Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [1]
After helping rebuild Halifax, Prince moved to New York City to study sociology. For his PhD dissertation at Columbia University, he deconstructed the Halifax explosion. “Catastrophe and Social Change,” published in 1920, was the first systematic analysis of human behavior in a disaster. “Life becomes like molten metal,” he wrote. “Old customs crumble, and instability rules.”
What makes Prince’s work so engaging is his optimism. Despite his funereal obsessions, he saw disasters as opportunities—not just, as he put it, “a series of vicissitudes mercifully ending one day in final cataclysm.” He was a minister, but he was clearly enchanted by industry. The horrific explosion had, in the end, “blown Halifax into the 20th century,” forcing many changes that were for the better. His thesis opened with a quote from St. Augustine: “This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.”
After Prince’s death, the field of human behavior in disasters would languish. Then with the onset of the cold war and a new host of anxieties about how the masses might respond to nuclear attacks, it would come back to life. After the fall of communism, it would stagnate again—until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Prince seemed to anticipate the temptation for people to avert their eyes. “This little volume on Halifax is offered as a beginning,” he wrote. Don’t let it be the end, he pleaded. “Knowledge will grow scientific only after the most faithful examination of many catastrophes.” The remainder of the century would prove rich with material.
Most of us have imagined what it might be like to experience a plane crash or a fire or an earthquake. We have ideas about what we might do or fail to do, how it might feel for our hearts to pound in our chests, whom we might call in the final moments, and whether we might be suddenly compelled to seize the hand of the businessman sitting in the window seat. We have fears that we admit to openly and ones that we never discuss. We carry around this half-completed sentence, filling in different scenarios depending on the anxiety of the times: I wonder what I would do if…
Think for a moment about the narratives we know by heart. When I say the word disaster, many of us think of panic, hysterical crowds, and a kind of every-man-for-himself brutality; an orgy of destruction interrupted only by the civilizing influence of professional rescuers. Yet all evidence from Prince until today belies this script. Reality is a lot more interesting—and hopeful.
What Prince discovered in Halifax was that our disaster personalities can be quite different from the ones we expect to meet. But that doesn’t mean they are unknowable. It just means we haven’t been looking in the right places.
The Things Survivors Wish You Knew
This book came about unexpectedly. In 2004, as a reporter working on Time magazine’s coverage of the third anniversary of 9/11, I decided to check in with some of the people who had survived the attacks. I wondered how they were doing. Unlike many of the families of the victims, the survivors had kept to themselves, for the most part. They felt so lucky—or guilty or scarred—that they hadn’t wanted to make too much noise. But there were tens of thousands of these survivors out there, people who had gone to work in a skyscraper one morning and then spent hours fighting to get out of it. I was curious to hear what had happened to their lives.
I got in touch with the World Trade Center Survivors’ Network, one of the first and largest support groups, and they invited me to sit in on one of their regular meetings. They met in a fluorescent-lit office space, high above the racket of Times Square. As I rode up in the elevator one evening, I prepared myself for an exchange of grief. After 9/11, I had heard so many stories. Every widow, firefighter, and victim had a