I walked back to our hotel, thinking she may be there.” By 8:30 P.M., she still had not returned.

  That night, the hotel operator took Hussain on the back of his motorbike to the two local hospitals. At the second one, Hussain found a photograph of his wife posted on the wall. She was wearing bangle bracelets in the photograph, just as he remembered. Sadiq, forty-seven, had been killed in the crush. Days later, a distraught Hussain tried to distill his wife’s essence into one sentence in an interview with the Yorkshire Post. “She was a brilliant girl, very hard-working, a really good wife and a very lovely lady who was always pleased to see people and happy to help people where she could.” Sadiq was buried in Saudi Arabia, along with more than 345 other victims.

  The Physics of Crowds

  After the stampede, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki blamed the victims. “Some of the pilgrims were undisciplined and hasty to finish the ritual as soon as possible,” he said. From the vantage point of the pilgrims themselves, specific nationalities seemed responsible. The Indonesians had held hands, rupturing the crowd like earthquake fault lines; the Nigerians were pushing; and on and on. It wasn’t hard to place blame. “You have all of these people from all these different places, people who may have never left their villages before, who don’t know how to line up, and they are moving simultaneously,” says Mohammed Abdul Aleem, CEO of Islamicity.com, an Islamic web portal run out of California. Aleem last went on hajj in 1999, and he remembers being lifted off his feet at one point, which was terrifying.

  But here’s the puzzle: the crowd at the hajj is not a crowd of hooligans. It is, overall, better behaved than the vast majority of crowds. Imagine a million people seeking enlightenment. As frightening as the sheer density of the crowd could be, Aleem remembers, the crowd could also be surprisingly soothing: “You are in this sea of humanity, and when it is not threatening, and people are just moving calmly, it is one of the greatest feelings of being connected.”

  That human connection, literally the opposite of panic, is what makes people want to go back to hajj, even after they’ve completed their required one trip. “Everyone is aligned, and the alignment creates harmony,” says John Kenneth Hautman, a Muslim in Washington, D.C. Hautman came to the hajj with few points of reference. He was a white, Catholic lawyer from Ohio before he met his future wife, a Muslim woman, on Match.com in 2005. Later that year, they got married, and Hautman converted, quit his job as a partner at Hogan & Hartson, a major law firm in town, and began to offer spiritual and legal advice on his own. Months later, he went on the hajj, and it was unlike anything he had experienced.

  I met Hautman in May 2007 at the National Islamic Center, the main mosque in D.C., after Friday prayers. Over lunch outside the imam’s office, Hautman explained that he does not, in general, like crowds. If asked to watch the Fourth of July fireworks celebration on the National Mall, he would politely decline. But the hajj feels radically different, he says. There was a noticeable absence of rage, he remembers, despite the heat, despite the long waits, despite everything. “This was a colossal traffic jam, but I never heard anyone yelling.” He learned to just let the crowd carry him along, something he’d never done before.

  So what happens to suddenly transform this wave of believers into a stampede? Why does the crowd coexist peacefully most of the time, only to devolve suddenly on certain occasions?

  G. Keith Still is a Scottish mathematician who has spent years studying the hajj crowds and advising Saudi safety officials. His own obsession with crowds began in 1992, when he was waiting in line with some ten thousand people to get into an AIDS awareness concert in London’s Wembley Stadium. He had hours to watch the crowd move. “My friends were getting very angry, and I thought it was just fascinating,” he says now. He went to graduate school and wrote his thesis on crowd dynamics.

  Because he is Christian, Still is not allowed to actually attend the hajj. But he has spent many months in Saudi Arabia, working with Muslim engineers and watching thousands of hours of video footage from some three hundred cameras poised over the pilgrims’ heads. The more he learned, the more he realized the crowd crush had more to do with physics than psychology.

  As long as human beings have at least one square yard of space each, they can control their own movements. With less than one square yard of space per person, people lose the ability to counter the jostling of others. Small lurches get amplified. After 11:53 that morning, Hussain and Sadiq felt shock waves pulse through the crowd. At that point, the crowd became unstable. It would have been surprising if no one had gotten hurt.

  Ironically, people can actually cause
more problems at this point by trying to help one another. Eddies are created when people try to form protective rings around women, the injured, or the elderly. The same thing happens when groups of people link arms. In 2004, Farid Currimbhoy, a businessman from Minnesota, and his wife, a Montessori teacher, got caught in a crush in jamarat. When another man from their American tour group fell to the ground, Currimbhoy and the man’s wife began frantically trying to rescue him. They found that the only way they could do it was by force. “We were pushing and shoving trying to prevent people from trampling on him.”

  One of the big problems in a crowd is the lack of communication. The people in the back have no way of knowing that someone in the front has fallen; all they see is a small space open up, where the person used to be, and so they push forward, putting more pressure on the fallen. That’s what happened in 1990. Seven people walking across an overcrowded bridge fell when a railing collapsed. They landed at the mouth of a pedestrian tunnel leading to jamarat. The pileup caused the crowd to come to a standstill, but no one at the other end of the tunnel knew about the problem. So they kept trudging forward, strangling more than fourteen hundred people.

  People who die in stampedes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Their lungs get compressed, and their blood runs out of oxygen. The compounded force of just five people is enough to kill a person. Pressure builds exponentially, so a crowd quickly picks up the same amount of force as a Mack truck. Humans can lose consciousness after being compressed for just thirty seconds. They become brain dead after about six minutes. They can die without ever falling down.