Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (29 page)

A Cigarette Break on a Sinking Ship

Certain kinds of disasters, like shootings or rape, closely resemble the predator-prey encounters we evolved to survive. In those situations, paralysis may effectively deter a predator. There is always that chance. In other cases, paralysis becomes a tragedy unto itself.

The sinking of the
MV Estonia
ferry in the Baltic Sea on the night of September 28, 1994, was the worst sea disaster in modern European history. It was followed by years of official reports, conspiracy theories, and recrimination. But one mystery has received relatively little attention: in the horrific final moments aboard the ferry, witnesses reported later, a surprising number of passengers did exactly nothing.

The
Estonia
had left its home port in Tallinn, Estonia, on a routine fifteen-hour trip to Stockholm, Sweden. The massive roll-on, roll-off automobile ferry was fancier than most. It had a pool, sauna, casino, and three restaurants. It was a symbol of the newly independent, free-market nation of Estonia. Almost all 989 people onboard had sleeping cabins. Although the weather had been stormy all night, the crew did not expect serious problems. A band was playing in the Baltic Bar, and the ten-deck vessel churned through the inky waters as it had for fourteen years. It had passed two inspections earlier that month. And it carried the required number of lifeboats and life jackets.

Kent Härstedt, now a member of Sweden’s parliament, was a passenger on the boat that night. He was then twenty-nine, and he was there because he had helped to organize a “peace conference” to bring together businesspeople from around the Baltic Sea. In the aftermath of the cold war, the conference, sponsored by the Swedish government, was meant to foster peace through economic codependence. “The idea was that if we had more trade, more business, we wouldn’t so easily want to have war,” he says now. The conference was going well. It had started in Estonia and then continued on the sea onboard the giant ferry. During a break in the itinerary that afternoon, Härstedt took a sauna on the ship. It was then that he noticed the water in the pool sloshing back and forth. “Normally, these ferries are so huge that you can barely notice that the boat is rocking,” Härstedt says. “But to see that in the pool, that was the first [clue].”

Later, Härstedt went to dinner, but he felt seasick. He left to take a nap in his cabin. He woke up around 10:30
P.M
. to the sound of a slamming noise. Later, he would wonder if this was the beginning of the disaster. But at the time, he figured that some piece of cargo must have been improperly secured. Feeling rejuvenated from his nap, he went back to the restaurant to join his colleagues. He sat down and ordered a Coke. This particular restaurant had a band and a dance floor, and Härstedt remembers how he and his colleagues amused themselves by watching people try to dance on the tottering boat. “They had to hold each other and run from one side to the next, with the waves. It looked really quite funny. I started to joke with my friends. I said, ‘This is almost like the
Titanic
. Soon they will give us champagne.’” Once dancing became impossible, and people started to leave the restaurant, Härstedt and a colleague moved to a bar in another part of the ship. The bar was full of about fifty people, he remembers. “All the people were having quite a good time. There was karaoke music. My friend and I sat down on two stools at the bar. We were in a good mood. Everybody was laughing and singing.”

Just after 1:00
A.M
., the
Estonia
suddenly listed starboard a full thirty degrees, hurling passengers, vending machines, and flowerpots across its passageways. In the bar, almost everyone fell violently against the side of the boat. Härstedt managed to grab on to the iron bar railing and hold on, hanging above everyone else. “In just one second, everything went from a loud, happy, wonderful moment to total silence. Every brain, I guess, was working like a computer trying to realize what had happened.” Then came the screaming and crying. People had been badly hurt in the fall, and the tilt of the ship made it extremely difficult to move.

Though no one knew it, everyone onboard the
Estonia
had just ten minutes before the starboard side of the vessel would be submerged and the tilt would become almost impossible to negotiate. Härstedt began to strategize. “I started to react very differently from normal, a little bit like I’d learned in my military service. I started to say, ‘OK, there is option one, option two. Decide. Act.’ I didn’t say, ‘Oh, the boat is sinking.’ I didn’t even think about the wider perspective.” Like Zedeño in the World Trade Center, Härstedt experienced the illusion of centrality. “I just saw my very small world.” Härstedt considered trying to crawl through a window before noticing that it was bolted shut. Then he decided to make his way into the corridor.

But as Härstedt worked through the deliberation phase, he noticed something strange about some of the other passengers. They weren’t doing what he was doing. “Some people didn’t seem to realize what had happened. They were just sitting there, totally apathetic.” Not just one or two people, but entire groups of people seemed to be immobilized. They were conscious, but they were not reacting.

Härstedt climbed up the stairwell, fighting against gravity. Out on the deck, the ship’s lights were on and the moon was shining. The full range of human capacities was on display. One man stood to the side, smoking a cigarette, Härstedt remembers. Most people strained to hold on to the rolling ship and, at the same time, find life jackets and lifeboats. Some reassured each other. Härstedt helped an injured woman find a life jacket. Others grabbed life jackets off the backs of fellow passengers, survivors would later tell investigators. To complete the nightmare, the passengers and crew had severe problems unhooking the lifeboats. They could not find directions for the automatic releases nor could they force the rusted manual parts to work. The life jackets—mandatory in fifty-degree water with waves up to twenty-eight feet high—were also maddeningly hard to use. The straps were too short—or at least it seemed that way. Many were tied together in bundles of three, further slowing the process. As the ship continued to capsize, the water around it filled with floating, empty life jackets.

But here, too, there were people who did nothing. In the middle of this frenzy, certain people seemed petrified. British passenger Paul Barney remembers groups of people standing still like statues. “I kept saying to myself, ‘Why don’t they try to get out of here?’” he later told the
Observer
. “They just sat there…being swamped by the water when it came in,” one passenger said. Another passenger saw about ten people lying on the deck near the bulkhead. He threw life jackets to them, but they did not react. One passenger was seen entering a lifeboat, which was still secured in place, and then calmly lying down inside, making no effort to launch it.

Later, when interviewed by the police, some survivors would say they understood this behavior. At some point, they, too, had felt an overwhelming urge to stop moving. They only snapped out of this stupor, they said, by thinking of their loved ones, especially their children.

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.”