Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [122]
Disaster experts think about disasters for a living, but they don’t feel powerless. They do tiny things to give their brains shortcuts in the unlikely event they need them. FAA human factor analysts always look for their nearest exit when they board planes, for example. And they read the safety briefing cards that most people think are useless. They do this because each plane model is different, and they know they may become functionally retarded in a plane crash.
Every time Robyn Gershon, who is leading a study of the World Trade Center evacuation, checks into a hotel, she takes the stairs down from her room. She knows that most hotel stairs take a confusing path through back rooms and empty onto unexpected streets. (I once did this in a hotel in Manhattan and ended up in the kitchen. A supervisor, assuming I was an employee leaving for a break, asked to search my bag. Apparently not very many guests took the stairs.)
Once a disaster begins, people who have some familiarity with their disaster personalities have an advantage. First, they know that if something does go terribly wrong, the odds favor their survival. Just knowing there is hope can help people muster the presence of mind to push past denial and deliberation and act. “The important thing is to recognize that you need to get out. Everything you’ve done to prepare yourself will help you,” says Nora Marshall, who has spent twenty-one years studying survival factors at the National Transportation Safety Board. Knowledge also helps to self-correct. Now that you know you are likely to delay evacuating or to waste time grabbing your carry-on bags from the overhead bin, you have a chance to override your own worst instincts. Above all, it is essential to take the initiative—to remember that you and your neighbors must save yourselves. Now that you have glimpsed the survival arc, you might have a better chance of finding the shortcuts.
Teddy Bears and Wheelchairs
An old mill town called Samoa, 250 miles north of San Francisco, held the first tsunami evacuation drill in the history of California—on June 28, 2007. Samoa is located on 185 acres, right on the water. It has a town square and a restaurant, but it’s not fancy. Samoa’s one hundred houses were built by a logging company that used to own the town. Today, the logging company is gone, but Samoa’s residents are still there, working in a nearby pulp mill as well as in construction and other service jobs.
Troy Nicolini is a National Weather Service meteorologist and a beauty salon owner in the area. Since the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, he has been working on developing evacuation routes in at-risk areas like Samoa. But it occurred to him that it might make sense to ask regular people to tell him where the evacuation-route signs should be. So he made the signs portable for the time being and started planning a drill. The process was made much easier because Nicolini didn’t have to worry about asking many property owners for permission to have people traipsing through their land. Samoa is one of the few towns in America that is still owned by a private company. The current owner is Danco, a construction and development company. And the company agreed to help with the drill. “We could just do whatever we wanted without having to worry about anything,” Nicolini says. With that, Samoa became one of the first towns in America to take responsibility for improving its citizens’ performance in a disaster. It’s ironic that it was a company—not a government—that cleared the way.
That Thursday evening at 6:00 P. M., a tsunami siren attached to the firehouse whirled to life. Danco CEO and president Dan Johnson was there, and he had low expectations. “I wasn’t even sure if people were going to come,” he says. “This is a pretty working-class community. They’re all blue collar, they’re drinking their beer.” But as he watched, the town’s residents poured into the streets and up the evacuation route. Nearly two hundred people, or about