Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (35 page)

In New Orleans, the lawyers should have known what the liability risks were well before the hurricane even had a name. The evacuation decision never should have been delayed because the lawyers needed to get educated. “If it were a town of five thousand, I wouldn’t have any complaints about that,” says Nicholson. “But for a huge city like New Orleans, which had obvious hazards everyone knew about, [that] is scandalous, I think.”

But fear of liability can be a convenient excuse, too, like fear of panic. Whether they are at an airline or at a command center, experts will err on the side of excluding the public, as we have seen. If they can avoid enrolling regular people in their emergency plans, they will. Life is easier that way, until something goes wrong.

In the 1990s, a committee of the British House of Commons suggested that aircraft cabin simulators be placed in airport waiting areas. That way, passengers would have a chance to practice actually doing some of the lifesaving tactics they are forever being told about. Instead of staring glumly at cable news TV while they wait to take off, people could be opening emergency exits, inflating life vests, and strapping on oxygen masks. What a clever idea! But the idea quietly died, remembers Frank Taylor, the former head of the Aviation Safety Centre at Cranfield University. “The U.K.’s Civil Aviation Authority threw it out without any proper consideration at all,” he remembers. “They just don’t seem to want to consider any change at all. They’re understaffed, and they don’t do things that they can’t see an immediate advantage from.”

Likewise, many U.S. high schools have dropped driver’s education classes due to cost-cutting and litigation fears. Schools teach typing, but they no longer do anything to protect your children from the most likely cause of their accidental deaths. In many states, kids now learn to drive from their parents, which is a terrible idea. Teenagers taught by their parents are more than twice as likely to be involved in serious accidents than those taught by professionals, according to a 2007 study by the Texas Transportation Institute.

We’re at risk of devolving, becoming worse at surviving one of the most dangerous things we do. Each year, over 6 million accidents get reported to police in the United States. About forty thousand people die, and about 2 million get hurt. Like all other disasters, car accidents are preventable tragedies. We could have fewer of them if we could train our brains the way Rescorla did. And this is not just an exercise in wishful thinking. There are more Rick Rescorlas out there, trying to teach us to do better. It is possible to speed up our own evolution for survival, even on the freeway.

“Imagine What We Can Practice!”

Late on the night of August 31, 1986, Ronn Langford was awakened by a call telling him his youngest daughter, Dorri, had been in an accident. She was riding in a car in a residential area of Colorado with her boyfriend. As they crossed through an intersection, another car going more than 55 mph ripped through a red light and crashed into the passenger side, T-boning the car. Dorri died instantly. The other car was driven by a nineteen-year-old man who had been drinking. He and everyone else involved survived.

Langford could visualize his daughter’s death with iridescent clarity. He was at the time a race-car driver who had won a string of championships. He understood the power of a car to do harm. And he understood the limitations of the human driver. He knew that the brain had evolved to do many things, and driving was not among them. He had often marveled at the lack of training required of new drivers, and now he was left to suffer for it for the rest of his life.

When he got back from the hospital that morning, Langford remembers, he lay down on his bed. He told himself he had to make a choice: he could be bitter for the rest of his life. He could feel the bile building up in his throat, and he could imagine letting it fill his body and mind. He could picture dedicating his life to hating the idiot who killed his daughter. It was tempting.

Instead, Langford went on a crusade. “You lose your mind. Literally, you lose your mind for a while,” he says now. He sold his share of a real-estate company, which he had started and which had been very successful. Then he opened a school called MasterDrive. He wanted to teach people that handling three thousand pounds of metal in motion is not intuitive. Like Rescorla, he wanted to make people better survivors by rewiring their brains for their modern age.

Langford can come across as a man carefully guarding a large store of anger. “Car-control skills, crash-avoidance maneuvers, the quality of decision making, all these skills are important skills for driving,” he says, starting out quietly. “But nobody teaches it. Nobody learns it!” he says, shouting now. “People are just ignorant. They don’t know what they don’t know. Do SUVs have a different weight ratio than a new Honda Accord? Hell, yes. Of course they do. The problem is that Mrs. Smith driving an Expedition doesn’t understand vehicle dynamics from a performance standpoint. You can’t jerk one of those things sideways. The damn thing will roll. Crap, the car companies make cars with fantastic [safety] systems today. The problem is, guess who doesn’t know how to use the systems?”

But Langford is a true believer in the brain, and it gives him enough hope to go on. “The brain is so powerful. Imagine what we can practice! Everything.” We can all become excellent drivers, Langford insists, but we have to change our brain’s programming. It’s not productive to tell drivers how to get out of a skid—just like it’s not useful to tell people to remain calm in case of an emergency. In a life-or-death situation, your brain needs subconscious programming, not just vague advisories.

So Langford takes students of all ages, some of whom have never driven before and some of whom have been traumatized by horrible car accidents, out on a course at MasterDrive and puts them into a skid, over and over again. In a safe environment, he re-creates the feeling of losing control and teaches the students to recover. MasterDrive students spend twenty-six hours behind the wheel of a car; in most states, the requirement is less than ten hours. They learn crash-avoidance techniques and how to dial up and dial down their personalities to cope with what’s happening on the road. Five thousand kids come through the Colorado locations each year. Some wet their pants or freeze up behind the wheel, which, in Langford’s mind, just means the training is sufficiently realistic.

Like Rescorla, Langford understands that realistic practice brings out our faults and then makes us stronger. As a young race-car driver, he read about the power of visualization techniques to improve performance. “So I started pretraining my brain to learn a track at the subconscious level.” He would visualize going around the track again and again. Now he helps race-car drivers do the same thing, with the car jacked up so that they can turn and lean and brake at the right moments. Like the police and military trainers in Chapter 3, he teaches drivers to breathe, too, especially when they go through high-speed turns, the most dangerous part of the track.

To experience Langford’s hands-on training, I visited the MasterDrive clinic outside of Denver, Colorado. Langford was wearing all white—white slacks and a white short-sleeved shirt with
MASTERDRIVE
over his heart. We sat in a small office overlooking the track, and Langford began to talk. “If you need water or anything, let me know,” he said, “because I have a tendency to not stop.” Then he stood up at a dry-erase board and sketched out a flowchart of how the human brain processes information. “Skill is my ability to do something automatically, at the subconscious level. I don’t have to think about it. It is programmed. How do I get that? I do that by repetition, by practicing the right thing. The only way you learn it—on a response level—is to program it.”

Langford has learned about how the mind works through formal and informal study of brain research. In the past decade, scientists have begun to understand just how malleable we are. “The ability for change is phenomenal,” says Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging at the child psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health. Throughout our lives, the geography of our brains literally changes depending on what we do.

Abilities we think are strictly innate almost never are. Most men, for example, tend to have slightly better spatial reasoning skills, and women have slightly better verbal skills. The stereotypes take over from there. But as with our fear responses, the room for improvement is bigger than the gaps. In an experiment at Temple University, women showed substantial progress in spatial reasoning after spending an hour a week playing the video game Tetris, of all things. The males improved with practice too. But the improvement for both sexes was far greater than the difference.

Without training, the brain falls back on its most basic fear responses in a crisis. “You put a kid in a car, take him out on an interstate at 60 mph during a snowstorm and the car goes out of control, I can tell you what his brain is going to do,” says Langford. “It is going to totally disintegrate. There is no programming. So what does he do? Freezes. Closes his eyes. Does all the wrong things. Young people can respond in a nanosecond. The problem is, most of the time they do the wrong thing.”

After lunch, we go out back to the track and get into a gray Corolla with racing stripes. I am behind the wheel and Langford is in the passenger seat. The sun is baking the course. We start out by doing a simple slalom course around orange cones, practicing braking and turning. First, I go too slowly, erring on the side of not humiliating myself. Langford starts working on my confidence. “Feel the rhythm of the car. That’s it! You got it! Make it dance!” And after a few rounds, it works. I’m going faster, having more fun, and even boldly knocking over a few cones now and then.

Then we move to the skid pad, which is essentially a wet, slippery piece of asphalt. At Langford’s direction, I drive onto the skid pad at about 20 mph. Then Langford yanks up on the parking brake in the middle of the car and, at the same time, leans over and yanks the steering wheel toward him. The reflex of most drivers at this point is to slam on the brakes and turn the car in the exact wrong direction. That’s because their brains are programmed to look toward the threat. “Whatever you’re looking at, the brain has a tendency to direct the hands toward it,” Langford says. This is problematic on a highway. When people see an oncoming car swerving into their lane, they slam on the brakes and…steer directly toward it.

Langford calls this phenomenon “potholism”: the more drivers stare at potholes, the more likely they are to drive into them. The hands follow the eyes. One of his clients was a woman who had seen a terrible accident. A car in front of her had hit a pedestrian, killing the man. From then on, the woman had become hypervigilant behind the wheel. She looked obsessively for pedestrians, and when she found them, she kept her eye on them. Soon she came to the sickening realization that she was steering directly toward the pedestrians. She hired Langford because she was afraid she was going to kill someone. He worked with her to help her learn to redirect her focus—away from watching pedestrians and toward controlling her car.

On the skid pad, the goal is to experience a skid enough times that your brain knows what to do: squeeze the brakes and steer where you want the car to go. After a while, I can pull the car out of each skid without any trouble, almost gracefully. I leave with an appreciation for the automobile. Like the brain, it is an amazing machine, fluid and adaptable, if the driver knows how to work it.

In Defiance of Dread

Terrorism is another hazard, like any other, except that it demands even more initiative from regular people. Civilians are the involuntary draftees, after all. We should not forget this after 9/11, says Stephen Flynn, a homeland security expert and former U.S. Coast Guard officer. “There were two narratives after 9/11. One narrative was, ‘There are bad people coming to kill us, and we have to take the battle to them.’” That was the narrative deployed by President Bush as he sent American soldiers to fight overseas and told the American people to stay calm and keep shopping.

“The other narrative,” Flynn says, “is the United Flight 93 narrative.” There was one plane on 9/11 on which regular people were well informed. The passengers on Flight 93 had time to learn that the plane would be used as a missile if they did nothing. And what did they do? They pushed through the denial phase fast. Then they deliberated, whispering behind their seat backs and gathering information over their phones. They operated as a group. Then, in the decisive moment, they charged into the cockpit and changed the course of history.

If regular people got as panic-stricken in a crisis as most of us think they do, Flight 93 would have almost certainly destroyed the White House or the U.S. Capitol. “It’s highly ironic,” says Flynn, “that our elected representatives were protected on 9/11 by everyday people.” Latent resilience is everywhere, and it is the only certain defense against terrorism. Not every attack can be prevented, but just enrolling regular people in the everyday counterattack is itself a victory. Because terrorism is not the same as the cold war; it is a psychological war more than a physical war, and in that distinction lies great opportunity. “Fear requires two things,” Flynn says. “An awareness of a threat and a sense of being powerless to deal with that threat.” Without the powerlessness, terrorism is far less destructive. If we understand dread, we can starve it.

After 9/11, small groups of employees at the Sears Tower in Chicago, Illinois, took their fate into their own hands and started arranging their own full-evacuation drills. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, made some attempts to engage the public. It started a program called Citizen Corps, designed to train and organize volunteers. But the groups are run locally, and their usefulness varies wildly. There are 2,300 Citizen Corps groups across the country, but the government keeps no tally of how many people have received training. (I signed up online to participate in D.C. and never got a response.)