Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [116]
On 9/11, between songs, Rescorla called his wife. “Stop crying,” he said. “I have to get these people out safely. If something should happen to me, I want you to know I’ve never been happier. You made my life.”
Moments later, Rescorla had successfully evacuated the vast majority of Morgan Stanley employees out of the burning tower. Then he turned around. He was last seen on the tenth floor, heading upward, shortly before the tower collapsed. Rescorla had his kairos moment. His remains have never been found.
People who knew Rescorla well knew he would not have left the towers until everyone else was out. “When the buildings went down, I never thought for a second that he wasn’t inside,” says Engel, the facilities manager. “Rick would want to go out in a blaze of glory.” No one knows exactly what happened, but Engel believes that Rescorla heard about a few people who had been left behind. In particular, a Morgan Stanley senior vice president had not left his office. The executive was last seen talking on the phone, even as everyone else evacuated. “Knowing Rick,” says Engel, “he’d go up and coldcock him and carry him over his shoulder.”
Self-sufficiency was a religion for Rescorla. He once told a friend that every man should be able to be sent outside naked with nothing on him. By the end of the day, the man should be clothed and fed. By the end of the week, he should own a horse. And by the end of the year, he should have a business and a savings account.
Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only thirteen Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe.
Devolution
When people believe that survival is negotiable, they can be wonderfully creative. All it takes is the audacity to imagine that our behavior matters. It can happen in a moment, with a phone call or an idea muttered aloud.
In 1996, after a flood wiped out Parsons, West Virginia, for the second time in eleven years, Katie Little called up a couple of her friends and told them they needed to make some money. The three women, all in their eighties, started with a bake sale on the first Friday of every month, held at the local bank. Then they held gospel sings. They auctioned off a pig named Muddy Waters. At the end of the year, the women, known to all by then as “the cookie ladies,” had $40,000, which they leveraged to get $1.5 million in state money. Then they used it to build a floodwall to protect their town, which it did.
“What I’ve always found,” says James Lee Witt, FEMA director from 1993 to 2000, and the man who told me this story, “is that people will respond to meet a need in a crisis if they know what to do. You give people the opportunity to be part of something that will make a difference, and they will step up.”
Why aren’t there more evacuation drills and pig auctions? To understand how a country built on self-sufficiency could become so vulnerable, it helps to consider why people with the best of intentions miss opportunities to do better. In 2004, New York City passed Local Law 26, making the biggest changes to the building code in over thirty years. The new rules require more training for each building’s fire-safety director and more elaborate emergency plans. But the rules still do not include serious evacuation drills like the ones run by Rescorla. “Unfortunately, this is one aspect where we met with some obstacles,” says Captain Joseph Evangelista, who oversees planning for the Fire Department