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How to survive a disaster
What makes one person a survivor and another a victim of the same disaster? Amanda Ripley, who has spent seven years researching her new book on how people respond to extreme events, believes that we must take responsibility ? and action ? if we want to stay alive when bad things happen
Robert Crampton
On September 11, 2001, Amanda Ripley was a 27-year-old reporter living on the Upper West Side in New York City and working for Time magazine. ?I got a call after the first plane,? she says. ?and then after the attacks, I covered the victims, the survivors, the city. It became a kind of endless story. Every single family member had a story that you would not believe, every one. Conversations with their husband trapped on the 90th floor on his cell phone realising he?s gonna die.? There came a point, she says, when she had to stop doing 9/11 stories for a while. ?You can?t write well unless you feel it, and at a certain point I had to stop feeling it.?
But she didn?t stop thinking about it. She became interested in a study of human behaviour in the twin towers. That led her to further reporting on other disasters, notably the effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005, and that led to research into tragedies: fires; explosions; airplane crashes; hostage dramas. The end result is a fascinating book, The Unthinkable: who survives when disaster strikes ? and why.
Ripley, now 34, has not directly been involved in a disaster herself. ?I?ve led a very charmed life. I tend to show up after things have happened. But I did a lot of stories about terrible things happening to people for no good reason, and as a coping mechanism, I began to deconstruct what happened. I found behaviour was very similar in lots of disasters. And in many ways it was better than we expect.?
The Unthinkable is part study of the science of reaction to extreme fear, part indictment of the US government?s response to the terrorist threat, part call to arms. The call in question is for the individual to make an assessment of the risks we face and then to develop a strategy to help ourselves, rather than rely on others, should the need arise. ?If you speak to disaster experts they only talk about what the government should be doing,? says Ripley. ?That?s a mistake. Regular people can have an enormous impact on their own survival chances. The problem is: people think it won?t happen to them and, if it does, they?re screwed. It?s really lame if you think about it. We all take ourselves very seriously in other ways.
?We vastly underestimate our survival chances,? she says. ?Most serious plane accidents are survivable, and most people don?t know that. They think if the plane goes down that?s it for them. There?s good evidence people die because of that mentality.?
Obviously, Ripley isn?t talking about a Lockerbie or any other high-altitude catastrophe. Rather, she cites a collision between two planes at Tenerife airport in 1977, when a KLM jet hit a Pan Am 747 awaiting take-off. Everyone on the KLM jet died instantly; many on the Pan Am flight had, however, survived the initial impact, and as it turned out they had a full minute in which to escape before the plane became engulfed in fire. Only 70 people got out, the other 326 on board died, and yet in tests the entire plane could be evacuated in 90 seconds. In another runway fire, at Manchester airport in 1985, 55 passengers died, despite there being a five-minute interval between the plane stopping and the fire preventing further rescue.
What happens in incidents such as the one at Tenerife, argues Ripley, is that some (not all) people go into a kind of paralysis, unable to speak or move, their minds curiously blank. We learn that the classic response to fear is flight or fight, but another F is equally likely: freeze. Restrained animals will often fight frantically for several seconds, and then freeze. As a strategy in the wild, this has its merits: predators will sometimes avoid limp, motionless prey, fearing disease. As a strategy in a stricken aircraft, a burning office block or a sinking ship, playing dead is no use at all.
People don?t get out even when they can, and that is partly because they think they can?t, partly because they don?t know what to do, and partly because of clusters of nuclei deep in their brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is primitive and ancient. It does not totally control an animal?s response to extreme fear (you can override it, as Ripley explains), but it has the first say.
One of the main ways the amygdala responds to a fear input is to flood the body with cortisol and adrenaline. This boosts the gross motor muscles, useful for doing battle with another caveman or scarpering from a sabre-toothed tiger, less handy when you have to strap on a fiddly lifejacket or open an unfamiliar hatch, because both hormones impair complex thinking. Given time, higher reasoning functions will assert themselves, but in an emergency, by definition, time is what you don?t have.
?Fear makes you better at some things and worse at others,? says Ripley. ?One thing you?re worse at, always, is making decisions about things you are not familiar with. People have trouble unbuckling seatbelts, for instance. You lose cognitive ability.? On the flight that caught fire in Manchester, the woman nearest the door wasted seconds repeatedly yanking her arm-rest in the belief it was the door handle. Workers in the Trade Centre milled about for minutes, turning off their computers, gathering their belongings, looking for staircases they had never used.
The key to short-circuiting the paralysis response, Ripley found, is familiarity and knowledge, or even better, full-on training. Freezing has never been noted in airline crew members, as opposed to passengers. They are familiar with the plane and are trained for an emergency. ?The brain?s got to have options, an alternative script,? she says. ?Even a tiny amount of knowledge can make a big difference.?
She thinks airports should have simulators where you can practise evacuating a plane. And she cites the example of Tilly Smith, the English schoolgirl who recognised the signs of impending disaster in Phuket in 2004 because she?d just done tsunamis at school. The beach Tilly?s family was on was evacuated in time.
One of the survivors of the Tenerife crash, 65-year-old Paul Heck, had studied the emergency exits before take-off. He had a plan if things went wrong. ?It feels ridiculous, but if you can overcome the peer pressure not to look at the safety card, there is evidence it helps you,? says Ripley. Part of the problem at the moment, she says, is precautionary planning is seen as ?paranoid, hysterical, neurotic. It needs to be rebranded in a progressive way, as your having a responsibility to take care of yourself.?
Ripley does not want to say ?in all disasters if people had done something differently they?d have survived. The Trade Centre, for instance, was mostly luck [where you were in relation to the impact]. And yet for some people their behaviour mattered: they?d been told to go to the roof, but they should have been trained to go down.? Rick Rescorla, head of security at Morgan Stanley, was one of the heroes of 9/11. ?He?d always been a real hard-ass about fire drills; he?d get up on a table with a bullhorn and make all these investment bankers leave. And after 9/11, everyone says those drills he?d made them do helped them. You don?t want to have to think in a disaster.? Rescorla died in the towers, one of only 13 (out of almost 3,000) Morgan Stanley employees to perish.
I met Ripley in Paris, where she and her husband were attending a reunion of his business school class. Checking into her hotel the previous night, did she recce the exits? ?I did, yes. And I take the stairs every time, even at work where we?re on the sixth floor.? She doesn?t come across as neurotic. Indeed, she seems a self-possessed, self-sufficient individual, a good advert for her belief that, ?Resilience in general is a great trait to work on. It makes people stronger, healthier, more confident, more connected to their community.?
She puts up with a fair bit of teasing, she says. ?There?s a price to pay. I?m the only one who goes out for fire drills in the Time bureau too. Well, I go out, and the mail guy goes out and our colleagues are inside rolling their eyes at us. I finally asked the mail guy, ?Vernon, I know why I come out here ? I know too many firefighters ? but why do you come out here?? And Vernon said, ?It?s probably because I?m in the military. I was in Iraq last year.??
Indeed, one thing that leaps off the pages of Ripley?s book is the advantages of military training in an emergency. An astonishing number of the survivors of disasters (and the heroes, like Rescorla, decorated in Vietnam) she describes are veterans. ?Hard physical training gives you confidence,? she says, ?and your attitude about your own ability to impact your destiny not only improves your chances of getting out, but vastly improves your chances of recovering well, of not having post-traumatic stress disorder. The other point about military training is it makes you very proactive. You don?t think about what?s happening, you think about what you are going to do.?
She cites the example of Joe Stiley, a business executive trapped in the sinking wreckage of Boeing 737 in the freezing Potomac river in 1982. Even as the plane sank, Stiley made a plan and enacted it, freeing his broken leg, his seatbelt, his secretary?s trapped foot (by breaking it), guiding them both to the surface. A former Navy pilot, Stiley told Ripley his training saved his life. ?You don?t sit there wondering what to do, you do it.? Ripley isn?t arguing for the draft, but she does think civilians can learn valuable lessons from the military?s creed of self-reliance. ?No one thinks a Marine is silly.?
In some ways, however, she finds the militarisation of American society disturbing, and says it?s ironic that a right-wing government employing the rhetoric of individual freedom and self-sufficiency should ?respond to 9/11 by telling the American people to go shopping. There was a great opportunity there to frame individual resilience as patriotic, and it was lost. It?s easier for a government to say, ?We bought six command centres that cost $800,000 each? rather than, ?We?ve gone into the neighbourhoods and talked to people.??
The terrorist threat is generally low-tech, but the romance with high-tech means, ?If you go to a Homeland Security expo it?s all tanks and Smith & Wesson selling guns. Northrop Grumman [suppliers of ships, planes and electronic systems to the US military] is now into homeland security in a big way.? She covered a security convention in Washington recently, and ?there was one guy there with these emergency food and water packs ? I loved that guy! These conventions should be about getting people to take their own security seriously rather than police departments buying tanks.?
Part of the explanation for the technological, as opposed to the psychological, response to threat is based on ignorance about how people actually behave in disasters. One thing they very rarely do, for instance, is panic. The descent from the twin towers was marked by calmness and patience, the able-bodied helping the less fit, everyone standing helpfully aside for the firefighters. There is little evidence of the Hollywood archetypes, the screaming woman losing control, the vicious man shoving others aside.
?It?s incredibly toxic, this belief that people will misbehave,? says Ripley. ?Why would we? What?s your interest? Your interest is to survive and except in rare cases that means treating other people well. The best friend you?re going to have in a disaster is a stranger.? Like other animals (chimpanzees for example), human beings tend to group together in a crisis, often putting themselves at risk to stay close to another person, not necessarily a relative or friend. Existing hierarchies (again, other animals are the same) become more important in emergencies. ?In the twin towers, people looked to their boss. It?d be helpful if the boss knew that in advance.?
As part of her research, Ripley visited the ?burn tower? at Kansas City Fire Department, where firefighters practise their drills. ?You?re in full gear, and they fill the room with smoke. You literally cannot see a thing, it?s like a blindfold. You become very attached to the person you?re with. You also think it might be useful to know where the stairs are.? When New Orleans was inundated following Katrina, stories circulated of the depravity supposedly engulfing evacuees at the city?s Superdome. ?The police chief went on Oprah and said babies were getting raped,? recalls Ripley. It wasn?t true, nor were most of the stories, but, ?They got traction because they fitted into an existing narrative that the public will go crazy and do horrible anti-social things in disasters.?
If those rumours fitted into a right-wing (not to mention racist) agenda, another part of Katrina mythology owes more to a leftish, liberal mindset in the media. This is the perception that the poor died for lack of transport while the rich got out of town. ?The victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor and black, taking into account this was a disproportionately black and poor city to start with,? says Ripley. ?They were disproportionately elderly. And the number one reason people cited for not leaving town was not the lack of a car, but the fact that there had been plenty of hurricane warnings before and the predicted devastation had not occurred.?
Psychologists call this ?the bias to normalcy?. In making a judgment, people rate their own personal experience and emotion above the advice of experts. ?Normally this is fine,? says Ripley, ?but living in a dense city on water, you need to rely more on the data.? Ripley recognises this tension in her argument. She wants more self-reliance but she thinks governments ?need to step in where the brain?s risk analysis is not very good?. This would mean acquainting people with the risks of living in a tsunami inundation zone, or on a flood plain, or with a swimming pool a toddler can access, or indeed on the San Andreas Fault. ?Everyone knows there?s going to be a huge earthquake in San Francisco more or less any day now.?
In her own life, particularly regarding her one-year-old boy, Ripley ?finds it very comforting to go to the facts when I can, knowing with a child you?re going to be a bit loopy?. On balance, ?doing this book has made me a little less anxious about risk?. She?s conscientious about smoke detectors, and she drives less than she used to. ?People are protective about the wrong things, they?re more worried about their kid getting kidnapped than them being in a car accident. Or they worry about GM foods while driving around on cell phones.?
Despite its title and its subject matter, The Unthinkable is an optimistic book, and its author is an optimistic woman. ?I?m not fear-mongering. That niche is filled. I?m saying the brain is magnificent. With something to focus on and a little practice, it can do amazing things. We accept that you can get better at, say, math, yet survival skills we think you?re just born with or you?re not, and it?s almost never the case.?
The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley is published by Arrow on July 3
What makes one person a survivor and another a victim of the same disaster? Amanda Ripley, who has spent seven years researching her new book on how people respond to extreme events, believes that we must take responsibility ? and action ? if we want to stay alive when bad things happen
Robert Crampton
On September 11, 2001, Amanda Ripley was a 27-year-old reporter living on the Upper West Side in New York City and working for Time magazine. ?I got a call after the first plane,? she says. ?and then after the attacks, I covered the victims, the survivors, the city. It became a kind of endless story. Every single family member had a story that you would not believe, every one. Conversations with their husband trapped on the 90th floor on his cell phone realising he?s gonna die.? There came a point, she says, when she had to stop doing 9/11 stories for a while. ?You can?t write well unless you feel it, and at a certain point I had to stop feeling it.?
But she didn?t stop thinking about it. She became interested in a study of human behaviour in the twin towers. That led her to further reporting on other disasters, notably the effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans in 2005, and that led to research into tragedies: fires; explosions; airplane crashes; hostage dramas. The end result is a fascinating book, The Unthinkable: who survives when disaster strikes ? and why.
Ripley, now 34, has not directly been involved in a disaster herself. ?I?ve led a very charmed life. I tend to show up after things have happened. But I did a lot of stories about terrible things happening to people for no good reason, and as a coping mechanism, I began to deconstruct what happened. I found behaviour was very similar in lots of disasters. And in many ways it was better than we expect.?
The Unthinkable is part study of the science of reaction to extreme fear, part indictment of the US government?s response to the terrorist threat, part call to arms. The call in question is for the individual to make an assessment of the risks we face and then to develop a strategy to help ourselves, rather than rely on others, should the need arise. ?If you speak to disaster experts they only talk about what the government should be doing,? says Ripley. ?That?s a mistake. Regular people can have an enormous impact on their own survival chances. The problem is: people think it won?t happen to them and, if it does, they?re screwed. It?s really lame if you think about it. We all take ourselves very seriously in other ways.
?We vastly underestimate our survival chances,? she says. ?Most serious plane accidents are survivable, and most people don?t know that. They think if the plane goes down that?s it for them. There?s good evidence people die because of that mentality.?
Obviously, Ripley isn?t talking about a Lockerbie or any other high-altitude catastrophe. Rather, she cites a collision between two planes at Tenerife airport in 1977, when a KLM jet hit a Pan Am 747 awaiting take-off. Everyone on the KLM jet died instantly; many on the Pan Am flight had, however, survived the initial impact, and as it turned out they had a full minute in which to escape before the plane became engulfed in fire. Only 70 people got out, the other 326 on board died, and yet in tests the entire plane could be evacuated in 90 seconds. In another runway fire, at Manchester airport in 1985, 55 passengers died, despite there being a five-minute interval between the plane stopping and the fire preventing further rescue.
What happens in incidents such as the one at Tenerife, argues Ripley, is that some (not all) people go into a kind of paralysis, unable to speak or move, their minds curiously blank. We learn that the classic response to fear is flight or fight, but another F is equally likely: freeze. Restrained animals will often fight frantically for several seconds, and then freeze. As a strategy in the wild, this has its merits: predators will sometimes avoid limp, motionless prey, fearing disease. As a strategy in a stricken aircraft, a burning office block or a sinking ship, playing dead is no use at all.
People don?t get out even when they can, and that is partly because they think they can?t, partly because they don?t know what to do, and partly because of clusters of nuclei deep in their brain called the amygdala. The amygdala is primitive and ancient. It does not totally control an animal?s response to extreme fear (you can override it, as Ripley explains), but it has the first say.
One of the main ways the amygdala responds to a fear input is to flood the body with cortisol and adrenaline. This boosts the gross motor muscles, useful for doing battle with another caveman or scarpering from a sabre-toothed tiger, less handy when you have to strap on a fiddly lifejacket or open an unfamiliar hatch, because both hormones impair complex thinking. Given time, higher reasoning functions will assert themselves, but in an emergency, by definition, time is what you don?t have.
?Fear makes you better at some things and worse at others,? says Ripley. ?One thing you?re worse at, always, is making decisions about things you are not familiar with. People have trouble unbuckling seatbelts, for instance. You lose cognitive ability.? On the flight that caught fire in Manchester, the woman nearest the door wasted seconds repeatedly yanking her arm-rest in the belief it was the door handle. Workers in the Trade Centre milled about for minutes, turning off their computers, gathering their belongings, looking for staircases they had never used.
The key to short-circuiting the paralysis response, Ripley found, is familiarity and knowledge, or even better, full-on training. Freezing has never been noted in airline crew members, as opposed to passengers. They are familiar with the plane and are trained for an emergency. ?The brain?s got to have options, an alternative script,? she says. ?Even a tiny amount of knowledge can make a big difference.?
She thinks airports should have simulators where you can practise evacuating a plane. And she cites the example of Tilly Smith, the English schoolgirl who recognised the signs of impending disaster in Phuket in 2004 because she?d just done tsunamis at school. The beach Tilly?s family was on was evacuated in time.
One of the survivors of the Tenerife crash, 65-year-old Paul Heck, had studied the emergency exits before take-off. He had a plan if things went wrong. ?It feels ridiculous, but if you can overcome the peer pressure not to look at the safety card, there is evidence it helps you,? says Ripley. Part of the problem at the moment, she says, is precautionary planning is seen as ?paranoid, hysterical, neurotic. It needs to be rebranded in a progressive way, as your having a responsibility to take care of yourself.?
Ripley does not want to say ?in all disasters if people had done something differently they?d have survived. The Trade Centre, for instance, was mostly luck [where you were in relation to the impact]. And yet for some people their behaviour mattered: they?d been told to go to the roof, but they should have been trained to go down.? Rick Rescorla, head of security at Morgan Stanley, was one of the heroes of 9/11. ?He?d always been a real hard-ass about fire drills; he?d get up on a table with a bullhorn and make all these investment bankers leave. And after 9/11, everyone says those drills he?d made them do helped them. You don?t want to have to think in a disaster.? Rescorla died in the towers, one of only 13 (out of almost 3,000) Morgan Stanley employees to perish.
I met Ripley in Paris, where she and her husband were attending a reunion of his business school class. Checking into her hotel the previous night, did she recce the exits? ?I did, yes. And I take the stairs every time, even at work where we?re on the sixth floor.? She doesn?t come across as neurotic. Indeed, she seems a self-possessed, self-sufficient individual, a good advert for her belief that, ?Resilience in general is a great trait to work on. It makes people stronger, healthier, more confident, more connected to their community.?
She puts up with a fair bit of teasing, she says. ?There?s a price to pay. I?m the only one who goes out for fire drills in the Time bureau too. Well, I go out, and the mail guy goes out and our colleagues are inside rolling their eyes at us. I finally asked the mail guy, ?Vernon, I know why I come out here ? I know too many firefighters ? but why do you come out here?? And Vernon said, ?It?s probably because I?m in the military. I was in Iraq last year.??
Indeed, one thing that leaps off the pages of Ripley?s book is the advantages of military training in an emergency. An astonishing number of the survivors of disasters (and the heroes, like Rescorla, decorated in Vietnam) she describes are veterans. ?Hard physical training gives you confidence,? she says, ?and your attitude about your own ability to impact your destiny not only improves your chances of getting out, but vastly improves your chances of recovering well, of not having post-traumatic stress disorder. The other point about military training is it makes you very proactive. You don?t think about what?s happening, you think about what you are going to do.?
She cites the example of Joe Stiley, a business executive trapped in the sinking wreckage of Boeing 737 in the freezing Potomac river in 1982. Even as the plane sank, Stiley made a plan and enacted it, freeing his broken leg, his seatbelt, his secretary?s trapped foot (by breaking it), guiding them both to the surface. A former Navy pilot, Stiley told Ripley his training saved his life. ?You don?t sit there wondering what to do, you do it.? Ripley isn?t arguing for the draft, but she does think civilians can learn valuable lessons from the military?s creed of self-reliance. ?No one thinks a Marine is silly.?
In some ways, however, she finds the militarisation of American society disturbing, and says it?s ironic that a right-wing government employing the rhetoric of individual freedom and self-sufficiency should ?respond to 9/11 by telling the American people to go shopping. There was a great opportunity there to frame individual resilience as patriotic, and it was lost. It?s easier for a government to say, ?We bought six command centres that cost $800,000 each? rather than, ?We?ve gone into the neighbourhoods and talked to people.??
The terrorist threat is generally low-tech, but the romance with high-tech means, ?If you go to a Homeland Security expo it?s all tanks and Smith & Wesson selling guns. Northrop Grumman [suppliers of ships, planes and electronic systems to the US military] is now into homeland security in a big way.? She covered a security convention in Washington recently, and ?there was one guy there with these emergency food and water packs ? I loved that guy! These conventions should be about getting people to take their own security seriously rather than police departments buying tanks.?
Part of the explanation for the technological, as opposed to the psychological, response to threat is based on ignorance about how people actually behave in disasters. One thing they very rarely do, for instance, is panic. The descent from the twin towers was marked by calmness and patience, the able-bodied helping the less fit, everyone standing helpfully aside for the firefighters. There is little evidence of the Hollywood archetypes, the screaming woman losing control, the vicious man shoving others aside.
?It?s incredibly toxic, this belief that people will misbehave,? says Ripley. ?Why would we? What?s your interest? Your interest is to survive and except in rare cases that means treating other people well. The best friend you?re going to have in a disaster is a stranger.? Like other animals (chimpanzees for example), human beings tend to group together in a crisis, often putting themselves at risk to stay close to another person, not necessarily a relative or friend. Existing hierarchies (again, other animals are the same) become more important in emergencies. ?In the twin towers, people looked to their boss. It?d be helpful if the boss knew that in advance.?
As part of her research, Ripley visited the ?burn tower? at Kansas City Fire Department, where firefighters practise their drills. ?You?re in full gear, and they fill the room with smoke. You literally cannot see a thing, it?s like a blindfold. You become very attached to the person you?re with. You also think it might be useful to know where the stairs are.? When New Orleans was inundated following Katrina, stories circulated of the depravity supposedly engulfing evacuees at the city?s Superdome. ?The police chief went on Oprah and said babies were getting raped,? recalls Ripley. It wasn?t true, nor were most of the stories, but, ?They got traction because they fitted into an existing narrative that the public will go crazy and do horrible anti-social things in disasters.?
If those rumours fitted into a right-wing (not to mention racist) agenda, another part of Katrina mythology owes more to a leftish, liberal mindset in the media. This is the perception that the poor died for lack of transport while the rich got out of town. ?The victims of Katrina were not disproportionately poor and black, taking into account this was a disproportionately black and poor city to start with,? says Ripley. ?They were disproportionately elderly. And the number one reason people cited for not leaving town was not the lack of a car, but the fact that there had been plenty of hurricane warnings before and the predicted devastation had not occurred.?
Psychologists call this ?the bias to normalcy?. In making a judgment, people rate their own personal experience and emotion above the advice of experts. ?Normally this is fine,? says Ripley, ?but living in a dense city on water, you need to rely more on the data.? Ripley recognises this tension in her argument. She wants more self-reliance but she thinks governments ?need to step in where the brain?s risk analysis is not very good?. This would mean acquainting people with the risks of living in a tsunami inundation zone, or on a flood plain, or with a swimming pool a toddler can access, or indeed on the San Andreas Fault. ?Everyone knows there?s going to be a huge earthquake in San Francisco more or less any day now.?
In her own life, particularly regarding her one-year-old boy, Ripley ?finds it very comforting to go to the facts when I can, knowing with a child you?re going to be a bit loopy?. On balance, ?doing this book has made me a little less anxious about risk?. She?s conscientious about smoke detectors, and she drives less than she used to. ?People are protective about the wrong things, they?re more worried about their kid getting kidnapped than them being in a car accident. Or they worry about GM foods while driving around on cell phones.?
Despite its title and its subject matter, The Unthinkable is an optimistic book, and its author is an optimistic woman. ?I?m not fear-mongering. That niche is filled. I?m saying the brain is magnificent. With something to focus on and a little practice, it can do amazing things. We accept that you can get better at, say, math, yet survival skills we think you?re just born with or you?re not, and it?s almost never the case.?
The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley is published by Arrow on July 3
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