Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (7 page)

For nine days, the phones stayed down and the roads remained un-crossable. All of Turner’s children except Williams had lost their homes. They were desperate to get to their father, but they could not. Finally, the phones came back on and Williams made a frantic call to a radio station. She pleaded for someone, anyone, to go check on her father. Three hours later, she got a call from rescue officials. They had found her father in the attic, with a baseball bat and the crucifix he kept by his bed. He was dead at age eighty-five, apparently killed by a heart attack. Time of death was unknown.

In those early, chaotic days, rescue personnel were under orders to prioritize bodies that were in the water. Turner was not in the water, so it would be two weeks before they took his body away. About a month after the storm, Williams went to the house. She found the Santa suit hanging in her father’s bedroom closet, in its normal place. It had gotten wet, along with everything else, but her brother decided to hang it outside of the house as a reminder to those who passed that this had been the little holiday house. “We wanted people to see it,” Williams says. “I don’t know. When people passed by, maybe people who knew him as Santa Claus or whatever, would remember.”

In the confusion that followed the storm, the authorities lost Turner’s body. For five months, his family tried to find him. Morgue workers called Williams repeatedly to describe the bodies of dead men, none of whom were her father. “I kept telling them, ‘He doesn’t have a tattoo!’” Five months after he died, Turner’s body was found again and handed over to his family.

When we spoke a year and a half after the storm, Williams was having trouble forgiving her father. “It makes me so mad,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen. I took such good care of him for him to do something like that.” Since his death her family has not been nearly as close, she says. She wonders if they will ever reconnect. She agreed to be interviewed for this book because, she said, she wants other people to know how one decision can make all the difference.

Turner was nobody’s fool; he had accumulated a lot of wisdom in his long life. When Katrina came, he made a trade-off that is more complicated than it looks. As I came to know Turner through his daughter, I wanted to know more about his decision. Why had his risk calculus failed him this time—after working so well for so long? Could we predict these kinds of blind spots in our own risk equations? And if so, couldn’t we overcome them?

The Science of Risk

How are you most likely to die? Think for a moment: Given your own profile, what do you really think is most likely to kill you?

The facts depend upon your age, genetics, lifestyle, location, and a thousand other factors, of course. But overall, here are the leading causes of death in the United States:

1. Heart disease

2. Cancer

3. Stroke

Now ask yourself whether these most-likely scenarios are also the ones you worry about more than any other. Are these the risks you actively work hardest to avoid? Do you start each day with twenty minutes of meditation? Do you work out for at least thirty minutes a day? When you swim in the ocean, are you more terrified of getting sunburned than you are of getting bit by a shark?

The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability. If we really were just concerned with preventing the most likely causes of death, we would worry more about falling down than we would about homicide. The nightly news would feature back-to-back segments on tragic heart-attack deaths. And we might spend more money on therapists than police (you are twice as likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime). It’s as if we don’t fear death itself so much as dying. We fear the how, not so much the what.

Curiously, we have only recently begun to understand how we process risk. For centuries, philosophers and especially economists assumed that people were rational creatures—if not individually than certainly overall. To measure risk, it was thought, humans simply multiplied the probability of something happening by the consequences of it happening.

It took two psychologists to point out that this was simply not true. In the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a series of revolutionary papers on human decision making. They explained that people rely on emotional shortcuts, called “heuristics,” to make choices. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts. And the shortcuts, while very useful, lead to a slew of predictable errors. For example, in one study, they found that a majority of subjects judged a deadly flood triggered by a California earthquake to be more likely than an equally deadly flood occurring somewhere else in North America on its own. The notion of a California earthquake resonated more than the prospect of a flood—and so it was assigned a higher probability by the people in the study.

In fact, the chances of a flood occurring for some other reason is far greater. But that kind of workaday flood—the kind that kills people every year—does not trigger the same cascading series of emotional shortcuts. It is less scary for a reason, which isn’t to say that it’s rational.

At first, Kahneman and Tversky were labeled pessimists. At a time when most Americans were enchanted by technology, they had concluded that people were in fact irrational. They were attacked for exaggerating the flaws of the human brain. More than one critic pointed to the fact that man had walked on the moon. How could a species that has evolved to walk on the moon be plagued by irrationality? But their work forever altered the study of risk. In 2002, six years after Tversky’s death, Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work.

Today, most people who study decision making agree that human beings are not rational. “We don’t go around like risk assessors—doing calculations, multiplying probabilities. That’s been disproved,” says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon and one of the world’s most respected experts on risk. Instead, people rely on two different systems: the intuitive and the analytical. The intuitive system is automatic, fast, emotional, and swayed heavily by experiences and images. The analytical system is the ego to the brain’s id: logical, contemplative, and pragmatic.

One system can override the other, depending on the situation. For example, consider this question:

A coffee and a donut cost $1.10 in total. The coffee costs $1 more than the donut. How much does the donut cost?

If your first answer was ten cents, that’s your intuitive system talking. If you then caught yourself and came to the correct answer (five cents), that’s your analytical system policing your intuition.

Notice how deft the intuitive system is! It moved at lightning speed, and if the question were a mountain lion about to lunge at your throat, it might have saved your life—or at least distracted the lion for a minute.

But it was also wrong. And this is where we come to the truth-telling moment: we all make mistakes when we judge risk. Our risk formula, especially when it comes to disasters, almost never looks this rational:

Risk
=
Probability
×
Consequence

No, if we could reduce our risk calculation to a simple formula, it might look more like this:

Risk
=
Probability
×
Consequence
×
Dread
/Optimism

Dread. Rarely does a label used by scientists so aptly fit the emotion it describes. Think of dread as humanity in a word. It represents all of our evolutionary fears, hopes, lessons, prejudices, and distortions wrapped up in one dark
X
factor.

After talking about dread with risk experts, I started to imagine it as a sum of many other, powerful factors. Dread had its own equation. Each factor in the equation could raise or reduce the sensation of dread, depending on the situation. It seemed important to break dread into its parts in order to understand its imperfections. So here, with apologies to those experts for reducing their findings to a formula, is what I think the equation for dread might look like:

Dread
=
Uncontrollability
+
Unfamiliarity
+
Imaginability
+
Suffering
+
Scale of Destruction
+
Unfairness

Chances are the thing that most terrifies you is high in several of these factors. Dread explains why we fear plane crashes so much more than we fear heart disease or car crashes. First, planes (unlike cars) are not under our personal control, so that bumps up the dread factor. Second, planes are very unfamiliar to human beings; we are not comfortable at twenty thousand feet, perhaps because we have spent only a tiny fraction of our evolutionary history at such a height. So the dread score goes up again. At the same time, accidents are easy to imagine, given the salience of plane-crash images in movies and in the news media. On a plane, there’s also a chance the suffering might be prolonged, at least compared to a car crash, in which you have little or no warning. Who hasn’t felt a sudden drop in altitude and imagined what it might portend? Minutes might pass between the anticipation of death and the end itself. The crash would also likely kill many people, not just one, further compounding the horror under the dread equation. (The importance of scale helps explain why we are more distressed by a bus accident that kills fifty people than we are by the one hundred people killed individually in cars on the same day.) A plane crash can also be brutally unfair if, for example, it is perpetrated by terrorists who turn a commercial jetliner into a weapon.

Terrorists understand dread. Unpredictable attacks on civilians are an extremely efficient way to create dread. And dread is a good way to get a population agitated. In fact, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism in the past fifty years is fewer than the number killed by food allergies. But terrorism is by nature a mind game.

After 9/11, many thousands of Americans decided to drive instead of fly. Driving felt safer, and, given the spasm of new security rituals in airports, certainly easier. In the months after 9/11, planes carried about 17 percent fewer passengers compared with the same period before the attacks. Meanwhile, the number of miles driven increased about 5 percent, according to government estimates.

But something terrible happened in the name of common sense. In the two years after 9/11, an estimated 2,302
additional
people were likely killed because they drove instead of flew, according to a 2006 study of road accidents in America by three Cornell University professors. The study compared the total number of road fatalities in the years before 9/11 with the period after. It controlled for other things that might explain a spike in accidents—like bad weather. And after all of that, the researchers found 2,302 deaths above and beyond the “normal” tally of car-accident casualties; that’s 2,302 people who, if not for 9/11, almost certainly would have lived. These were the lesser-known, secondary victims of 9/11, casualties of the adjustments we make in times of great uncertainty. “The greatest cost of terrorism may be the public’s response to the attacks rather than the attacks themselves,” the authors note.

In reality, even after 9/11, driving remained much, much more dangerous than flying. The chance of dying on a major domestic commercial flight from 1992 through 2001 was roughly 8 in 100 million, according to a 2003 analysis in
American Scientist
. Driving the same distance as the average flight segment is, by comparison, about sixty-five times riskier.

Hierarchy of Fears

Justin Klabin, a partner in a manufacturing firm in New Jersey, is not a coward. He has ridden motorcycles, played competitive rugby, and fought fires. In 2005, he even tried out for the America’s Cup bobsled team; that is, he willingly hurtled down an iced, steeply banked course at speeds up to 90 mph in a fiberglass sled controlled almost exclusively by gravity. But after 9/11, Klabin decided to stop flying on airplanes. He had watched the Twin Towers collapse from across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and he had responded to Ground Zero with his fire department. That was all he needed to see. “I’d like to get on a plane,” he says. “It would be a lot easier.” But he is convinced that plane travel is just not worth the risk. “Flying is so many things combined—claustrophobia, fear of heights, fear of being out of control,” says Klabin. Given all of those factors, the statistics mean little to him. “Even if the odds are 1 in 15 million, that’s one person. People like me think there’s no reason it can’t happen to me.”

In October 2001, when Klabin and his girlfriend went on a planned trip to Florida, they drove instead of flying. They traveled more than a thousand miles in his pickup truck. On the way back, at the end of a long day of driving, they stopped in South Carolina. As Klabin pulled the truck into a parking space, he heard a loud pop. The tie-rod, which connects the wheel to the steering column, had snapped. Both front tires were turned in toward each other, like snowplowing skis. The truck could not be driven a foot farther. Staring at the inverted tires, Klabin started laughing at himself. Here he was trying to be safe by driving instead of flying. But had the rod snapped just a few minutes earlier, when they were on the highway, the truck would have been uncontrollable at 80 mph. “There’s no question we would have been dead,” he says.

After his near miss, Klabin decided to do something radical. He took flying lessons. He thought he might feel better about flying if he understood the mechanics. So he went up in a Cessna plane (which is far more dangerous than a commercial jet). Surprisingly, he felt absolutely fine. He wasn’t scared!

Why wasn’t Klabin terrified? People who drive because they fear flying are not really looking for physical safety, explains Tom Bunn, a former commercial airline pilot who now counsels people with a fear of flying. “What they’re looking for is emotional safety.”