Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (37 page)

Notes

INTRODUCTION: “LIFE BECOMES LIKE MOLTEN METAL”

The Halifax Explosion

See S. H. Prince, “Catastrophe and Social Change.”

Material was also drawn from the very helpful archives of Nova Scotia, which can be accessed here:
http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/explosion.asp
.

Samuel Prince

See Leonard F. Hatfield,
Sammy the Prince.

Mayor Ray Nagin

Nagin’s quotes come from John Pope’s article in the
Times-Picayune.

The Exploding Streets of Guadalajara

“Ordinary citizens are amazingly capable of avoiding deadly harm,” concluded epidemiologist Thomas Glass after completing an extensive National Science Foundation study of ten major disasters, including Guadalajara. “What the lay public does, both individually and collectively, will make the greatest difference in the ultimate outcome.”

Survivability of Airplane Accidents

This data comes from the National Transportation Safety Board’s
Survivability of Accidents Involving Part 121 U.S
.
Air Carrier Operations, 1983 Through 2000.

7/7 Attacks in London

This information comes from the 7 July Review Committee,
Report of the 7 July Review Committee.

The Conundrum of Modern Civilizations

Here is a good example of what I mean: In May of 2007, a tornado utterly flattened the Kansas town of Greensburg, located smack in the middle of Tornado Alley. Three days later, Major General Tod Bunting, director of emergency management for the state, made the vow that all officials now make after a disaster, mistaking defiance for strength. He promised CNN that the town would be back, that the enemy, whoever that might be, would never win: “You know what? This is America. We build where we want to build. We live where we want to live.”

For a thorough description of America’s complicated relationship with hazards, see Dennis Mileti,
Disasters by Design.

The Two Kinds of Evolution

For more on this concept, see Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene.

More Than 80 Percent of Americans Live in Cities

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs,
World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision.

Hawaiian Tsunami

For more on the Hawaii tsunami, see Brian F. Atwater et al., “Surviving a Tsunami—Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan,”
U.S
.
Geological Survey,
and Richard Horton, “Threats to Human Survival,”
The Lancet.

Risk of a Disaster

Amanda Ripley, “Why We Don’t Prepare for Disaster,”
Time.

Hunter S. Thompson

I am indebted to at least two and maybe three people for this quote. First, my friend David Carr introduced me to it. The quote is part of his e-mail signature, and I shamelessly lifted it. The quote itself, meanwhile, is widely attributed to Thompson in many different places. But it is also, in other places, described as an Indian proverb. I thank them all.

CHAPTER
1:
DELAY

Lethargy in Fire

Guylène Proulx, “Cool Under Fire,”
Fire Protection Engineering.

Laughter During an Emergency Landing

Matthew Kaminski’s column appeared in the
Wall Street Journal
on May 19, 2006.

NIST Report on 9/11

The federal government’s in-depth investigation into the collapse of the World Trade Center was conducted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is a massive and extremely helpful document. Of the forty-two companion reports, one in particular (NIST NCSTAR 1-7: “Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communication”) was most relevant to this book. To see the full report, go to
http://wtc.nist.gov/pubs/
.

Gathering Before Evacuating on 9/11

This survey of 1,444 Trade Center evacuees, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Association of Schools of Public Health, was conducted by Robyn R. M. Gershon and her team at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. The final quantitative results had not yet been published at the time of this book’s printing, but Gershon shared what she’d learned with me in several meetings from 2004 to 2006. You can see many of her findings here:
www.mailman.hs.columbia.edu/CPHP/wtc/
. Most of the data cited in this book are also included in Gershon’s 2007 IRB-Investigator presentation, available on the site.

Fire Marshals in 1993

The quote on training comes from Rita F. Fahy and Guylène Proulx, “Collective Common Sense: A Study of Human Behavior During the World Trade Center Evacuation,”
NFPA Journal
(Mar./Apr. 1995): 59–67. The emphasis is mine.

9/11 Commission

The testimony of Alan Reiss can be found here:
www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing11/reiss_statement.pdf
. The rest of this invaluable report can be seen here:
http://www.9-11commission.gov/
. Details on the repeater system start on page 297.

CHAPTER
2:
RISK

Hurricane Katrina Evacuation

New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s quotes come from the Associated Press and the
New Orleans Times-Picayune,
both dated August 28, 2005.

For a summary of the evacuation’s little-known success stories, see Coleman Warner, “Contrarians Call Katrina Evacuation a Success,”
New-house News Service,
Dec. 28, 2005. The figure about the number of carless households in New Orleans comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2004 Community Survey.

For the prescient five-part report on what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, see John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “In Harm’s Way,”
New Orleans Times-Picayune,
June 23, 2002, and the rest of the series, running through June 27, 2002.

Unintended Consequences of War

For more on this general concept, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb,
The Black Swan
.

As for the U.S. finding that the Iraq war became a “cause célèbre” for jihadists, you can see declassified portions of the report here:
www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf
.

Hurricane Katrina

Knight Ridder’s analysis of 486 Katrina victims showed that black victims outnumbered whites by 51 percent to 44 percent. But in the area overall, blacks outnumbered whites by 61 percent to 36 percent. The database was compiled from official government information as well as interviews with survivors of the dead. The database is far from complete. But Knight Ridder found similar patterns in another analysis comparing the locations where 874 bodies were recovered to U.S. census tract data. For more, see John Simerman, Dwight Ott, and Ted Mellnik, “Stats Shake Beliefs About Hurricane; New Information About Katrina Suggests That Victims Weren’t Disproportionately Poor or Black,”
Knight Ridder Newspapers,
Dec. 30, 2005.

Max Mayfield’s quote comes from a speech I saw him deliver at the National Association of Government Communicators conference in Baltimore on May 25, 2006. The poll of New Orleans residents who did not evacuate is from Mollyann Brodie et al., “Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters: Implications for Future Planning,”
Research and Practice
(Mar. 29, 2006).

Competing Causes of Death

For a list of the leading causes of deaths in the United States, see “Deaths: Final Data for 2003,”
National Vital Statistics Reports
54, no. 13 (Apr. 19, 2006);
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_13.pdf/
.

The odds of killing yourself versus being killed by someone else come from David Ropeik and George Gray,
Risk
, Appendix 1.

Kahneman and Tversky

Both men were prolific, but one of their most important papers on risk is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.”

The Donut Quiz

This classic problem has been cited in many studies, including Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 25–42.

Increased Driving Fatalities After 9/11

There have been at least two other studies illustrating this phenomenon. I’ve chosen here to cite the results of the most comprehensive one: Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon, “Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism,” accepted for publication in
Applied Economics
in 2007. Another study, which did not control for as many factors and looked only at rural interstate highway deaths, found that an estimated fifteen hundred Americans died after 9/11 because they drove instead of flying: Gerd Gigerenzer, “Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire: Behavioral Reactions to Terrorist Attacks,”
Risk Analysis
26, no. 2 (2006).

One other interesting factoid from the third study on this subject: for any trip over thirty-six kilometers (in other words, any trip in which flying is even an option), the air remains safer than the road, according to Michael Sivack and Michael J. Flannagan, “Flying and Driving after the September 11 Attacks,”
American Scientist
(Jan./Feb. 2003).

The Personalities of Hazards

Paul Slovic,
The Perception of Risk
.

Fire Deaths

The National Fire Protection Association has a wealth of information on fires—when they happen, why, and what would prevent them from happening. It’s all on their website at
www.nfpa.org
.

Least Hazardous States

This list comes from Dennis Mileti’s
Disasters by Design,
which was published in 1999. The list can be expected to change with time.

Three Mile Island

See Robert A. Stallings, “Evacuation Behavior at Three Mile Island.”

The Lake Wobegon Effect

The data on Hurricane Floyd drownings come from: “Morbidity and Mortality Associated with Hurricane Floyd—North Carolina, September–October 1999,”
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
49, no. 17 (May 5, 2000): 369–372.

Men are more than twice as likely as women to die during a thunderstorm, according to a study by Thomas J. Songer at the University of Pittsburgh, which is described here: “Seventy Percent of Thunderstorm-Related Deaths Occur in Men,”
Public Health
(Fall 2003).

The survey of people living in hurricane zones is here: Robert J. Blendon et al., “High-Risk Area Hurricane Survey.”

For more on our tendency toward unrealistic optimism, see Shelley E. Taylor,
Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind
10–11; and Neil Weinstein, “Unrealistic Optimism About Susceptibility to Health Problems: Conclusions from a Community-wide Sample,”
Journal of Behavioral Medicine
. The survey measuring predictions of terrorism risk is here: Jennifer S. Lerner, Roxana M. Gonzalez, Deborah A. Small, and Baruch Fischhoff, “Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment,”
Psychological Science
14, no. 2 (Mar. 2003).

The Connection Between Weather and Stocks

See David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway, “Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather.”

Our Dependence on Emotions

For the full story of Elliot, see Antonio R. Damasio,
Descartes’ Error.

Crafting Better Warnings

The survey of passengers involved in airplane evacuations comes from: National Transportation Safety Board,
Emergency Evacuation of Commercial Airplanes.
And for more on the suggestions of U.K. civilians, see Lauren J. Thomas, Sophie O’Ferrall, and Antoinette Caird-Daley,
Evacuation Commands for Optimal Passenger Management
.

Dennis Mileti is one of the foremost experts on warnings in the world. He has published hundreds of reports on the subject. For one of his very helpful primers, see Dennis Mileti et al., “Public Hazards Communication and Education: The State of the Art,”
Natural Hazards Informer
.

Newspaper accounts of “freak” falling deaths are actually very easy to find. Here are the sources for the two examples I cited: Louise Hosie, “Toddler Dies After Cutting Neck on Vase,”
Scottish Press Association
, and “Young Polish Man’s Dream of New Life Ends in Tragedy,”
Wexford People
.

Gambling and the Brain

To understand more about what happens to your brain in a casino, see Camelia M. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson, “The Neural Basis of Financial Risk Taking,”
Neuron
.

Case Studies—Good Warnings and Bad

The story of Vanuatu comes from Costas Synolakis, “Self-Centered West’s Narrow Focus Puts Lives at Risk,”
The Times Higher Education Supplement
.

The Bangladesh example comes from Philippa Howell, “Indigenous Early Warning Indicators of Cyclones: Potential Application in Coastal Bangladesh,”
Disaster Studies Working Paper 6
.