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
