Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

by Amanda Ripley

  Snow fell intermittently. The drops of water on Stiley’s eyelashes froze into tiny icicles. Both of his legs were broken, as was one arm. All of the passengers were seriously injured. Stiley found a life vest floating in the water, but he couldn’t open its plastic packaging because his hands were so cold. Finally Duncan ripped it open with her teeth. They put it on Felch, and Duncan pulled the inflation cord. Despite her injuries and her relative inexperience, Duncan performed masterfully that day, just as she had been trained to do.

  By now, quite a crowd had gathered on the bridge above. They were staring down at the little band of survivors. Some dangled pieces of rope. But Stiley didn’t think he could make it over to the bridge, especially not while dragging Felch. And he knew he couldn’t make it to the riverbank, which was much farther away. So he stayed where he was, clinging to the steel fragments of airplane. He remembers looking up at the crowd at some point and seeing cameras staring back at him.

  Stiley checked his watch to see how long they’d been in the water. Ten minutes. He remembered from his Navy training that people tend to go into cardiac arrest after about twenty minutes in extremely cold water. He tried to move the parts of his body that weren’t broken, to generate heat. Finally, Stiley saw flashing red lights. Rescue workers raced down the riverbank with their gear. “Oh, they’re here! Thank God,” Stiley thought. “They showed up just like they were supposed to.” But then he watched as the rescue workers ran to the water’s edge and came to a stop. There was nothing they could do. “They became spectators like everyone else.”

  Until that moment, Stiley had been trying to reassure the other survivors. One man, who was pinned into his seat next to the tail, had been mumbling repeatedly, “I’m not going to make it out of here.” Stiley had countered such talk with relentless optimism. He encouraged everyone who could move to try to do small exercises to stave off hypothermia. But now, watching the rescue workers watch them, he felt an emptiness open up in his chest. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I survive an airplane crash and I’m going to sit out here and freeze to death with ten thousand people watching.’”

  Electric Cold

  When Olian jumped into the water, he was wearing all his clothes, a jacket, and a wool cap, but no gloves. The water cut to the bone. “It was like getting electrocuted,” he remembers. Someone on the shore shouted to him to take the makeshift lifeline. He grabbed it and tied it around him.

  Human beings do not tolerate temperature extremes very well. Other animals—like rats and pigeons—do much better. If you stick one finger in sixty-four-degree Fahrenheit water, you will feel a deep ache after about one minute. With lower temperatures, the pain comes on faster and is more intense. The water Olian jumped into was thirty-four degrees.

  Here’s what it would feel like to jump into water that cold: first, your heart rate would spike. Your blood pressure would immediately shoot up. Your body would automatically reduce blood flow to the surface of the skin by constricting your blood vessels. Blood travels, so the cold blood on the surface of your skin would eventually make its way to your heart. The constriction of the blood vessels slows down that process, but it also hurts. At the same time, you may experience a sudden urge to urinate. That’s your body’s way of trying to reduce the total fluid volume in your system. Meanwhile, your heart rate would begin to fall, beating fewer times per minute until, without warming, it would eventually stop altogether.

  As your skin temperature continues to cool, the pain would get worse. It would build up to an almost unbearable intensity. Then suddenly the pain would fade, and it would feel like the water had miraculously gotten warmer. In fact, in order to keep your skin supplied with oxygen, your blood vessels would have dilated, bringing a wave of blood back to the surface of your skin. That’s why your cheeks and nose look red in cold temperatures. But then, just as you’re getting more comfortable, the process would reverse itself again. The blood vessels constrict, and the pain returns. This opening and closing of the blood vessels would continue until the body becomes even colder, at which point the blood vessels would stop dilating altogether. Your blood would begin to abandon your extremities to frostbite, choosing to save your heart instead.

  As soon as you entered the water, goose bumps would have popped up on your skin. Goose bumps are your hair follicles standing on end. The technical term for this is horripilation (from the Latin horrere, “to stand on end,” and pilus, which means “hair” horrible is a close relative of this word for obvious reasons). Like the rest of our survival response, it is an obvious descendant of evolution, and a classic example of how outdated our fear response can be. In animals with a lot of fur, goose bumps help to boost insulation in the cold. Or, when animals are afraid, goose bumps can bristle the animal’s coat, creating a more intimidating silhouette. But of course, humans don’t have enough hair to reap such benefits.

  Meanwhile, as in any extreme situation, your abilities to reason and make decisions would deteriorate rapidly. So would your fine-motor skills. Humans lose manual dexterity in water less than fifty-four degrees. Swimming can help delay the onset of hypothermia. But as your body continued to cool you would start to shiver violently. Shivering is like involuntary calisthenics. It causes your muscles to contract, which creates heat.

  Because humans have such a weakness for cold temperatures, it has been a subject of a sometimes perverse fascination for scientists for many years. In the 1930s, doctors tried treating schizophrenia and tumors with cold temperatures, under the theory that the cold might kill the diseased tissue. During World War II, Nazi scientists subjected prisoners at Dachau to atrocious experiments in temperature extremes. To this day, much of what we know about human responses to cold water comes from the suffering of these prisoners.

  Like Stiley, Olian had formed an instant plan. He guessed that the water might be shallow enough that he could walk out to the survivors. Immediately, he realized he was wrong. The land dropped off dramatically, and he had to tread water as soon as he jumped in. Plan B was to walk on water. Maybe he could leapfrog from one floating ice slab to the next. He scrambled up on the nearest, dinner-table-sized ice block. But as soon as he stood up, the block flipped, tossing him back in the water. He tried again, but the ice was too unstable. He’d been in the water only a couple of minutes, but already he’d lost feeling in his hands. They felt like giant wooden clubs, and they were useless to him in this ridiculous dance he was doing in the water.

  Next, Olian tried swimming between the ice blocks. He had been a powerful swimmer in high school and still swam several days a week. He plowed his arms through the water, but got nowhere. The plane had shattered the ice, but the fragments were still too close together to allow him to pass through. “It was like a jigsaw puzzle. Every piece was in exactly the right place.”

  Plans A, B, and C had all failed. “I’m getting into the Greek alphabet, and I’m beginning to think I’m in trouble.” So Olian did the least elegant thing he could do. He threw himself up on an ice block, then crawled across it and fell back into the water. He did this over and over again, slowly working his way toward the wreckage. Every couple minutes, he yelled to the passengers: “Hold on. I’m coming!”

  When Olian entered the water, his temperature was probably about 98.6 degrees, or normal. For a while, his body could keep his core at that temperature through the constriction of his blood vessels and the hard work of swimming. As he began to cool further, though, his temperature began to drop. The Potomac was one degree cooler than the coldest water used in the Dachau experiments. In general, doctors consider patients in need of treatment when their temperatures drop below 95 degrees—and in danger of dying below 90 degrees. Below 87 degrees, the rhythm of the heart becomes abnormal. At Dachau, the Nazis concluded that death becomes almost certain below 75 degrees.

  Olian didn’t know the people he was trying to rescue. I asked him if he experienced any feelings of doubt or regret as he thrashed about in the water, his body lacerated by cold. “I wondered v
aguely if I would ever regain use of my hands,” he says. “But some switch in my head said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Keep going.’” Olian admits he was not behaving logically. “If rational thought had entered my head at any point, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  If you ask heroes why they did what they did, they invariably say they had no choice. How could they watch a man drown? Or starve? Or burn to death? Heroes are universally uncomfortable with the label. They attribute their actions to the situation, rather than their own profile. “I am just a guy who happened to be somewhere and do something,” says Olian. “If it happened again next week, it might not work out so well.”

  But at the Flight 90 crash site, there was a control group. At least a couple dozen people did not jump in. That was a fair decision. If they had, there may have been even more casualties that day. But what was the difference between Olian and everyone else?

  It’s not, Olian assures me, that he is such a great guy. “A lot of people may not even like me,” he says, laughing. “I’m always mad at someone for something.” He is not particularly optimistic about his fellow humans. “Ordinary human behavior generally sucks.” Had the crash not happened, he would have been stuck in traffic, he says, swearing at the people around him instead of trying to save them.

  Profiling a Hero

  Over the past twenty-five years, sociologist Samuel Oliner and his wife, Pearl Oliner, have interviewed more than four hundred documented heroes—all people who risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. The Oliners also interviewed seventy-two other people who were living in the same countries at the same time and did not save anyone. They asked them every imaginable question: Did your father belong to any political party when you were growing up? What was your religious affiliation? Did any Jews attend your elementary school?

  While most of us are content to marvel at the occasional beneficence of man, Oliner has spent his life systematically dissecting the hero. When he was twelve years old, the Nazis came for his family. They were living in a Jewish ghetto in Bobowa, Poland. His own mother had died of tuberculosis five years prior. But his stepmother was there, holding his baby sister, when the Germans pulled up their trucks and starting yelling for the Jews to get out. She met his little-boy eyes. And with the hollow clarity of a woman facing her own execution, she told him to run. “Run away so that you will stay alive!” She gave him a push.

  Samuel Oliner ran. He went up to a rooftop and lay there, flat and still in his pajamas, for almost an entire day and night. He saw atrocious scenes no child should see—a child thrown from a window and another stabbed with a bayonet, he says. After the German voices faded, he crept into a house and scavenged for clothing. Then he slipped out of the ghetto and began wandering the streets. From a farmer, he learned that all the Jews in the ghetto had been shot and killed, their bodies shoved into a mass grave and covered with dirt.

  And then he was saved. Fate scooped Oliner up and held him close, just as inexplicably as it had abandoned him. He walked to a nearby village and knocked on the door of a peasant woman. He did not know her well, but he knew she had gone to school with his father years ago. Balwina Piecuch fed him, gave him a new name, and taught him the Lord’s Prayer and the Polish catechism. Then she arranged for him to work on a farm several miles away and sent her son to check up on him routinely.

  Oliner has lived a long life because of this woman. He eventually came to the United States, fought in Korea, and attended college on the GI Bill. He became a professor at Humboldt State University in California. “I saw and understood the tragedy of evil,” Oliner told me. But heroism…heroism was harder. He has devoted his life to unraveling the mystery this peasant woman presented. Why do some people risk their lives to save strangers while other people just watch?

  What Oliner found was subtle. “There is no single explanation for why people act heroically. It’s not absolutely genetic or personality or cultural.” But first, consider what did not matter. Religious conviction didn’t seem to make a difference. In the Oliners’ study, about 90 percent of both rescuers and nonrescuers said they had been affiliated with a religious institution while growing up. (Most were Catholic.) More to the point, both groups reported similar levels of religious intensity among themselves and their parents.

  Many individual heroes would disagree. Walter Bailey, the busboy who saved hundreds in the fire at the Beverly Hills Supper Club, believes his faith filled him with a sense of calm. “I generally feel that a person who knows where they’re going to go when they die is less afraid of death.” Roger Olian, the man who jumped into the Potomac River after the Flight 90 crash, on the other hand, does not have strong religious convictions. His values overlap with religious ideology, but he got them somewhere else, he says—from his family, the military, and any number of other influences.

  Politics also do not predict behavior, the Oliner study found. Rescuers and nonrescuers alike were simply not all that concerned with politics. Rescuers were, however, more likely to support democratic, pluralistic ideologies in general.

  Despite what so many heroes say, their acts were not simply products of chance, the study concluded. The rescuers were not just in the right place at the right time. People who knew more about what was happening to Jews were not more likely to help. Nor were people who faced less severe risks by helping. Rescuers were not wealthier than nonrescuers, and they hadn’t known more Jews while they were growing up.

  But there were important differences. Rescuers tended to have had healthier and closer relationships with their parents. They were also more likely to have had friends of different religions and classes. Their most important quality seemed to be empathy. It is tricky to say where empathy comes from, but Oliner believes the rescuers learned egalitarianism and justice from their parents. When they were disciplined as children, rescuers were more likely to have been reasoned with; nonrescuers were more likely to have been whipped.

  For all these reasons, perhaps, heroes feel a nonnegotiable duty to help others when they can. “It’s something in your heart, your soul, and your emotions that gets a hold of you and says, I gotta do something,” Oliner says. This finding agrees with the results of other (albeit scant) research into heroism. People who perform heroic acts are very often those who are “helpers” in everyday life, be they firefighters or nurses or police officers.

  Perhaps because of their training and experience, heroes also have confidence in their own abilities. In general, like almost all people who perform well under extreme stress, heroes believe they shape their own destinies. Psychologists call this an “internal locus of control.” I asked Roger Olian if he felt in control of what happens to him. “There’s no question in my mind. To a very large degree,” he said. “Even if I couldn’t control it, I would feel like I should.”

  Bystanders, on the other hand, tend to feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. “They pay scant attention to other people’s problems. They will concentrate on their own need for survival,” Oliner says. And bystanders, it’s worth remembering, are what most of us are.

  “He Just Kept Coming”

  Stiley heard Olian before he saw him. “Hey, guys! Hold on! I’m coming!” Stiley looked toward the shore and saw a person, a tall, determined, and possibly crazy person hacking his way through the ice. Stiley felt a rush of gratitude. “I thought, ‘That guy’s a man.’” He and the other passengers said the Lord’s Prayer as they waited. It wasn’t clear what Olian could do for them if he ever got to them, but it would be better to die knowing someone had tried and failed to help than knowing no one had tried at all.

  Twenty minutes came and went. None of the six survivors passed out. The cold was becoming unbearable, though, and they kept swallowing jet fuel in the water. Meanwhile, Olian slashed through the water, ever so slowly. The lifeline around his waist kept getting caught on the ice, so he tried to take it off. But his hands had turned into useless stumps from the cold. Then he heard shouts from the people on the bank; they’d run o
ut of rope. He had to wait for them to find more. He thought to himself: “Good night nurse, I can’t wait! This is hard enough.” But soon they lengthened the rope, and he charged back into the slurry.

  At that point, Olian was just halfway there. He’d been in the water for about fifteen minutes. If it took another fifteen minutes to get to them, and it would probably take more since he was exhausted now, what would he do next? If he somehow summoned the strength to carry even one of them back across the football-field length of water, it would take yet another thirty minutes at least. Realistically, there was no way his body—or the survivors—could last another forty-five minutes in that water. He remembers staring at the tail section of the plane and noticing how smooth it was. Even if he made it out there, there might be nothing to hold on to, he thought. “I was pretty sure I was gonna die,” Olian says in a quiet voice. “But that was OK. I had an internal calm and good feeling about that. I was not going to turn my back on those folks.”

  Stiley and Olian both felt the helicopter before they saw it. The whoomp, whoomp of the blades broke through the sky like thunder. That afternoon, the Park Police helicopter had been grounded at its home base a few miles away. Chief pilot Donald Usher had ruled out flying in the storm conditions—until he got the call from the airport about a downed plane. He and rescue technician Melvin Windsor decided to lift off. Flying in a near whiteout with periods of freezing rain, Usher and Windsor found their way to the bridge by following the roadways below.

  Olian watched the chopper get closer. “I knew instinctively that this was a Vietnam pilot,” he says, smiling. “Because those guys, they were great. They would do anything.” The windshield was iced over and the helicopter’s downdraft was blowing debris dangerously close to the rotor system. But Usher, indeed a Vietnam veteran, delicately lowered the chopper toward the water.