Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (3 page)

We all share a basic fear response. So why do some people get out of a burning building while others do not? Chapter 4 investigates resilience, that elixir of survival. Who has it? Does gender matter? What about personality or race? But almost no one goes through a disaster alone. Chapter 5 is about groupthink, the effect of the crowd on our deliberation. How well our group functions depends largely on who is in the group. Whom we live and work with matters.

Finally, we reach the third phase of the survival arc: the decisive moment. We’ve accepted that we are in danger; we’ve deliberated our options. Now we take action. We’ll start with the exception. Chapter 6 is about panic, the most misunderstood behavior in the disaster repertoire. What does it take to spark a panic? And what does it feel like to be caught in one?

Many—if not most—people tend to shut down entirely in a disaster, quite the opposite of panicking. They go slack and seem to lose all awareness. But their paralysis can be strategic. Chapter 7 will take us into the horrific Virginia Tech shooting rampage, the deadliest in U.S. history, through the eyes of a fortunate student who did nothing.

Next, we will consider the opposite of nothing. Chapter 8 investigates the hero. What possible evolutionary explanation could there be for a man who jumps into a frozen river to save strangers?

Finally, we think bigger: how can we turn ourselves into better survivors? We’ll meet revolutionaries who have trained regular people to survive, according to how our brains actually work—individuals who have taught entire towns to escape tsunami and major corporations to flee a skyscraper.

The three chronological phases—denial, deliberation, and the decisive moment—make up the structure of this book. Real life doesn’t usually follow a linear arc, of course. Sometimes the path to survival is more like a looping roller coaster, doubling up and back upon itself as we struggle to find true north. So within each section you will notice that we often glimpse the other stages. There is, unfortunately, no single script in these situations. But it’s rare that anyone survives a disaster without pushing—or being pushed—through each of these three main stages at least once.

On our tour of the black box, I will take you down a stairwell in the World Trade Center, onto a sinking ship in the Baltic Sea, and out of a burning airplane that forever changed the way safety experts thought about passengers. The point of all of this is to answer two simple questions: What happens to us in the midst of a disaster? And why do some of us do so much better than others? Our disaster personalities are more complex and ancient than we think. But they are also more malleable.

1

Delay

Procrastinating in Tower 1

O
N
F
EBRUARY
26, 1993, when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center for the first time, Elia Zedeño was in an express elevator carrying a slice of Sbarro’s pizza. She had taken a new temporary worker to the food court to show him around, and they were on their way back to their desks. When the bomb exploded, they heard a loud pop and the elevator stopped and began to descend. Then it stopped for good, trapping her and five other people. Smoke began to slowly coil in from below. Two men grappled with the door. A woman dropped to her knees and started praying, making Zedeño nervous. Then one of the men calmly directed everyone to get low and cover their faces. They all did as they were told.

Zedeño concentrated on keeping her breathing shallow and slow. But the more she tried to calm down, the harder her heart seemed to pound. Then they heard a man screaming in the elevator next to them. “I’m burning up!” he yelled as he banged on the metal box around him. But soon he was quiet. “I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to be next,’” Zedeño says. She visualized rescue workers finding them dead inside the elevator later. Just then, she thought she would lunge for the doors and start banging herself. But before she could, the temp had started doing it for her. He was screaming and banging. So Zedeño took charge of quieting him down. “Robert, calm down. You’re going to inhale too much smoke,” she told him. He started to cough and returned to the floor.

It was around then that Zedeño was filled with a wave of peace, inexplicably. “Regardless of the outcome, I knew everything was going to be OK,” she remembers. “My breath became effortless. My mind no longer wandered. Suddenly, I wasn’t there anymore. I was just watching. I could see the people lying in the elevator. The sounds were far away, and I was just hovering. I had no emotions.”

When they’d been in the elevator for about an hour, a firefighter managed to rip open the door and pull them out. It turned out the car had returned to the lobby level, and that’s where they’d been all along. Zedeño could not see the face of the firefighter who pulled her out; the smoke was too thick. She did as he instructed, grabbing onto a rope and following it out through the lobby and out the doors. She was stunned by the darkness in the lobby and the emptiness outside. She thought that once she had made it out of her own private catastrophe, everything would be normal, bustling and bright. She never imagined that a place could look so different.

In the basement below, a Ryder truck full of eleven hundred pounds of explosives had left a crater five stories deep. Six people had died. It was the largest full-building evacuation in U.S. history, and nothing had gone the way it was supposed to go. Smoke purled up the stairways. The power failed, rendering the emergency communications system useless and the stairways dark. People moved extraordinarily slowly. Ten hours after the explosion, firefighters were still finding people who had not yet evacuated in their offices.

After the bombing, glow-in-the-dark tape and backup power generators were installed in the Trade Center. Both helped save lives eight years later. But still no one fully answered the fundamental question: why did people move so slowly? And what did it mean about all of our assumptions about skyscrapers—and the Trade Center in particular? The 1993 bombing became a story about terrorism, as would the attacks on the same buildings eight years later, and rightly so. But they were also stories of procrastination and denial, the first phase of the human disaster experience.

A few days later, Zedeño was right back at work in a neighboring building. One month later, her office reopened on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. She started riding the same elevator to work. But it was months before she could get the taste of soot out of her mouth. She thought about leaving the towers, but not with any conviction. “I remember saying, ‘This could happen again.’ And someone said, ‘Lightning never strikes twice.’”

“Don’t Worry. It’s in Your Head!”

Zedeño has a small stature, round glasses, and Dizzy Gillespie cheeks when she smiles, which happens often. She came to America with her family from Cuba when she was eleven. Her parents had spent her entire childhood plotting to get away from Fidel Castro. When they finally got permission to leave in the early 1970s, they moved to West New York, New Jersey, where their daughter could see the brand-new Trade Center Towers sunning themselves almost everywhere she went.

When she was nineteen, Zedeño visited the Trade Center for the first time. She came to apply for a secretarial job with the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey. She had no idea what the Port Authority did—or even that it owned the Trade Center—but a girlfriend convinced her to fill out the application. When she returned for her second interview, her mother came with her. The boss hired her on the spot, and, on her lunch break, Zedeño ran to the plaza to tell her mother. “What will you do?” she asked her mother, who had no idea how to get home to New Jersey. “I will sit right here and wait for you,” her mother announced. They took the train home together that evening.

Eventually, Zedeño got promoted to the finance section. Her office had regular fire drills, which consisted of gathering in the hallway to gossip. During a blackout in 1990, she and her office mates walked down the tower’s stairs. That’s how they learned that homeless people had been using the lower stairwells as bathrooms. “We were laughing and talking,” she remembers. When Zedeño talks, her voice goes up at the end of her sentences, like a child telling you something outrageous. “The whole thing was a joke!”

Zedeño is a witness wherever she goes. She remembers life in surround-sound detail. When I ask her what it was like to leave Cuba as a little girl, she tells me about the day she left in April of 1971. Her mother was doing her hair when they heard the sound of a motorcycle. “Only one man in town had a motorcycle, and it didn’t sound like that,” she says. Suddenly, the sound stopped in front of their house. A soldier walked in the front door without knocking and told them to leave. Zedeño knew this was good news: they had finally won permission to go to America. Fifteen minutes later, they left their house forever. They were terrified the whole journey out, but they made it. When they arrived in Miami, Zedeño ran down the aisles of a supermarket yelling out descriptions of everything she saw.

By September 2001, Zedeño had worked in the towers for over twenty-one years. She was forty-one years old, and she managed five employees on the seventy-third floor of Tower 1. Her group oversaw the Port Authority’s engineering consultants. On 9/11, Zedeño got to work a little after 8:00
A.M
. She settled into her cubicle and listened to her voice-mail messages. In an hour, she would head up to the cafeteria to get some breakfast, as usual.

The Trade Center did not feel like a cluster of seven buildings; it felt like a city. Every day, fifty thousand people came to work there, and another two hundred thousand passed through. The plaza underneath held the largest shopping mall in Lower Manhattan. “You didn’t need to leave for anything,” Zedeño says. The complex had 103 elevators—and its own zip code (10048). Bomb threats and small fires were not uncommon. The engine company across the street sometimes got called to the Trade Center eight times a day. Zedeño got used to seeing firefighters in the elevators. Days later, she would hear that there had been smoke somewhere in the building. It might have been two football fields away from her.

At 8:46
A.M
., an American Airlines Boeing 767 traveling 490 mph struck the building eleven floors above her. When the plane hit Zedeño’s building, the effect was not subtle. It obliterated four floors immediately. From her desk, Zedeño heard a booming explosion and felt the building lurch to the south, as if it might topple. It had never done that before, not even in 1993. This time, she grabbed her desk and held on, lifting her feet off the floor. “I actually expected the ceiling to fall and the building to cave in,” she remembers. At the time, she screamed, “What’s happening?”

Talking about it now, in a deli across from the void where the towers once stood, Zedeño wonders why she didn’t immediately run for the stairs. She’d been through this before, after all. But what she really wanted, quite desperately, was for someone to answer back: “Everything is OK! Don’t worry. It’s in your head!” At the moment of impact, Zedeño had entered a rarefied zone. The rules of normal life were suspended. Her entire body and mind changed. She would wind her way through a series of phases along the survival arc. First would be a thicket of disbelief, followed by frantic deliberation, and, finally, action. We will witness all three here, but more than anything else, Zedeño’s story is one of denial.

Zedeño has revisited the moments of her escape from the Trade Center until they are worn and familiar. She now gives tours of Ground Zero to tourists from around the world. But still there are riddles she cannot decipher, behavioral glitches that don’t make obvious sense. More than anything else, she is mystified by how slow she was to accept what was happening all day long.

After the plane hit the building, Zedeño told me, she wanted nothing so much as to stay. Like her, I was perplexed by this reaction. Shouldn’t a primal, survival instinct have kicked in, propelling her to the door? I wondered if Zedeño was unusual. So I went to the National Fire Academy to find out more. The instructors at the school, located on the rolling grounds of a former Catholic college in rural Maryland, are veteran firefighters who have witnessed just about every conceivable form of human behavior in fire. I met Jack Rowley, who spent thirty-three years as a firefighter in Columbus, Ohio. When I told him about Zedeño, he told me that he saw this kind of curious indifference all the time. In fact, he came to consider one particular kind of fire a regular Saturday night ritual. His station house would get dispatched to a bar; he would walk into the establishment and see smoke. But he would also see customers sitting at the bar nursing their beers. “We would say, ‘Looks like there’s a fire here,’” he says. He’d ask the customers if they felt like evacuating. “They would say, ‘No, we’ll be just fine.’”

One of the few people who has extensively analyzed behavior at the Trade Center in both 1993 and 2001 is Guylène Proulx at Canada’s National Research Council. And what she saw fit with Zedeño’s memory exactly. “Actual human behavior in fires is somewhat different from the ‘panic’ scenario. What is regularly observed is a lethargic response,” she wrote in a 2002 article in the journal
Fire Protection Engineering
. “People are often cool during fires, ignoring or delaying their response.”

In a May 19, 2006, column in the
Wall Street Journal,
Matthew Kaminski wrote about a recent flight he’d taken from Paris to New York. Three hours out of Paris, halfway into the movie
Jarhead,
Kaminski heard a loud thud and felt the plane shudder and swerve. “The captain made no announcement. No one asked the flight attendants a thing,” he wrote. And yet, wrote Kaminski, a veteran traveler, “My stomach told me to worry.”

About an hour later, the pilot announced the plane would be making an emergency landing in St. John’s, Newfoundland. It seems one of the plane’s four engines had blown out. As the plane approached the landing strip, the passengers could see fire trucks and ambulances on the tarmac below. The French flight attendant’s English was deteriorating fast. In a high-pitched voice, she ordered the passengers to “Brace, brace!” And what did about half the passengers do in this moment of exquisite tension? Did they panic or weep or pray to God? No. They laughed.