Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (21 page)

Follow the Busboy

Walter Bailey was an eighteen-year-old busboy at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. On the night of the fire, he had asked to work the Cabaret Room so that he could catch some of the act. The last group to hear of the fire was the more than twelve hundred people in that ballroom.

Bailey was what they called a “party busboy.” That meant he helped prep mass quantities of food—two hundred butter bowls or one hundred salads with croutons. In the club hierarchy, party busboys ranked down at the bottom, right above dishwashers. Unlike the waiters, who wore jackets and ties, he had to wear a gold sort of smock. “It looked like something a monkey would wear—a monkey that cranks music,” says Bailey. On May 28, he had worked at the club for only a little over a year. The month before, he’d been there as a guest for his senior prom.

Shortly after 8:30
P.M
., Bailey left the Cabaret Room to help out in another dining room. On his way down the hallway, he ran into a waitress. She asked him if he knew where the club’s owners were. He pointed her toward the kitchen. She whispered into his ear: “There’s a fire in the Zebra Room,” and then she headed toward the kitchen.

At first, Bailey did not believe the waitress. “She must be exaggerating,” he thought. So he went to the Zebra Room to see for himself. When he got there, everything looked normal, at first. He walked over to the doors to open them, but then he stopped. Just as he approached, smoke started curling out from the cracks at the top of the door. The smoke was actually puffing out in little bursts, as he recalls. “That indicated there was pressure behind the doors,” he says, then adding, by way of explanation, “Science was one of my favorite subjects in high school.” As he watched, the smoke started leaking out through the center of the doors as well. He wisely decided not to open the doors. Instead, he did something remarkable, something many other people would not do. He went into the bar next to the Zebra Room and shouted, “Everyone out! There’s a fire.” The patrons got up and started moving. Then Bailey thought of the Cabaret Room. It was clear across the building, the show was now in progress, and no one had any way to know about the fire. There were no smoke detectors, fire alarms, or sprinklers in the Beverly Hills.

When Bailey got to the Cabaret Room, he walked up to a supervisor and told him there was a fire. “We have to clear the room,” he said. The man just stared blankly at him. Then Bailey turned to find the club’s owners. But then he stopped himself. “This is stupid,” he told himself. “I’m wasting time. Either he has to clear this room or I will.” So he went back to his supervisor and told him, again, to clear the room. The supervisor walked off. Bailey assumed he was going to start the evacuation. In the meantime, he decided to start moving a line of about seventy people who were still waiting to enter the show. “Everyone, follow me,” Bailey said. And they did. Without a word of explanation, he led them down the hallway and out into the garden. “OK, everyone stay here,” he said. To his amazement, they didn’t ask any questions.

When he came back to the Cabaret Room, he was stunned to see that nothing had changed. The opening act was still in progress, the comedians were still chortling their way through their bit. “This isn’t going to do,” he told himself. “This room has to be cleared out, and it has to be cleared out soon. I’m probably going to lose my job, but I’m just going to do it.” Then he walked right down the middle of the room, through the VIP seats in the pit and up the steps to the stage. He reached over to one of the comedians and took the microphone. The crowd stared up at him, confused. “I want everyone to look to my right,” he said. “There is an exit in the right corner of the room. And look to my left. There’s an exit on the left. And now look to the back. There’s an exit in the back. I want everyone to leave the room calmly. There’s a fire at the front of the building.” Then he walked back off the stage.

Thirty years later, Bailey still has a flat, calm voice. He still uses words like
super
and
neat
. Back then, he was a quiet teenage boy who didn’t have too many friends at the club. He had recently discovered at school that he had stage fright, so he was terrified when he climbed the stairs to take the microphone. But he did it anyway, saving hundreds of lives.

How did Bailey do it? Why didn’t he stay within the narrow confines of his role, like most people that night? When I ask Bailey about this, he explains that his identity was actually a little more complicated than it appeared. Unlike a lot of the Beverly Hills employees, who loved working there, he was not particularly attached to his job or the club. He had lived all over the country as part of a military family and had worked at construction jobs that paid a lot more money. The busboy job paid just $1.10 an hour. “I put in my time and left,” he says. So when it came time to react to the fire, Bailey had less to lose. He was not as impressed by the club’s hierarchy, and he could easily imagine life without the smock. “When I decided to clear the room, my first thought was, ‘I’m going to get fired.’ But I wanted to do the right thing.” Heroism is the subject of another chapter, and there is much to say. But suffice it to say that Bailey was, in some ways, a classic case.

After Bailey told everyone in the Cabaret Room to leave, he went outside. Then he circled around to check on another exit. He saw smoke coming out and headed back in. As soon as he got inside, he realized that he was witnessing a catastrophe. He couldn’t see anything, but he could hear people—so many people—crying out for help. He started reaching into the depths, grabbing people by the collar and dragging them out the door. He went back and forth this way about ten times, pulling someone out each time. “I was afraid. I don’t want to die, just like most people,” Bailey says. “Maybe I was stupid.” The smoke started burning his throat, so he began holding his breath on each trip back in. He had a high level of confidence in his lungs. “I was on the swim team in high school,” he explains. “I could swim almost two lengths of the pool without taking a breath.” On one trip, he made it all the way back to the Cabaret Room door. The voices in the blackness, moaning for help, seemed to be coming from all directions. As he groped into the smoke, he realized he was feeling a pile of bodies, jammed in the doorway. His lungs bursting, he grabbed whomever he could find lying on the perimeter of the pile. “I remember pulling one guy by his necktie. That’s the only thing I could get.”

Outside, Bailey decided to recruit more help. Several other men—mostly employees—were already helping, but the number of casualties was overwhelming. Rows of bodies were lined up on the grass. The victims had died from smoke inhalation, not fire, so their bodies looked strangely untouched, lying peacefully in their best dresses and suits. All around, guests who had become separated from their parties were searching for their loved ones, crying out the names of the missing like so many wretched ghosts.

Bailey ran up to the hillside, where several hundred patrons had gathered, and called out: “Can anyone help us? We need some help at that exit!” The guests, who had been comforting one another and staring at the fire, watched him. No one volunteered. They were guests, and guests aren’t generally expected to go back into burning buildings. “I just figured I’d get a bunch of big guys,” he says. “But no. They just looked at me.”

So Bailey ran back to the club alone. Each time he went into the smoke, the voices were quieter. “You could tell people were dying in there. People were breathing heavy. They were reaching out from the pile. I remember thinking, ‘These people are going to grab me, and I’m going to get stuck in here and die.’” On one trip in, Bailey didn’t hear any voices at all. After that, he didn’t go back inside anymore. He wandered around outside, placing napkins over the faces of corpses, before finally getting a ride home, where his mother was sitting in the kitchen waiting in dread for news of her son the busboy.

After the fire, Bailey did a handful of media interviews. But then he withdrew and refused to talk about the fire for decades. Like a lot of survivors, he felt shadowed by guilt. “I’m a perfectionist,” he explains. “It was ripping me apart, having all those people dead. I thought a lot of people had died because I didn’t do a good job.” Thirty years after the fire, he agreed to be interviewed for this book, partly, he says, because so much time had gone by.

The Submissive Crowd

If disasters breed groups, then groups need leaders. In a study of three mine fires published by the U.S. government in 2000, the eight groups that escaped each had a leader. The leaders had some things in common. They did not bully their way into power, but they got respect because they seemed calm and credible. They were, like Bailey, knowledgeable, aware of details, and decisive. They were also open to other opinions; in many of the escape groups, a sort of second lieutenant emerged to help the leader.

But what about the followers? Why did so many people abandon expensive seats in order to follow a teenager in a gold smock? Again, we see the same tendencies in our primate ancestors. Chimpanzees always follow an elaborate hierarchy, with an alpha male on top. When facing an enemy, they become even more militaristic. They have a better chance of surviving if they obey without hesitation, says chimp expert Frans de Waal. A strong leader can make decisions fast, which is what you need in a crisis. “Hierarchy,” says de Waal, “is more efficient than democracy.”

Jim Cline, a retired New York City Fire Department captain, remembers when he discovered the human herd instinct himself. It was a bright Friday afternoon in Manhattan, the kind of day when the city actually sparkles through its layer of grit. The financial district was full of workers on their lunch hour. He was in the fire truck headed up Fulton Street when he heard a massive explosion. About two hundred feet in front of him, a gas tank had exploded on an ice cream truck, injuring 106 people and blowing out windows all around. People were screaming. Some were covered in blood. But no one yet knew what had happened, and it was impossible to see anything. “Wall Street was absolutely packed with cars and people. We couldn’t even see where a hydrant was.” The firefighters flipped on the lights and siren to try to clear a path. Hundreds of people, suddenly noticing the truck, started running toward it, away from the fire.

Then something strange happened: when the people got to the truck, they turned and started running alongside it—as it headed directly for the explosion. “It was a very strange phenomenon,” Cline says, chuckling. “People will follow you, even when they don’t know why they’re following you.” As the firefighters stretched the first hose line toward the fire, they had to navigate through the throng of onlookers. It was only after enough police arrived on the scene that the crowd could be pushed back to safety.

Now Cline trains firefighters and rescue workers to beware the herd instinct: “I tell them, ‘If something goes wrong, people will tend to follow you—which is not what we want. We want them to go the other way!’” He advises officials to use loud, clear warnings and gestures to preempt the herd instinct.

“What you actually look for in these circumstances is someone who can tell you what to do,” Ian, a victim of the 2005 London transit bombings, later told investigators. “Even if it is a basic ‘Stay here’ or ‘Move there,’ you just need guidance, because you are a bit all over the place, as you can imagine.” Ian suffered severe burns to the chest and legs when the blast hurled him onto electrified cables in the train tunnel. After briefly losing consciousness, he heard the voice of the train driver, who told him to make his way out of the tunnel. This instruction, Ian told investigators, was enormously reassuring.

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.”