Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [100]
When the Boeing 737 sliced into the bridge span next to him at 4:01 P. M., Olian didn’t even see it. Encased in his snow-covered truck, he didn’t hear or feel the crash. It was only when the car in front of him stopped that Olian had any indication that something strange had happened. The driver got out and walked back to his truck. Olian rolled down his window, and the man’s shouts jangled through the snowbound quiet.
“Did you see that?”
“What’s that?”
“A plane! A plane just crashed into the river!” the man screamed.
Olian dismissed him. “I thought, ‘This guy is nuts.’ All I wanted to do was to get out of there.”
But the man kept yelling. “I think that plane might explode!”
“So get in your car and go!” Olian told him, rolling up his window.
The man did as he was told. But as Olian started to follow him, he noticed that the other cars were behaving oddly too. “It was as if you’d dropped food into the middle of an anthill and all of a sudden the ants started to move in weird ways. So I thought, ‘Maybe that guy was right.’” Without thinking too much about what he was doing or how he would start his truck again, Olian eased over to the shoulder and parked. If a plane had gone down without him even noticing, he thought, it must have been a small private plane. “Well, maybe I could see what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Or maybe somebody needs help, maybe I could do something—some nominal thing, and it will be interesting.”
“This Is Not a Small Plane”
What makes a person risk his or her life to save someone else? It’s one thing to carry someone’s briefcase as you evacuate a burning building, or to help a frightened stranger to her feet. Small acts of kindness don’t cost very much, and they have clear evolutionary value, as we’ve seen. But how do we explain truly irrational acts of generosity? Heroism, much as we revere it, is rather incomprehensible. Isn’t it exactly the kind of behavior that should get naturally selected for extinction?
This chapter is about exceptional grace. We have already dissected exceptional failure, known as panic. And we’ve explored the far more common default behavior called paralysis. But for almost every disaster, there is a hero. Sometimes there are hundreds. The following is not a celebration of heroes. That is the topic of many other worthy books. This chapter is an attempt to understand, not applaud; to look the hero straight in the eye and ask: what the hell were you thinking?
As Olian jogged down toward the river, he could make out a dozen other people, drivers like him who’d emerged to investigate. They were clustered on the riverbank tying scarves and jumper cables together, trying to make a lifeline. In the water, about seventy-five to a hundred yards from shore, Olian saw the tail section of a passenger jet. “My first thought was, this is not a small plane,” he remembers. “My second thought was, where is the rest of it?”
As he got closer, Olian saw something else. Six people were in the water, floating amid the pieces of airplane, trying to keep their heads above the slush. They were the passengers. Olian realized immediately that there was no obvious way to save them. The river was frozen over, so no boat could get through. The plane had shattered the ice between it and the shore, making it equally impossible to walk to safety. And the snowstorm was so bad that Olian couldn’t imagine a helicopter making it out. As he approached the river, he could hear the survivors’ calls for help. Their cries bounced across the frozen landscape. “You knew they knew they were in trouble,” Olian says. But the bystanders on the river and on the bridge above could only watch.
As he reached the water, Olian didn’t stop to talk with the people gathered there. He didn’t take off his steel-toed boots or remove the five pounds