Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (4 page)

The plane, as it turned out, landed safely. And Kaminski was left to marvel at his fellow passengers’ well-developed sense of irony.

Laughter—or silence—is a classic manifestation of denial, as is delay. Zedeño was not alone. On average, Trade Center survivors waited six minutes before heading downstairs, according to a 2005 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study drawn from interviews with nearly nine hundred survivors. (The average would likely be higher if those who died had been able to respond to the survey.) Some waited as long as forty-five minutes. People occupied themselves in all kinds of interesting ways. Some helped coworkers who were disabled or obese. In Tower 2, many people followed fatal instructions to stay put. Staying inside was, after all, the standard protocol for skyscraper fires. But ultimately, the threat should have demanded immediate attention. Eventually, almost everyone saw smoke, smelled jet fuel, or heard someone giving the order to leave. Even then, many called relatives and friends. About one thousand individuals took the time to shut down their computers, according to NIST. “The building started to sway and everything started shaking,” one person on a floor in the sixties of Tower 1 told NIST. “I knew there was something wrong.” Notice what comes next: “I ran to my desk and made a couple of phone calls. I dialed about five times trying to reach my [spouse]. I also called my sisters to find out more information.”

Why do we procrastinate leaving? The denial phase is a humbling one. It takes a while to come to terms with our miserable luck. Rowley puts it this way: “Fires only happen to other people.” We have a tendency to believe that everything is OK because, well, it almost always has been before. Psychologists call this tendency “normalcy bias.” The human brain works by identifying patterns. It uses information from the past to understand what is happening in the present and to anticipate the future. This strategy works elegantly in most situations. But we inevitably see patterns where they don’t exist. In other words, we are slow to recognize exceptions. There is also the peer-pressure factor. All of us have been in situations that looked ominous, and they almost always turn out to be innocuous. If we behave otherwise, we risk social embarrassment by overreacting. So we err on the side of underreacting.

But it would be a mistake to assume that we just waste time during this delay. Given time to think, people in disasters need information like they need shelter and water. Their brains lack the patterns they need to make a good decision, so they wisely search for better data. No matter what we are told by a man in a uniform, no matter how shrill the alarm, we check in with one another. This “milling” ritual is part of the second phase of deliberation. How and with whom you mill can dramatically influence your chances of survival. For now, it’s fair to say that milling is a useful process that can take a painfully long time to complete.

“Get Out of the Building!”

Luckily, one of Zedeño’s colleagues passed through the denial phase immediately. He screamed at her: “Get out of the building!” His brain worked faster, for reasons we’ll go into later. Zedeño still wonders what she would have done if he hadn’t told her to leave. As it was, she still found ways to delay a little longer. First, she reached for her purse. Then she started walking in circles in her cubicle. “I was looking for something to take with me. It was like I was in a trance.” She picked up a mystery novel she’d been reading. Then she looked for more things to take. This gathering process is common in life-or-death situations. Facing a void of unknown, we want to be prepared with as many supplies as possible. And, as with normalcy bias, we find comfort in our usual habits. (In a survey of 1,444 survivors after the attacks, 40 percent would say they gathered items before leaving.)

Finally, Zedeño headed into the stairwell. She was taking action, the last stage in the process. But her journey had only just begun. She would cycle through the phases of “disaster think” over and over. Disbelief and deliberation would continue to stall her descent. “I never found myself in a hurry,” she says. “It’s weird because the sound, the way the building shook, should have kept me going fast. But it was almost as if I put the sound away in my mind.”

On average, the estimated 15,410 people who got out of the Trade Center took about a minute to make it down each floor, the NIST findings show. A minute may not sound like a long time, but it was shocking to people who design and build tall buildings. It was twice as long as the standard engineering codes had predicted—and the buildings were less than half full. In a 110-story building, a minute per floor is just too slow.

Most of the people who died on 9/11 had no choices. They were above the impact zone of the planes and could not find a way out. Of the thousands who had access to open stairwells and time to use them, all but about 135 did manage to escape, the NIST report found. But the most important finding from the Trade Center evacuation is what did not happen. The attacks took place on the same day as the mayoral election in New York City. Many people had stopped at the polls to vote and were late to work. Others had taken their children into school for the first day of classes. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange does not open until 9:30
A.M
., so the trading firms were not fully staffed yet. And the Trade Center’s visiting platform did not open to tourists until 9:30
A.M
.

The fires caused by the 9/11 attacks were the deadliest in American history, killing 2,666 people. Had the buildings been full that morning, the slow evacuation would have translated into more than five times the casualties. It’s hard to imagine that kind of body count. This was already an unprecedented tragedy for the United States, after all. But had the attacks happened at a different time, at least fourteen thousand people would have been killed, according to NIST’s conservative estimates based on the rate of movement on 9/11. And the exasperating crawl of the evacuation would have been a topic of endless public debate.

Since the first skyscraper was built in 1885 in Chicago, these monuments to human engineering have been designed without much consideration for how human beings actually behave. The people who work in skyscrapers have never been required to undergo regular full-evacuation drills, which could dramatically improve their escape times. When they do have drills, most people see them as a waste of time. They overestimate how well their minds will perform in a real crisis. When the alarm goes off, they know they are being interrupted and inconvenienced, but they don’t necessarily know how much they might one day appreciate the remedial help.

When she gives tours of Ground Zero, the number one question Zedeño gets asked is, How did people behave in the stairwell? Were people panicking? No one expects the answer they get. “Everybody was very calm, very calm,” Zedeño tells them. Only one woman got hysterical—screaming and hyperventilating in the staircase. Zedeño gives her the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t know what this woman saw,” she says. The woman was walking with a man who had blood on his forehead. The man kept repeating, “We were the lucky ones, we were the lucky ones.” Zedeño and the rest of the crowd moved to the side in the narrow stairway so the two of them could go ahead.

Crowds generally become very quiet and docile in a true disaster. Of course, on 9/11, no one in the stairways expected the towers to collapse. We’ll never know how they would have behaved had they known. But even in other, more overtly dire situations, crowds don’t tolerate irrational panic behavior. Most of the time, people remain consistently orderly—and kind, much kinder than they would have been on a normal day. One of Zedeño’s coworkers weighed over three hundred pounds and was in a wheelchair. He worked on the sixty-ninth floor in 1993—and in 2001. Both times, his coworkers carried him all the way down the stairs.

During the first thirty floors of her descent, Zedeño learned that the explosion she’d heard was a plane hitting the tower. She promptly made up a story for herself to explain what had happened. Her brain reached into its database of patterns for a reasonable explanation, in other words. “I said to myself, ‘Poor pilot. He must have had a heart attack or a stroke.’” She would revise the story again and again that day, underestimating the gravity of the attacks each time.

At the forty-fourth floor, someone told Zedeño and the people near her to switch stairways. She’s not sure who said this, but she remembers someone saying there were fires below in that staircase. So they all filed out into the sky lobby and queued up at another stairway entrance. Zedeño stood facing the windows of the sky lobby. About seventeen minutes had passed since the first plane hit.

Suddenly, another explosion shook the tower. Zedeño looked up and saw balls of fire and black smoke. “I don’t remember the sound, for some reason,” she says. Like many people in disasters, her memory and her senses switched on and off at certain key points. But she does remember somebody screaming: “Get away from the windows!” Zedeño turned and ran toward the center of the building.

Until now, Zedeño had been mostly calm and quiet. But as she ran from the explosion, she felt a new sensation. She was filled with a rush of anger. I ask her whom she was angry at, expecting her to say whoever was causing the explosions. But what she says, very slowly and deliberately, is this: “How…could…I…have been so stupid to put myself inside this building again after what happened in 1993? I should have known better.” Zedeño was furious at herself. As she ran, she experienced a moment of clarity—which can be decidedly unhelpful. “I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m on the forty-fourth floor of a building. Where am I going? I’m still way up high. I can’t go anywhere!’”

Then everything changed again just as quickly. The group stopped running, the anger faded away, and things returned, instantly, to the previous calm. “Every single one of us turned around and marched right back to the stairway as if nothing ever had happened,” Zedeño says. She smiles when she says this. She knows it sounds strange. Disaster victims often oscillate between horrifying realizations and mechanical submission. As Zedeño describes it, they can be remarkably obedient:

We were like robots. There were no comments as to, “What do you think happened outside?” Nobody ran to the windows to see what was happening. Nobody pushed anybody. Nobody tried to get into the stairway before anyone else. Everybody just went right back as a group and continued to funnel into the stairway in an orderly fashion.

I ask Zedeño what she thought the sound of this second explosion was. At that moment, she says, she did not think about it at all. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m telling you, it was as if it didn’t happen. It’s not even that I forgot it. It’s just that it was as if it never happened. Never.” Psychologists call this “dissociation.” Most often, you hear the word used to describe the way children distance themselves from physical or sexual abuse. But it happens in life-or-death situations too. It can be a coping mechanism—a productive and extreme form of denial, in a sense. As Zedeño puts it, “I could not afford to dwell on it. My job was to just take it one step at a time.”

Soon afterward, though, Zedeño heard someone in the stairwell say that another plane had hit the towers. That information conflicted with her heart-attack theory. So she promptly made up a new story for herself. This, too, was a clever coping device. “I said, ‘Those idiots! They were racing! And they ended up hitting us. I can’t believe people are so stupid.’”

Several floors later, as the slow descent wore on, she heard some more disturbing information. A man behind her noted that one plane had hit about fifteen minutes after the other. She turned to him as if he had told her something new and surprising, and she announced to herself as much as to him, “It was intentional!” He looked back at her. “Yes,” he said. Her carefully constructed narrative could not absorb this information. So Zedeño did the most pragmatic thing she could do: she ignored it. “I put it out of my mind as if it hadn’t happened,” she says. Denial can be remarkably agile.

Around the twentieth floor, Zedeño started passing a lot of firefighters coming up the stairs. Again, the instinct of the crowd was to be generous. “I remember thinking the firemen looked tired. I wished we had bottles of water to give them,” she says. The evacuees kept moving to the side to give the firefighters more space, but the firefighters urged them to keep going down, don’t stop, don’t stop.

Zedeño remembers certain sounds from that descent with perfect clarity. There were two men, probably firefighters, coming up below her. At each floor, they would stop and yell, “Does anyone need help? Is there anyone here?” She heard their voices floating upward several minutes before she saw the men. Then they passed her and she heard their voices above her, getting farther and farther away. She doesn’t know what happened to them. “Their voices stayed with me. I can still hear them now. Their voices haunted me for a long time.”

Nothing imprints the brain more effectively than fear. Certain details from life-or-death events stay with us for the rest of our lives, like scars in our consciousness. They can cause debilitating problems. They can require years of therapy to repair. But, like most disaster behaviors, they can be helpful, too. They are there to protect us from getting into the same situation again.

A Woman in Red

Finally, about an hour after she had left her cubicle, Zedeño emerged into the light of the Trade Center lobby. She felt a flush of happiness. She was on the ground at last. She looked around and saw firefighters and other people moving in slow motion, a common distortion in extreme situations. Then she looked outside and gasped.

As when she’d emerged from the elevator after the 1993 bombing, she’d expected to see normal life, bustling on indifferently. Here is how Zedeño describes this powerful presumption that the trouble was limited to her immediate vicinity, which psychologists call the “illusion of centrality”: