Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (36 page)

In 2003, the government launched a public preparedness website, Ready.gov, which has received over 23 million unique visitors. But it was found to contain some errors and was generally uninspiring (“During a nuclear incident, it is important to avoid radioactive material, if possible”). So in 2006, an intern for the Federation of American Scientists took it upon herself to build a competing site, called ReallyReady.org, that is a bit smarter (“The cloud of dust and smoke from the explosion will be visible and will be carried by the wind. Walk across the direction of the wind, away from the dust cloud.”).

These people have discovered that the more they learn about the things that scare them, the less scared they feel. The first and most important task is to get smart about risk. Depending on where you live, your most likely threat may be a hurricane or an earthquake, two very different problems. There’s no need to prepare for everything.

Beware of warnings without data. It’s important to rely on facts here, as opposed to emotion. Local TV news is a terrible way to judge actual risk, as we have seen. So whenever possible, look for actual risk data. What are the chances of a plane crash happening to me, given how often I fly? What are the chances of a terrorist attack affecting me, given where I live and work? These questions seem obvious, but they are very rarely part of our conversations about risk. Getting smarter requires an almost countercultural dedication to facts over emotion.

The website for this book (
www.TheUnthinkable.com
) has clear-eyed, specific advice based on relative risk—a thinking-person’s survival guide. You can also look for your state’s homeland-security or emergency preparedness website to get a list of the major threats for your region. Then systematically prepare for those risks. But do it holistically. Don’t just stockpile water like an automaton; learn about the history and science of the risk and try to conduct a dress rehearsal for your brain. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can just mean taking the stairs out of your office building once a week.

If possible, involve your whole office or your neighborhood in this exercise, not just your family. You will all be in this together, so it’s wise to get to know one another in good times—not just bad. You’d be surprised how receptive people are if you give them a chance.

If you are, for whatever reason, particularly frightened of something that is not on your risk list, then prepare for it, too. The more control you feel you have, the less dread you will feel day to day. And the more control you feel, the better your performance will be, should the worst come to pass.

Disaster experts think about disasters for a living, but they don’t feel powerless. They do tiny things to give their brains shortcuts in the unlikely event they need them. FAA human factor analysts always look for their nearest exit when they board planes, for example. And they read the safety briefing cards that most people think are useless. They do this because each plane model is different, and they know they may become functionally retarded in a plane crash.

Every time Robyn Gershon, who is leading a study of the World Trade Center evacuation, checks into a hotel, she takes the stairs down from her room. She knows that most hotel stairs take a confusing path through back rooms and empty onto unexpected streets. (I once did this in a hotel in Manhattan and ended up in the kitchen. A supervisor, assuming I was an employee leaving for a break, asked to search my bag. Apparently not very many guests took the stairs.)

Once a disaster begins, people who have some familiarity with their disaster personalities have an advantage. First, they know that if something does go terribly wrong, the odds favor their survival. Just knowing there is hope can help people muster the presence of mind to push past denial and deliberation and act. “The important thing is to recognize that you need to get out. Everything you’ve done to prepare yourself will help you,” says Nora Marshall, who has spent twenty-one years studying survival factors at the National Transportation Safety Board. Knowledge also helps to self-correct. Now that you know you are likely to delay evacuating or to waste time grabbing your carry-on bags from the overhead bin, you have a chance to override your own worst instincts. Above all, it is essential to take the initiative—to remember that you and your neighbors must save yourselves. Now that you have glimpsed the survival arc, you might have a better chance of finding the shortcuts.

Teddy Bears and Wheelchairs

An old mill town called Samoa, 250 miles north of San Francisco, held the first tsunami evacuation drill in the history of California—on June 28, 2007. Samoa is located on 185 acres, right on the water. It has a town square and a restaurant, but it’s not fancy. Samoa’s one hundred houses were built by a logging company that used to own the town. Today, the logging company is gone, but Samoa’s residents are still there, working in a nearby pulp mill as well as in construction and other service jobs.

Troy Nicolini is a National Weather Service meteorologist and a beauty salon owner in the area. Since the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, he has been working on developing evacuation routes in at-risk areas like Samoa. But it occurred to him that it might make sense to ask regular people to tell him where the evacuation-route signs should be. So he made the signs portable for the time being and started planning a drill. The process was made much easier because Nicolini didn’t have to worry about asking many property owners for permission to have people traipsing through their land. Samoa is one of the few towns in America that is still owned by a private company. The current owner is Danco, a construction and development company. And the company agreed to help with the drill. “We could just do whatever we wanted without having to worry about anything,” Nicolini says. With that, Samoa became one of the first towns in America to take responsibility for improving its citizens’ performance in a disaster. It’s ironic that it was a company—not a government—that cleared the way.

That Thursday evening at 6:00
P. M
., a tsunami siren attached to the firehouse whirled to life. Danco CEO and president Dan Johnson was there, and he had low expectations. “I wasn’t even sure if people were going to come,” he says. “This is a pretty working-class community. They’re all blue collar, they’re drinking their beer.” But as he watched, the town’s residents poured into the streets and up the evacuation route. Nearly two hundred people, or about 75 percent of the population, hustled up to a gathering spot forty-eight feet above sea level. Babies, cats, and dogs came too. Peggy Weatherbee pushed her mother, Delores, up the path in a wheelchair. On the steepest part of the trail, three large men stepped in to help.

CEO Johnson was stunned. “All of a sudden, all these people are walking with their dogs and a bird, and a little girl is dragging her teddy bear, which was bigger than she was. I couldn’t believe it. These big gruff guys were walking up there with their backpacks full of all the stuff they wouldn’t want to lose from their houses.” As Nicolini headed up the trail, he saw a little girl carrying a backpack. “I said, ‘Wow, is that your evacuation pack?’” he remembers. “She looked at me like, ‘Look, buddy, this is serious, I got a mission here, don’t bother me.’”

Everybody made it to the top in ten minutes, which is about all the warning they might have in real life. As each family arrived, they punched a time card so that they would know exactly how long the trip would take in a real tsunami—a fine souvenir from high land. Then Nicolini addressed the crowd: “I want to congratulate everyone and tell you that you’re alive and well.” He also reminded them all that the siren may not work, so if they ever were to feel the earth shake for more than twenty seconds, see the ocean recede, or hear a strange roar come from the horizon, they should make a break for it. He plans to do the drill every year and try to expand it to other towns. “You’ve got to practice stuff that’s important,” Nicolini says. “I hope this will allow people to think less about tsunami. You have a plan, and you don’t have to worry.”

After the drill ended, a strange thing happened. People didn’t seem to want to leave. “It was like this whole community-building event,” says Johnson, laughing. “People are giving me hugs, and saying, ‘Thanks for doing this.’ You see the appreciation.”

There was one sheriff’s deputy at the drill. A few people asked why there weren’t more. Where was the fire department? Where were the thundering trucks and the flashing lights? It was an excellent question, and the answer might have been the most important part of the drill. The firefighters and police officers were absent by design. Because in a real tsunami, they will not be there. It will just be us, on our own, carrying one another to high ground.

So as you drive to work tomorrow, on top of long buried sewer pipes or across fault lines strained by the weight of our ambition, as you walk home tonight under low-flying airplanes and over frozen rivers, take a minute—just a minute—to contemplate your disaster personality. You’ve made each other’s acquaintance, after all this time, by finishing this book. Now that you have, you should keep in touch. You might need each other one day.

Author’s Note

Survivors offer our greatest hope for reconstructing disasters—not just the plot, but also the smells, the sounds, and the spontaneous acts of kindness. Their memories of the banal and the horrifying are portals into the unknown.

It is important to acknowledge, though, that memory is imperfect. I have in some cases interviewed five survivors from the same disaster and heard five very different sets of facts. These distortions of time and space happen for good reason, as other parts of this book explain. The passage of time also leads to revisions, as our minds work to create a narrative of the event that makes sense, and as media reports begin to congeal around a story line. Then there is also the simple problem of forgetting. Memory fades, of course, and in some cases, I’ve asked survivors to remember details from two or three decades ago.

I have tried to compensate for the frailties of memory in three ways. First, I checked and supplemented survivors’ recollections with official investigations, books, and media reports. All told, I have consulted more than 1,000 articles from academic journals and mass-market media and at least 75 official reports on specific accidents from the plane crash in Tenerife to the sinking of the
Estonia.
I have also reviewed transcripts and video footage of incidents for which such material exists.

Second, wherever possible, I interviewed multiple survivors from the same disaster in order to identify and resolve major discrepancies. I traveled to several countries in order to talk to as many experts and survivors in person as possible. In each case, I tried to leave the questions open-ended, so as to avoid shaping the answer. Also, in the interest of transparency and accountability, no names in this book have been changed.

Last, I tried to complement the stories of survivors with the best available research. Admittedly, serious research into human behavior in disasters is spotty. The funding has been scarce, with a few exceptions during periods of heightened anxiety. But there is some very good and careful work that has been done—particularly in aviation and in the military—and I rely heavily on this material. It helps to put the anecdotes of survivors in perspective, and it also has the benefit of being extremely interesting.

But in the end, I have to ask the reader to keep in mind that the memories of survivors, like the findings of researchers, are fallible. A book about human behavior is not exempt from the complications it describes.

Anything that is right and true in this book, on the other hand, is the product of collaboration. I am first and last grateful to the survivors who have shared the details of their darkest hours with me—and then shared them again when I returned with follow-up questions and fact-checking queries. Their patience and generosity, even in response to what I am sure were some profoundly foolish questions, have been humbling.

This book relies on the knowledge of experts, from neuroscientists to pilot instructors to police psychologists, who have altogether taken hundreds of hours of time to explain to me what they have learned in words I can understand. I am particularly grateful to Mark Gilbertson, Gordon Gallup Jr., Robyn Gershon, Ronn Langford, the Kansas City Fire Department, Susan Cutter, Dennis Mileti, Kathleen Tierney, and everyone else affiliated with the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But I never would have had the time to do this book right if I had not had the blessing of
Time
magazine and managing editors Jim Kelly and Rick Stengel. One of the distinctions about a magazine like
Time
is that there are (still) people there who recognize the importance of getting to know a story through and through before you dare to tell it.

For wisdom, phone numbers, and inspiration, thank you to my colleagues and friends Michael Duffy, Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Cloud, Nancy Gibbs, Priscilla Painton, Michele Orecklin, Eric Roston, Suzy Wagner, Adam Zagorin, Romesh Ratnesar, Daniella Alpher, Lisa Beyer, Aaron Klein, Jay Carney, Amy Sullivan, and Judith Stoler.
Time
photo editor Katie Ellsworth was exceedingly generous in helping me find (and in one case shoot) the pictures for this book. Thank you also to Ellen Charles and Frances Symes, my brilliant and kind research assistants who made no mistakes, except leaving me to get real jobs.

My agent Esmond Harmsworth III has been an invaluable ally, counselor, and satirist in this endeavor from beginning to end. Thank you to everyone at Crown and to my editor, Rick Horgan, for “getting it” from the beginning—and for backing this book with resources, passion, and professionalism.

For reporting help, I am grateful to Jane Prendergast in Cincinnati and Sibylla Brodzinsky in Colombia. For help with editing and related magic-making, thank you to Stephen Hubbell, David Carr, Lisa Green, Becca Kornfield, my PACE book club, Mike Schaffer, Dave Ripley, Louise Ripley, Ben Ripley, and Alan Greenblatt. For advice and encouragement on every single thing, from word choice to storytelling to font to web strategy, thank you to my husband, John Funge.