Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [11]
Finally, Zedeño headed into the stairwell. She was taking action, the last stage in the process. But her journey had only just begun. She would cycle through the phases of “disaster think” over and over. Disbelief and deliberation would continue to stall her descent. “I never found myself in a hurry,” she says. “It’s weird because the sound, the way the building shook, should have kept me going fast. But it was almost as if I put the sound away in my mind.”
On average, the estimated 15,410 people who got out of the Trade Center took about a minute to make it down each floor, the NIST findings show. A minute may not sound like a long time, but it was shocking to people who design and build tall buildings. It was twice as long as the standard engineering codes had predicted—and the buildings were less than half full. In a 110-story building, a minute per floor is just too slow.
Most of the people who died on 9/11 had no choices. They were above the impact zone of the planes and could not find a way out. Of the thousands who had access to open stairwells and time to use them, all but about 135 did manage to escape, the NIST report found. But the most important finding from the Trade Center evacuation is what did not happen. The attacks took place on the same day as the mayoral election in New York City. Many people had stopped at the polls to vote and were late to work. Others had taken their children into school for the first day of classes. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange does not open until 9:30 A.M., so the trading firms were not fully staffed yet. And the Trade Center’s visiting platform did not open to tourists until 9:30 A.M.
The fires caused by the 9/11 attacks were the deadliest in American history, killing 2,666 people. Had the buildings been full that morning, the slow evacuation would have translated into more than five times the casualties. It’s hard to imagine that kind of body count. This was already an unprecedented tragedy for the United States, after all. But had the attacks happened at a different time, at least fourteen thousand people would have been killed, according to NIST’s conservative estimates based on the rate of movement on 9/11. And the exasperating crawl of the evacuation would have been a topic of endless public debate.
Since the first skyscraper was built in 1885 in Chicago, these monuments to human engineering have been designed without much consideration for how human beings actually behave. The people who work in skyscrapers have never been required to undergo regular full-evacuation drills, which could dramatically improve their escape times. When they do have drills, most people see them as a waste of time. They overestimate how well their minds will perform in a real crisis. When the alarm goes off, they know they are being interrupted and inconvenienced, but they don’t necessarily know how much they might one day appreciate the remedial help.
When she gives tours of Ground Zero, the number one question Zedeño gets asked is, How did people behave in the stairwell? Were people panicking? No one expects the answer they get. “Everybody was very calm, very calm,” Zedeño tells them. Only one woman got hysterical—screaming and hyperventilating in the staircase. Zedeño gives her the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t know what this woman saw,” she says. The woman was walking with a man who had blood on his forehead. The man kept repeating, “We were the lucky ones, we were the lucky ones.” Zedeño and the rest of the crowd moved to the side in the narrow stairway so the two of them could go ahead.
Crowds generally become very quiet and docile in a true disaster. Of course, on 9/11, no one in the stairways expected the towers to collapse. We’ll never know