Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (10 page)

The best warnings are like the best ads: consistent, easily understood, specific, frequently repeated, personal, accurate, and targeted. Now compare that description to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s color-coded alert system. It is indeed easy to understand, and it gets repeated frequently. But other than that, the alerts are inconsistent, unspecific, impersonal, and untargeted. “That isn’t a warning system,” says warnings expert Mileti. “That’s the first 10 percent of the system. It’s a risk classification system. It would be equivalent to saying, ‘It’s orange today for floods.’” Warnings need to tell people what to do. Since people aren’t sure what action they should take in response to an Orange Alert for terrorism, the color codes are unsatisfying—like someone clinking a glass to give a toast and then standing there in silence.

So what can regular people do to improve their own risk perception? When I asked risk experts this question, they told me their own tricks.

When it comes to financial risk, Taleb, the mathematical trader, refuses to read the newspaper or watch TV news. He doesn’t want to tempt his brain with buy-sell sound bites. Likewise, Slovic avoids short-term investments; he invests broadly and then walks away. Similarly, when it comes to disaster risk, there’s little to be gained by watching TV news segments: stories of shark attacks will distract your brain from focusing on far likelier risks. (Sharks kill an average of six people worldwide every year. Humans kill between 26 and 73 million sharks. This is not a battle humans are losing.)

“I tell people that if it’s in the news, don’t worry about it. The very definition of ‘news’ is ‘something that hardly ever happens,’” writes security expert Bruce Schneier. “It’s when something isn’t in the news, when it’s so common that it’s no longer news—car crashes, domestic violence—that you should start worrying.”

Repeatedly absorbing disaster images on TV can be particularly damaging. After 9/11, studies showed that the more hours of coverage adults and children watched, the more stress they experienced. In general, TV makes us worry about the wrong things. Your brain is better at filtering out media hype when it is reading. Words have less emotional salience than images. So it’s much healthier to read the newspaper than watch TV.

The time to let your emotions run free is when you can’t get good data. Long ago, that would have been all the time. You would have needed to rely on your emotions every minute of every day. “If you’re back in a time before books and statistical research, and you need to know which mushrooms are poisonous, going by rumor and hearsay is a good strategy,” says Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. But when data are available—and they are now more available than any time before—there is no better complement to raw emotion.

David Ropeik, coauthor of
Risk: A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Really Safe and What’s Really Dangerous in the World Around You,
does not totally repress his own instincts. He allows his emotions to help him make decisions. “We’re always going to use our feelings. We’re never going to have all the facts. So we have to use emotions to kind of fill in the blanks,” Ropeik says. “But, and this is the challenge, that can be dangerous. If you go with how a risk feels, and that flies in the face of the facts, you could die.” So Ropeik tries to check himself whenever his feelings clash with known facts. For example, he is emotionally opposed to wearing a bike helmet. He feels strongly that he looks “goofy and stupid” in a helmet. But he forces himself to wear one anyway. He knows his emotions clash with the data, so he suppresses his feelings, just the way he suppresses the desire to eat a piece of chocolate cake (most of the time).

The next time you hear about something that scares you, look for data. Be suspicious of absolute numbers—or no numbers at all. For example, new parents are now inundated with warnings about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), the name given to the unexplained death of a baby under age one. Given the enormous stakes, and the ready availability of preventive measures (like putting the baby to sleep on his or her back), these warnings make sense. But it would be much better if the scary pamphlets handed to new parents at the hospital put the risk into perspective. For instance, perhaps the warnings could include language like this: “SIDS is still not well-understood. But it is at an all-time low, partly because parents like you have been following basic precautions described in this pamphlet. Fewer than one baby per 1,000 dies this way (four times as many infants die from birth defects and low birthweight). So you don’t need to get up seven times in the middle of the night to check if the baby is breathing. Just follow these simple rules—and concentrate on sleeping, which will make you a much better parent, with near 100 percent certainty.”

Of course, even when people really do understand the risks, that doesn’t mean they will make low-risk choices. Mileti, one of the nation’s foremost experts on hazards, lives along one of the biggest earthquake faults in North America. I ask him if this is wise. “No, it makes no sense,” he says. But, unlike 86 percent of Californians, Mileti has earthquake insurance. He also has several days’ worth of supplies. And instead of paying off his house, he has stashed his savings in the bank, so he’ll have cash if he needs it. He isn’t mired in denial. He’s made an informed gamble: until the megaearthquake he fully expects to occur one day, he gets to live in Palm Springs, California.

3

Fear

The Body and Mind of a Hostage

T
HE
D
OMINICAN
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EPUBLIC’S
embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, occupied a large but rather shabby building outside of the usual diplomatic enclave. It would take U.S. ambassador Diego Asencio, his driver, and four bodyguards at least half an hour to drive there. But the Dominican ambassador was celebrating his country’s independence day, and by tradition, every diplomat attended everyone else’s party. Besides, it was Asencio’s job to pan for treasure at cocktail parties. There was always the chance he would carry home some small rumor, floated theory, or unkind whisper that might prove valuable.

At age forty-eight, Asencio was “used to the low lighting of comfortable offices,” as he would later put it. He had grown up in working-class Newark, New Jersey, the son of Spanish immigrants. Through charm, hard work, and fluent Spanish, he managed to tunnel his way into the squirearchy of diplomacy. He graduated from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Washington, D.C. Then he worked in embassies in Mexico, Panama, Brazil, and Venezuela before going to Colombia. Around the State Department, Asencio was known as a gregarious, pipe-smoking character unafraid to offer his opinion on delicate matters. He liked dirty jokes, “the dirtier the better,” according to one newspaper account from the time. By February 27, 1980, the day of the party, he had been the U.S. Ambassador to Colombia for two and a half years.

Asencio swept into the party around noon with a short agenda: greet the host, say hello to a few friends, and then gracefully exit in time for lunch. About sixty people had already arrived. The banter, as usual at such functions, was collegial but calculated. Asencio began making his rounds. Ambassadors from Israel, the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Switzerland, as well as the pope’s representative, exchanged kisses and handshakes and picked at the canapés. Around the time the Venezuelan ambassador pulled Asencio aside to debate a proposal affecting the local beef industry, Asencio sensed it was time to go. He started to glide toward the door and compose his good-byes.

Just then, two well-dressed couples walked in through the front door, past Asencio’s armored Chrysler Imperial limousine and his bodyguards. The couples wore unusually serious expressions for such an affair, but attracted no special attention. There were bound to be a few professional party crashers in attendance—a tradition at diplomatic functions in Colombia.

But the four young arrivals were members of M-19, a group of violent, nationalist rebels, and they had come to take the diplomats hostage. Lining up in the front of the room, they opened up their jackets, pulled pistols from their belts, and started firing at the ceiling. There was total quiet at first, as plaster fell to the floor. Then a few women started screaming. Men shouted. Despite his rather portly build, Asencio did not hesitate. He dove to the ground and crawled between a sofa and a wall. Others did nothing at all, silently watching the world collapse around them.

From the ground, as the gunfire continued, Asencio looked up to see his host, the Dominican ambassador, run shrieking from the room—followed immediately by the countershriek of his wife, who yelled, “Mallol, act like a man!” and sent her husband spinning back inside. Meanwhile, another twelve young people who had been casually kicking a soccer ball around across the street ran into the embassy, pulling shotguns, carbines, and pistols from their gym bags and firing at Asencio’s bodyguards outside the door.

The security men returned fire, but they were now badly outnumbered. As the sixteen terrorists barricaded themselves inside the embassy, the cacophony of screaming, swearing, and gunfire was overwhelming. Bullets shattered the tall window above Asencio, raining glass down onto his head. He could hear the thud of bullets slamming into the wall behind him. The terrorists held more than fifty captives—one of the largest groups of diplomatic hostages in history.

Over the previous two months, there had been a dozen embassy seizures in Latin America alone. At that very moment, Iranian militants were occupying the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Asencio had read accounts of diplomats held hostage, and he himself had recently been involved in negotiations to free a Peace Corps officer held by Colombian guerrillas. Given all that he knew, he did not anticipate things going well for him. “My feeling was that there was absolutely no way I was going to survive,” he remembers. “I was for all intents and purposes, dead.”

The Physiology of Fear

What does it feel like to face death? What happens in our brains as the ground buckles under our feet? Fear guides our reactions in every station of the survival arc. But we’ll consider its effects here, in the beginning of the deliberation phase, because fear is typically at its peak once we’ve grasped the danger we face. Any deliberation that follows will happen through the prism of fear. People’s behavior in a disaster is inexplicable until we understand the effect of fear on the body and mind.

The human fear response looks a lot like the fear response of other animals. So scientists understand fear better than, say, guilt or shame. “Fear is so fundamental,” says brain expert Joseph LeDoux. “There are key environmental triggers that will turn it on and well-worked-out responses that help you cope with it. These things have stuck around through zillions of years of evolution.”

The first rule of fear is that it is primitive. Consider the fact that our hair stands on end in a terrifying situation. What purpose could that possibly serve? Well, none—for us. But scientists believe it may be related to the flashing of feathers in birds or fin extensions in fish—all of which aid in the survival of those creatures. Over the long arc of history, fear has served us very well, and it still does, with some exceptions.

Here is how fear moved through Asencio’s body: first, an unexpected sound registering 90 decibels or louder sets off an instinctive alarm in human beings. A rifle shot registers around 120 to 155 decibels. As soon as Asencio’s ears detected the booming gunshots, before he even realized what they were or that he was afraid, a signal traveled to his brain by way of the auditory nerve. When the signal reached his brainstem, neurons passed along the information to his amygdala, an ancient, almond-shaped mass of nuclei located deep within his brain’s temporal lobes that is central to the human fear circuit. In response, the amygdala set off a cascading series of changes throughout his body. In a flash, Asencio transformed into survival mode—without any conscious decision making on his part.

If Asencio responded like most people, the chemistry of his blood literally changed so that it would be able to coagulate more easily. At the same time, his blood vessels constricted so that he would bleed less if he got hurt. His blood pressure and his heart rate shot up. And a slew of hormones—in particular cortisol and adrenaline—surged through his system, giving his gross-motor muscles a sort of bionic boost. (The hormones are so powerful that, after a life-or-death situation, many people report having an odd, chemical taste in their mouths.)

But the next rule of fear is that for every gift it gives us, it takes one away. Like a country under attack, the human body has limited resources. The brain must decide what to prioritize and what to neglect. Our muscles become taut and ready. Our body creates its own natural painkillers. But our abilities to reason and perceive our surroundings deteriorate. Cortisol interferes with the part of the brain that handles complex thinking. We suddenly have trouble solving problems, even simple ones—like how to put on a life jacket or unbuckle a seat belt. All of our senses are profoundly altered. A few of us, like Elia Zedeño in the World Trade Center, even go temporarily blind, as we saw in Chapter 1.

Not all of the diplomats dove for cover like Asencio. While the gun battle raged on, the Costa Rican consul general wandered the room, still clutching his drink, until one of his assailants pulled him down to the ground. Another ambassador, who had only arrived in Bogotá three weeks before, stood immobilized on the staircase where she’d been when the terrorists entered. Glass showered down on her from above, but still she didn’t move. Finally, one of the attackers screamed at her repeatedly: “Get down! You’ll get shot!” With that, the ambassador slumped into a crouch.

The amygdala learns about danger in two ways. We have already seen the first way, which neuroscientist LeDoux calls the “low road”: Asencio’s ears sent a signal directly to his amygdala to trigger the sympathetic nervous system reaction. The low road is “a quick and dirty processing system,” as LeDoux writes in his excellent book,
The Emotional Brain
. But the sound of the gunshots also sent a signal that traveled through the cortex, the outer layer of gray matter involved in Asencio’s higher brain functions. The cortex recognized the sound as gunshots and sent a more nuanced message to the amygdala. This is the “high road.” It is a more accurate depiction of what happened, but it is also slower.