Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  At 1:50 A. M., just thirty minutes after its first “Mayday” call, the Estonia vanished altogether, sinking upside down into the sea. Moments beforehand, Härstedt had jumped off the ship and into the sea. He climbed onto a life raft and held on. He would stay there for five hours, waiting to be rescued. At the start, there were about twenty other people on the raft. By the time the helicopter arrived, only seven, including Härstedt, were still alive.

  All told, only 137 people survived the disaster. Investigators would conclude that the ship sunk because the bow to the car deck had come unlocked, and the Baltic Sea had come gushing into the ship. Most of the 852 victims were entombed in the Estonia, where most of their bodies remain to this day.

  What did the immobilized people on the Estonia have in common with Clay Violand at Virginia Tech? They were all under attack and felt trapped. They were also extremely frightened, more frightened than most of us have ever been. But in the case of the Estonia, the freezing response may have been a natural and horrific mistake. “What we may be witnessing is a situation in which a previously adaptive response has now become maladaptive as a consequence of technological changes,” says Gallup, the expert on paralysis in animals. In more modern disasters, in which the threat is not actually another animal, paralysis may be a misfire. Our brains search, under extreme stress, for an appropriate survival response and choose the wrong one, like divers who rip their respirators out of their mouths deep underwater. Or like deer who freeze in the headlights of a car. Of the twenty-three people on board with Härstedt for the conference, only one other survived.

  Some people, like some animals, are clearly more likely to freeze. The behavior is built into their fear response. No one knows exactly why. Genetics are undoubtedly important. Gallup has bred chickens that tend to stay frozen for longer periods of time and found that their offspring show the same behavior. This makes sense, says brain expert Joseph LeDoux. The amygdala, the part of the brain that handles fear, is made up of two key parts. The lateral nucleus handles input, and the central handles output. “You can imagine individual differences, for either genetic or experiential reasons, in the wiring of the lateral nucleus that makes one person more sensitive to input,” LeDoux says. “So the same terrifying stimulus might make the more sensitive person freeze.”

  The more important point, perhaps, is that the brain is plastic. It can be trained to respond more appropriately. More fear, on the other hand, makes paralysis stronger. Animals injected with adrenaline are more likely to freeze, for example. Less fear, then, makes paralysis less likely. A rat with damage to its amygdala will not freeze at all—even if it encounters a cat. House pets also tend not to freeze when they are restrained, Gallup has found. They seem to think the exercise is a game. They might fight back, but they won’t freeze. They are not frightened enough. So it makes sense that if we can reduce our own fear and adrenaline, even a little bit, we might be able to override paralysis when we need to.

  Breaking Out of the Stupor

  On March 27, 1977, a Pan Am 747 awaiting takeoff at the Tenerife airport in the Canary Islands was sliced open without warning by a Dutch KLM jet that had come hurtling out of the fog at 160 mph. The collision left twisted metal, along with comic books and toothbrushes, strewn along a half-mile stretch of tarmac. Everyone on the KLM jet was killed instantly. But many of the Pan Am passengers had survived. They could live if they got up and walked off the fiery plane.

  Floy Heck, then seventy, was sitting on the Pan Am jet between her husband and her friends, en route from their California retirement residence to a Mediterranean cruise. When the KLM jet sheared off the top of their plane, the impact did not feel too severe. The Hecks were thrown forward and to the right, but their safety belts held them down. Still, Floy Heck found that she could not speak or move. “My mind was almost blank. I didn’t even hear what was going on,” she told an Orange County Register reporter years later. But her husband, Paul Heck, sixty-five, reacted immediately. He unbuckled his seat belt and started toward the exit. “Follow me!” he told his wife. Hearing him, Floy snapped out of her daze and followed him through the smoke “like a zombie,” she said.

  Just before they jumped out of a hole in the left side of the craft, Floy looked back at her friend Lorraine Larson, who was just sitting there, looking straight ahead, her mouth slightly open, hands folded in her lap. Like dozens of others, she would die not from the collision but from the fire that came afterward.

  Unlike tall buildings, planes are meant to be emptied fast. All passengers are supposed to be able to get out within ninety seconds, even if only half the exits are available and bags are strewn in the aisles. As it turns out, the people on the Pan Am 747 had at least sixty seconds to flee before fire engulfed the plane. But 326 of the 396 people onboard were killed. Including the KLM victims, 583 people ultimately perished. Tenerife remains the deadliest accidental plane crash in history.

  At the time of the Tenerife crash, psychologist Daniel Johnson was working on safety research for McDonnell Douglas. He became fascinated by this paralysis behavior, which had been observed in other plane crashes as well. Floy and Paul Heck are both deceased now. But a few months after the accident, Johnson interviewed them both. He made an important discovery. Before the crash, Paul had done something highly unusual. During the long delay before takeoff, Heck had studied the 747’s safety diagram. He even walked around the aircraft with his wife, pointing out the nearest exits. He had been in a theater fire as an eight-year-old boy, and ever since, he had always checked for the exits in an unfamiliar environment. Maybe this is a coincidence. But it is also possible that when the planes collided, Heck’s brain had the data it needed to take action.

  The National Transportation Safety Board has found that passengers who read the safety information card are less likely to get hurt in an emergency. In a plane crash at Pago Pago three years before the Tenerife accident, all but 5 of the 101 passengers died. All the survivors reported that they had read the safety information cards and listened to the briefing. They exited over the wing, while other passengers went toward other, more dangerous but traditional exits and died.

  After preparation, the next best hope is leadership. That’s one reason that well-trained flight attendants now shriek at passengers in evacuations—to break into their stupor, just as Paul Heck did for his wife. Otherwise, the amygdala works like a positive feedback loop: fear leads to more fear. Cortisol and other stress hormones go back to the amygdala and make the fear stronger. The more intense the fear, the less likely the hippocampus and other parts of the brain can intervene and readjust the response. “The amygdala will keep firing away,” says brain expert LeDoux. “Unless you have some way to overcome that, you’re going to be sort of locked in.”

  The easiest way to get a paralyzed animal to snap out of its daze is to make a loud noise, Gallup found. The sound of a door slamming shut will do the trick. An animal will start suddenly and try to flee. Sometimes this would happen in the lab by accident: if a researcher sneezed or a car backfired. “Any sudden change will terminate the response,” he says. Otherwise, animals can stay in their trance for hours. They can even die that way. (Gallup has found that about 30 to 40 percent of mice actually die while paralyzed, presumably of cardiac arrest.) The paralysis response is so powerful that “playing dead” can turn into being dead.

  Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—when almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme. Sometimes it works. But paralysis remains mostly a mystery. Aside from Gallup, very few people have researched it seriously, which is a shame. In a way, the paralysis response is so good that it has had us all fooled. Victims appear motionless, overwhelmed, and useless, so researchers move on to the next subject. But there, trapped in a still life, might be one of the most interesting and problematic defense mechanisms in the animal kingdom.

  8

  Heroism

  A Suicide Attemp
t on the Potomac River

  THE SNOW STARTED out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard buildings and bleaching the memorials storybook white. But by midafternoon on January 13, 1982, it had turned unforgiving. Great groaning piles of snow fell from the sky like mud. Government employees were liberated early, stacking the city’s streets with traffic. Normally, it took Roger Olian, a sheet-metal worker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half an hour to get home. On this day, after driving for two hours, he was only halfway there. It would have been faster to walk.

  By the time he got to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which crosses over the Potomac River from D.C. into Virginia, Olian’s old red Datsun pickup truck was protesting. It had needed a new battery for a while and now it was desperately low on gas, too. Worried the car might stall and never start again, Olian kept the radio and the windshield wipers off.

  When the Boeing 737 sliced into the bridge span next to him at 4:01 P. M., Olian didn’t even see it. Encased in his snow-covered truck, he didn’t hear or feel the crash. It was only when the car in front of him stopped that Olian had any indication that something strange had happened. The driver got out and walked back to his truck. Olian rolled down his window, and the man’s shouts jangled through the snowbound quiet.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What’s that?”

  “A plane! A plane just crashed into the river!” the man screamed.

  Olian dismissed him. “I thought, ‘This guy is nuts.’ All I wanted to do was to get out of there.”

  But the man kept yelling. “I think that plane might explode!”

  “So get in your car and go!” Olian told him, rolling up his window.

  The man did as he was told. But as Olian started to follow him, he noticed that the other cars were behaving oddly too. “It was as if you’d dropped food into the middle of an anthill and all of a sudden the ants started to move in weird ways. So I thought, ‘Maybe that guy was right.’” Without thinking too much about what he was doing or how he would start his truck again, Olian eased over to the shoulder and parked. If a plane had gone down without him even noticing, he thought, it must have been a small private plane. “Well, maybe I could see what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Or maybe somebody needs help, maybe I could do something—some nominal thing, and it will be interesting.”

  “This Is Not a Small Plane”

  What makes a person risk his or her life to save someone else? It’s one thing to carry someone’s briefcase as you evacuate a burning building, or to help a frightened stranger to her feet. Small acts of kindness don’t cost very much, and they have clear evolutionary value, as we’ve seen. But how do we explain truly irrational acts of generosity? Heroism, much as we revere it, is rather incomprehensible. Isn’t it exactly the kind of behavior that should get naturally selected for extinction?

  This chapter is about exceptional grace. We have already dissected exceptional failure, known as panic. And we’ve explored the far more common default behavior called paralysis. But for almost every disaster, there is a hero. Sometimes there are hundreds. The following is not a celebration of heroes. That is the topic of many other worthy books. This chapter is an attempt to understand, not applaud; to look the hero straight in the eye and ask: what the hell were you thinking?

  As Olian jogged down toward the river, he could make out a dozen other people, drivers like him who’d emerged to investigate. They were clustered on the riverbank tying scarves and jumper cables together, trying to make a lifeline. In the water, about seventy-five to a hundred yards from shore, Olian saw the tail section of a passenger jet. “My first thought was, this is not a small plane,” he remembers. “My second thought was, where is the rest of it?”

  As he got closer, Olian saw something else. Six people were in the water, floating amid the pieces of airplane, trying to keep their heads above the slush. They were the passengers. Olian realized immediately that there was no obvious way to save them. The river was frozen over, so no boat could get through. The plane had shattered the ice between it and the shore, making it equally impossible to walk to safety. And the snowstorm was so bad that Olian couldn’t imagine a helicopter making it out. As he approached the river, he could hear the survivors’ calls for help. Their cries bounced across the frozen landscape. “You knew they knew they were in trouble,” Olian says. But the bystanders on the river and on the bridge above could only watch.

  As he reached the water, Olian didn’t stop to talk with the people gathered there. He didn’t take off his steel-toed boots or remove the five pounds of keys in his pockets. He just jumped in. He needed to let those people know someone was trying to save them, he said later. That was all. “They had to see someone right now. If I was ever confident of anything in my life, it was this,” he says in his slow, methodical way. “Worst-case scenario, I would be totally ineffective in saving them, but at least I would give them hope.”

  Olian is bald now, with a white beard and wire-rimmed glasses that make him look like a man who likes to read classics and collect wine. But he actually spends most of the day outside doing hard physical work. He runs his own small tree service, a profession he took up in 2002 when he was laid off from his government sheet-metal job after twenty-eight years of service. He often works alone, climbing up into the treetops like an acrobat and cutting down unwanted branches. When we meet at his small red-brick home in Arlington, he is wearing a denim shirt, tan jeans, and the kind of earth-tone sneakers you see on people at technology start-ups in Seattle. His long arms hang languorously by his sides, like a basketball player’s.

  We sit in the living room, next to the woodstove, which Olian periodically feeds with wood from a symmetrically stacked pile of logs. As we talk, he gently pets Sandy, a miniature poodle and one of two small dogs that he and his wife dote over. For the first half hour or so, Olian doesn’t meet my gaze very often. He stares down at the dog as he describes that strange, long-ago day on the Potomac. When Pumpkin, the other dog, comes over to lick Sandy’s nose, Olian interrupts his story to fuss over them. “Oh, look, they’re kissing!” he says. As he relaxes, Olian looks up more often. Eventually, the dogs move on to other things.

  The Hero On Board

  Air Florida Flight 90 had taken off that morning with ice and snow on its wings. The Boeing 737, en route to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had been delayed almost two hours while snow was swept off the runways at D.C.’s National Airport. Shortly before 3:00 P.M., the airport had reopened. The flight crew had deiced Flight 90, but not as thoroughly as they should have. When the plane took off, it strained and stretched to reach up to the sky, but the armor of ice weighed it down.

  Joe Stiley knew the plane was going to crash before it even left the runway. He traveled constantly for his job as an executive at GTE. He flew in 737s out of National Airport about once a week. Maybe because Stiley had also been a pilot himself, he noticed things that most people didn’t. For one thing, the crew hadn’t finished deicing the plane. He could see them through his window. And when the plane finally took off, he could tell it was going far too slowly. He got into the brace position and told his secretary, Patricia “Nikki” Felch, to do the same thing. “What I said was, ‘Nikki, we’re in deep shit. Do what I do.’ I put my head right up next to my rear end.”

  Stiley looked up once more before the plane crashed. He saw through the window that the plane’s left wing was slanted downward. He put his head back between his legs. That day, January 13, was his son’s birthday. Before the plane slammed into the bridge, Stiley apologized to God for leaving on a business trip on that day. He ached to think that his son would forever remember his birthday as the anniversary of his father’s death.

  Just seconds after takeoff, less than half a mile from the airport, Flight 90 hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge like a wrecking ball, destroying seven cars, killing four people, and tearing away a section of the bridge wall. The plane broke into a dozen pieces on impact.

  When the plane hit the bridge, Sti
ley remembers, it felt a lot like being rear-ended hard in a car. The impact rattled him down to his bones. Hitting the water, though, was much worse. “That impact was unbelievable.” He could feel himself blacking out. “I didn’t expect to wake up.”

  When Stiley came to, he was sitting upright in his seat with water up to his neck. Felch was still next to him. He could hear other people moaning around him. Then the plane started to sink. It slipped underwater and kept drifting downward for what seemed like a very long time, until it finally settled on the bottom of the river. While this was happening, Stiley made a checklist in his head. He had much to do. First, he needed to free his left leg, which was horribly broken and pinned in the wreckage. He also had to unbuckle his seat belt. Then he had to help Felch. Like many of the survivors in this book, his military training had taught him to always make a plan. It probably saved his life. “There is a tremendous benefit to having that training,” he says. “You don’t sit there wondering what to do. You do it.”

  Once the plane stopped falling, Stiley started working on the checklist. He wrenched his leg free, unbuckled his belt, and started to help Felch. He had to break her foot to get it free. Then the two of them swam over the other seats, past the college kids they had been chatting with on the runway. They couldn’t stop to help anyone else. They’d been underwater for too long. Their lungs were throbbing. They kept swimming, clutching each other’s hand, and groping through the black water. Finally they broke through to the surface. As they sucked in the twenty-four-degree air, they saw the tail section of their plane sticking out of the water about ten yards away. It was the only thing to hold on to. They helped each other swim toward it. Then they saw Kelly Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant, and the only member of the crew to survive. She came over to hold on to the tail too. Then Priscilla Tirado surfaced, screaming. “Where is my baby? Does anyone see my baby?” In less than five minutes, she had lost her two-month-old infant and her husband forever. Stiley swam over to Tirado and floated her over to the little group of survivors. She pulled so hard on his tie she almost choked him to death, he remembers.