Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (27 page)

In some ways, the hajj is uniquely, unintentionally designed for failure. To begin with, the pilgrimage is an inherently populist event. All men, rich or poor, wear two white sheets. A prince prays next to a peasant. That is part of the appeal. So the hajj must be made available to as many people as possible. Saudi officials restrict the number of visas permitted to each country, but, under pressure to keep the event accessible, not nearly enough to make it safe.

Until relatively recently, almost no one but princes could afford to travel to Mecca for the pilgrimage. In the 1930s, the crowds numbered approximately seventy thousand. Then, in the last half of the twentieth century, air travel became much cheaper. At the same time, Saudi rulers began to encourage more pilgrims to come. The government dropped its normal tax on pilgrims and spent millions to increase the capacity of the holy sites. In 1965, 1.2 million pilgrims arrived. Today, 2 to 3 million people descend upon Saudi Arabia for the hajj. In less than a week, they move en masse through the same twenty-five-mile course, all with the same itinerary, following in the steps of Muhammad: first, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, a city of just eight hundred thousand people. Then, after a side trip to Medina, they proceed to Mina. The rest of the year, Mina is a quiet desert valley. During the hajj, it becomes a teeming tent city, organized by country. The pilgrims use the tent city as a staging ground for their obligatory trips to the three granite pillars.

The hajj is also merciless on the body. Hundreds of people die on the hajj every year, whether the crowd kills them or not. In 2007, no one died in a crowd accident, but 431 Indonesians (of the 205,000 who came) died from pneumonia, heart attacks, and other “natural” causes. Most people catch vicious fevers or colds, and the poor endure the harshest conditions of all. Days of waiting in exhaust fumes and sleeping in crowded tents try the patience of even the most devout. But believers have embraced the suffering as part of the challenge of the hajj, and so the crowds keep growing. Each day of the hajj, the Saudi police bring the new corpses into the Grand Mosque on gurneys for funeral prayers. Those who die on the hajj are said to be guaranteed a place in heaven. So the hajj tragedies become cruelly self-perpetuating.

In their defense, Saudi officials have made many costly attempts to prevent crowd disasters over the years. If they cannot manage Islam’s holiest places, after all, then the legitimacy of the entire government is in question. After a fire in the tent city of Mina killed three hundred people in 1997, the government equipped the tents with sprinklers. After the 2004 stampede, officials widened the pillars into walls, giving pilgrims a wider target for the stoning ritual and spreading the crowds. But after the 2006 disaster, Interior spokesperson al-Turki fell back on the usual rhetoric. “This was fate” he said, “destined by God.”

Crowd expert Still has spent years wrestling the Saudi status quo. “You’re dealing with a culture where God is the final arbiter, and only he can decide to take or give life.” He would warn authorities about new bottlenecks and then watch as his predictions came true, he says. Over the past few years, however, he believes the Saudis have made tremendous progress. The design, management, and scheduling teams have been working together at last. The Saudis have invested $1.2 billion in rebuilding the jamarat bridge, creating a much bigger, four-story complex with many more entrances and exits. Today, when pilgrims arrive in the airports, officials hand them pamphlets instructing them how to behave safely in the crowd. The warning urges people to be patient and, above all, not to push. Perhaps most important, after the 2006 disaster, some Islamic clerics issued fatwas, or religious edicts, declaring that pilgrims do not have to wait until noon to carry out the stoning ritual. That way the crowd can be spread out over the entire day.

In the last hajj in 2007, no one was killed in a crowd crush. With that, Still’s job advising the Saudis officially ended, he says. “Unless of course there is another accident.”

The Panic of One

If we think of panic as an overreaction, it starts to make more sense. The way to avoid a panic, then, is to reduce the causes of overreaction—by reducing the density or turbulence of the crowd or by giving the crowd better information. But sometimes panic happens to just one person, all alone, and no one else. Sometimes a single exception is enough to change history. So what causes this kind of overreaction?

Early in the morning on Memorial Day in 1993, a scuba club gathered to go diving off Singer Island in Florida. The divers wanted to be among the first to check out a brand-new artificial reef, the largest in Palm Beach County. The week before, local officials had sunk the
Princess Anne,
an old, 340-foot ferry, hoping to attract tourists.

One of the divers exploring the
Princess Anne
that day was Scott Stich, thirty-four. Stich was a healthy, experienced diver. He had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Then he had gone to law school and started practicing real-estate law at a firm in West Palm Beach, where he lived with his wife. With the rest of the group, named The Scuba Club, Stich descended into the water to check out the hulking wreck of the
Princess Anne
.

Each year, about a hundred people die in scuba accidents in North America. That is not a big number, when you consider that there are at least a million divers in all. But the deaths are complicated in interesting ways. Scuba diving is a uniquely claustrophobic experience: the diver’s nose is covered and he or she cannot breathe into it, which can, in some people, feel very similar to suffocation. In one survey of 254 scuba divers, 54 percent said they had experienced panic at least once while diving. Dive sites become a laboratory for human behavior under stress.

At about 9:00
A.M
., with no warning, the other divers saw Stich—then about seventy feet underwater—rip his air regulator out of his mouth for no apparent reason. The regulator contains the mouthpiece, air gauges, and tubes that connect with the air tank. It is essential. Another diver frantically tried to push the regulator back into his mouth. But Stich wouldn’t take it. He seemed adamant that he’d made the right decision, even as his face began to turn blue. Then, unable to breathe, he slipped into unconsciousness in the dark water. The dive master raised him to the surface and performed CPR. But he was pronounced dead shortly afterward. The regulator was found to be in fine working condition. At such a shallow depth, it was extremely unlikely that Stich had suffered from nitrogen narcosis—a state of mental impairment also called “rapture of the deep.” The Palm Beach County medical examiner found that Stich died as a result of drowning. There was no evidence of equipment failure or malfunction, nor of any other natural disease, traumatic injury, or alcohol or drug use. Stich had been diving since he was twelve, and his equipment was less than six months old.

Why would any human being willfully abandon his oxygen source at the bottom of the ocean? Deep in the darkness of the sea, an equipment malfunction can, needless to say, rapidly escalate into terror. But sometimes there doesn’t even need to be an equipment malfunction. Every so often, all over the world, divers are found dead with plenty of air in their tanks.

At the exercise-psychology lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, William Morgan spent decades studying diving deaths. About 60 percent were attributed to health, environmental, or equipment problems. But the remaining 40 percent were usually classified as “unexplained.” The more he looked, the more mysteries Morgan found. Sometimes divers didn’t stop at ripping out their own regulator; sometimes they also forcibly grabbed the regulator out of the mouth of the person next to them.

It turns out that similar “freak” accidents occur among firefighters, who are on occasion found dead with their oxygen tanks in good working order. In Kansas City, Missouri, one firefighter crawled into a burning room just as the fire rolled across the ceiling. In the midst of this inferno, the firefighter stood up and ripped off his respirator, searing his lungs. His captain tackled him and dragged him out of the fire. The firefighter suffered severe burns but survived.

Panic is the leading cause of deaths among divers overall. Certain people experience an intense feeling of suffocation when their noses are covered. They respond to that overwhelming sensation by relying on their instinct, which is to rip out whatever is covering their airway. For the vast majority of human experiences, that would work. For scuba divers and firefighters, unfortunately, it is their oxygen source.

So which people tend to rip out their oxygen source? Is there any way to predict this behavior? Morgan invited twenty-five firefighters to his lab and tested them himself. He had each man run at high speed on a treadmill for ten minutes while wearing a breathing apparatus. Sure enough, some of them suddenly ripped off the masks in distress and complained that they weren’t getting enough air—even though the masks were working normally. Morgan had predicted in advance which six men would rip off their masks. He was wrong; only five of them did. But it was a pretty good guess.

How did he know? Before he put the men on the treadmill, Morgan had given them a common psychological test measuring their anxiety levels. Generally speaking, anxiety comes in two flavors: the first is “state anxiety,” which describes how a person reacts to stressful situations, like a big exam or a traffic jam. The other kind is “trait anxiety,” which refers to a person’s general tendency to see things as stressful to begin with. Trait anxiety, in other words, is your resting level of anxiety on any given day.

As it turns out, people with higher trait anxiety are more likely to rip out their air supply, Morgan found. Luckily, most people who become scuba divers or firefighters have low trait anxiety to begin with. But not all of them. After running the same tests on scuba divers, Morgan found he could predict who would panic with 83 percent accuracy. Essentially, he found that certain people are slightly more likely to lose touch with their reality when under physical stress. Their brains, overwhelmed by the situation, sort through their database of responses—and choose the wrong one. They may not cause a stampede or a mass panic, but they will likely put themselves, at least, in sudden and intense jeopardy. They have overreacted, in the purest form of panic.

Panic may be the most frightening kind of disaster reaction, at least in the popular imagination. But the more I learned about it, the less diabolical it seemed to be. Panic is a tragedy—but one of errors, not malice. It can of course be catastrophic. But it is one of the more preventable human mistakes in the disaster portfolio. If mass gathering places are designed with physics in mind, then the prerequisites to panic should never develop. People will not feel potentially trapped, helpless, and alone. They will just feel crowded. Then, if something goes terribly wrong, they will be much more likely, as we will see next, to default to a far more common disaster response—which is to say, they will do nothing at all.

7

Paralysis

Playing Dead in French Class

T
HE NOISE STARTED
about halfway through intermediate French on April 16, 2007. An insistent, popping sound. The students stopped their conversation. “It’s probably construction,” one said. Then the banging got louder. A moan came from the classroom next door. The teacher, Jocelyne Couture-Nowak, had long gray hair and was known for her generous smile. But now she stiffened and said, “That’s not what I think it is, is it?”

With that, Clay Violand, a junior in her class at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, stood up. He felt certain of what needed to happen, but he suddenly could not remember his teacher’s name. It was strange, but it didn’t slow him down. “You,” he said, “put that desk against the door.” Couture-Nowak did exactly as he said. Then Violand turned toward the window. He knew he had to get out.

Violand saw the gun first. As he turned, he saw the semiautomatic weapon appear in the doorway. The shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, a rage-filled, silent young man, who would kill thirty-two people and himself that day, making it the deadliest shooting rampage in U.S. History, strode into the room. He easily shoved the desk aside. Seeing this, Violand automatically changed course. “I wanted to go to the window; it was only two stories. But as soon as I saw the gun come in, I just froze.”

Then Violand, an international studies major with a music minor, crumpled onto the floor underneath his desk. He didn’t curl up into a ball or cover his head; he lay down on his side, in a relatively vulnerable position, with his arm slightly, unnaturally twisted. Then he lay very still. “My mind just went into this mode. I remember thinking, ‘He’s going to shoot the moving people first.’ I remember movement was the key.”

As Violand lay under his desk, his arm flung across his face, Cho started firing. “He began methodically and calmly shooting people. It sounded rhythmic, like he took his time between each shot, moving from person to person. After every shot, I thought, ‘OK, the next one is for me.’ Shot after shot went off. I tried to look as lifeless as possible. Sometimes after a shot, I would hear a quick moan, or a slow one, or a grunt, or a quiet yell from one of the girls.”

Like most disaster victims, Violand has no sense of how long the ordeal lasted. “I couldn’t tell you if it was five minutes or two hours,” he told me when we spoke five weeks after the shootings. But eventually, Cho left the room, and the shots continued, at a distance. With the same certainty he’d had when he’d fallen to the floor, Violand knew Cho would come back. He doesn’t know how he knew; he’d never been in any situation like this before. He wasn’t a hunter or a soldier. He was a twenty-year-old from Potomac, Maryland, a posh suburb of Washington, D.C. He had long, fashionably messy brown hair and played in a band. But this voice inside his head seemed to have experienced all of this before.