Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (38 page)

Tilly Smith’s quote about the tsunami comes from Duncan Larcombe’s article in
The Sun
.

The Personal Strategies of Risk Experts

When I interviewed risk experts, I asked them how their studies had influenced their own behavior. They had different answers, depending upon their lifestyles and the focus of their research. But the one response I heard from at least three different experts was that they do one main thing differently: they don’t drive unless they have to.

The quote from Bruce Schneier comes from the May 17, 2007, entry on his blog:
www.schneier.com/blog
.

Television News

For more on how TV footage of disasters correlates with stress levels, see M.A. Schuster et al., “A National Survey of Stress Reactions After the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks,”
New England Journal of Medicine
.

CHAPTER
3:
FEAR

The 1980 Hostage Crisis in Colombia

Asencio’s story is drawn from my interview with him, as well as news articles from the time and his own book on the subject: Diego and Nancy Asencio with Ron Tobias,
Our Man Is Inside
.

The Brain and Fear

One of the best in-depth descriptions of how the brain processes fear—and all emotions—is
The Emotional Brain
by Joseph LeDoux.

The data about the fear reactions of World War II soldiers is from Samuel Stouffer et al.,
The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, Vol. II
.

The study of 115 law enforcement officers involved in shooting incidents is here: J. Michael Rivard et al., “Acute Dissociative Responses in Law Enforcement Officers Involved in Critical Shooting Incidents: The Clinical and Forensic Implications,”
Journal of Forensic Science
.

Self-Talk in Crisis Moments

The story of a soldier’s conversation with himself comes from Mark Bowden’s book,
Guests of the Ayatollah
.

Perceptual Distortions in Police Shootings

Ninety-five percent of eighty officers involved in shootings reported having experienced some kind of distortion during the incident—from tunnel vision to auditory blunting to slow-motion time—according to David Klinger, “Police Responses to Officer-Involved Shootings,”
NIJ Journal,
no. 253 (Jan. 2006).

Interestingly, another study of forty-four officers found that 9 percent actually experienced an out-of-body experience during shooting. See R. M. Solomon and J. M. Horn, “Post-Shooting Traumatic Reactions: A Pilot Study,” in
Psychological Services for Law Enforcement,
ed. J.T. Reese and H. A. Goldstein (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986), 383–394.

The story of the police officer who saw “beer cans” floating past his face comes from Alexis Artwohl, “Perceptual and Memory Distortion During Officer-Involved Shootings,”
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
(Oct. 2002): 18;
www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2002/oct02leb.pdf/
.

Slow-Motion Time

At press time, Eagleman’s results (coauthored with his graduate students Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta) are under review for publication. He shared the results with me over the phone and via e-mail.

For more on this subject, also see the fascinating work of Peter Hancock, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches time distortion and other stress effects for the U.S. military;
http://www.mit.ucf.edu/timeperception.asp
.

Learning to Do Better

For more on how police officers learn to master their fear response, see Alexis Artwohl and Loren W. Christensen,
Deadly Force Encounters
.

The importance of knowledge in reducing injury rates on 9/11 is from Gershon’s survey.

For more on Siddle’s combat-performance research, see Bruce K. Siddle,
Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge
.

Tunnel Vision

To experience a mild version of this phenomenon for yourself, check out the video demos put together by the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois:
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.htm
.

The details on the crash of the Eastern Air Lines jet in 1972 come from the official investigation: National Transportation Safety Board,
Eastern Air Lines, Inc., L-1011, N310EA
,
Miami, Florida, December 29, 1972
.

The story of the crash-landing of United Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989 comes largely from the recollections of Al Haynes, the plane’s captain, which can be found here:
airdisaster.com/eyewitness/ua232.shtml
.

The preliminary results of the Rhode Island cell-phone study come from the following press release:
http://www.uri.edu/news/releases/html/ 02-0610.htm
.

Learning to Do Better, Part II

The juggling study is here: Bogdan Draganski et al., “Neuroplasticity: Changes in Grey Matter Induced by Training,”
Nature
427 (Jan. 22,2004): 311–312.

A description of Darren Laur’s knife-attack experiment can be found here: Darren Laur, “The Anatomy of Fear and How It Relates to Survival Skills Training,”
http://www.lwcbooks.com/articles/anatomy.htm
.

For the study on the brains of meditators, see Sara W. Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,”
NeuroReport
.

On the importance of control, real and imagined, see J. Amat et al., “Medial Prefrontal Cortex Determines How Stressor Controllability Affects Behavior and Dorsal Raphe Nucleus,”
Nature Neuroscience
8, no. 3 (Mar. 2005).

Rosemberg Pabón, aka Commandante Uno

The quotes from Pabón, the hostage-taker-turned-government-functionary, come from the only interview I did not do myself. Sibylla Brodzinsky, a reporter in Bogotá, conducted the interview on my behalf, and I am grateful for her excellent work.

CHAPTER
4:
RESILIENCE

Resilience Defined

Over the past five years or so, disaster researchers and trauma psychologists have begun to focus more on the people who recover from disasters—instead of the people who don’t. This is a massive and important shift, and it comes, naturally, with jargon. In clinical and research circles, the words
resilience, recovery, resistance,
and
hardiness
are all separate but related concepts. Because this is a book for the layperson, I hope the experts will forgive me for using the word
resilience
to mean, in a way, all of the above. Resilience, in this book, refers to whatever it is that makes some people able to perform extraordinarily well during a disaster—and then recover relatively quickly and fully afterward. For more on resilience, see Al Siebert,
The Survivor Personality.

Physical Fitness

For more on the effect of obesity in car accidents, see Charles N. Mock et al., “The Relationship Between Body Weight and Risk of Death and Serious Injury in Motor Vehicle Crashes,”
Accident Analysis and Prevention
34, no. 2 (Mar. 2002): 221–228.

The increased odds of people with low physical ability getting injured on 9/11 comes from Gershon’s survey of Trade Center evacuees.

Gender

For more on how race and gender subtly shape our risk equation, see Dan M. Kahan et al., “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception,”
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
.

The Oxfam study on the female victims of the tsunami is here: Oxfam International, “The Tsunami’s Impact on Women,”
Oxfam Briefing Note
(Mar. 2005).

The greater likelihood for females to have been injured in the Trade Center comes from Gershon’s survey data.

Poverty

The data on African American and American Indian fire fatalities come from U.S. Fire Administration/National Fire Data Center,
Fire in the United States 1992–2001,
13th edition (Emmitsburg, MD: U.S. Fire Administration, Oct. 2004).

For more on the effect of poverty on disasters worldwide, see James McCarthy et al., eds., “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Insurance and Other Financial Services (2001), 451–486; and Matthew E. Kahn, “The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography and Institutions,”
Review of Economics and Statistics
87, no. 2 (May 2005): 271–284.

The comparison between the Northridge and the Pakistani earthquake was made by geophysicist John C. Mutter in the following article: Claudia Dreifus, “Earth Science Meets Social Science in Study of Disasters,”
New York Times,
Mar. 14, 2006, Science Desk.

Arrogance

For more on resilience overall and the survival value of self-confidence specifically, see George A. Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?”
American Psychologist
59, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 20–28.

Military Research

For more on Charles Morgan’s study of soldiers at Survival School, see Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Plasma Neuropeptide-Y Concentrations in Humans Exposed to Military Survival Training,”
Biological Psychiatry
and Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Relationship Among Plasma Cortisol, Catecholamines, Neuropeptide Y, and Human Performance During Exposure to Uncontrollable Stress,”
Psychosomatic Medicine
.

The questionnaire used in Morgan’s study was the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale. The three sample questions listed in this book are adapted from this questionnaire. For more on this evaluation tool, see J. D. Bremner et al., “Measurement of Dissociative States with the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale (CADSS),”
Journal of Traumatic Stress
11 (1998): 125–136.

For Morgan’s findings on dissociation in soldiers, see Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Symptoms of Dissociation in Humans Experiencing Acute, Uncontrollable Stress: A Prospective Investigation,”
American Journal of Psychiatry
.

As for the Vietnam veteran twins, for Mark Gilbertson’s study on the relative size of the brothers’ hippocampi, see Mark W. Gilbertson et al., “Smaller Hippocampal Volume Predicts Pathologic Vulnerability to Psychological Trauma,”
Nature Neuroscience
.

For Gilbertson’s analysis of the twins’ overall cognitive performance, see Mark W. Gilbertson et al., “Neurocognitive Function in Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Combat Exposure: Relationship to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,”
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
115, no. 3 (2006): 484–495.

The ratio of Vietnam vets who have suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder comes from R. A. Kulka et al.,
The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study: Tables of Findings and Technical Appendices
(New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1990).

CHAPTER
5:
GROUPTHINK

The Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire

The details of the fire come from interviews with survivors, newspaper articles from the time, and the following additional sources: Ron Elliott,
Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire,
and Richard L. Best, “Tragedy in Kentucky,”
Fire Journal
.

Many thanks to Jane Prendergast, a Cincinnati-area reporter who helped connect me with Beverly Hills survivors and who also reported back to me about a thirtieth anniversary memorial service that I could not attend myself.

Milling

Lee Clarke’s quote on disaster cohorts comes from Lee Clarke, “Panic: Myth or Reality?”
Contexts.

For information on milling before hurricanes, see Thomas E. Drabek, “Disaster Warning and Evacuation Responses by Private Business Employees,”
Disasters
.

The statistic on 9/11 milling comes from the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s final report into the collapse of the Trade Center.

Role Playing in Disasters

See Drue M. Johnston and Norris R. Johnson, “Role Extension in Disaster: Employee Behavior at the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire,”
Sociological Focus
.

The Value of the Group

The miners’ study is a good example of how groups stick together during life-or-death situations: Charles Vaught et al.,
Behavioral and Organizational Dimensions of Underground Mine Fires
(U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2000).

For more on monkey groups in Indonesia, see Carel P. van Schaik and Maria A. van Noordwijk, “Evolutionary Effect of the Absence of Felids on the Social Organization of the Macaques on the Island of Simeulue,”
Folia Primatologica
44 (1985): 138–147.

The Richard Dawkins quote comes from his book,
The Selfish Gene,
4.

For more on the concept of the selfish herd, see W. D. Hamilton, “Geometry for the Selfish Herd,”
Journal of Theoretical Biology
.

Fire Dynamics

On its website, the Kansas City Fire Department offers a helpful primer on how fire works: Emergency Services Consulting, “Deployment Analysis,” Kansas City Fire Department,
www.kcmo.org/fire/deploymentanalysis.pdf
.