Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [123]
CEO Johnson was stunned. “All of a sudden, all these people are walking with their dogs and a bird, and a little girl is dragging her teddy bear, which was bigger than she was. I couldn’t believe it. These big gruff guys were walking up there with their backpacks full of all the stuff they wouldn’t want to lose from their houses.” As Nicolini headed up the trail, he saw a little girl carrying a backpack. “I said, ‘Wow, is that your evacuation pack?’” he remembers. “She looked at me like, ‘Look, buddy, this is serious, I got a mission here, don’t bother me.’”
Everybody made it to the top in ten minutes, which is about all the warning they might have in real life. As each family arrived, they punched a time card so that they would know exactly how long the trip would take in a real tsunami—a fine souvenir from high land. Then Nicolini addressed the crowd: “I want to congratulate everyone and tell you that you’re alive and well.” He also reminded them all that the siren may not work, so if they ever were to feel the earth shake for more than twenty seconds, see the ocean recede, or hear a strange roar come from the horizon, they should make a break for it. He plans to do the drill every year and try to expand it to other towns. “You’ve got to practice stuff that’s important,” Nicolini says. “I hope this will allow people to think less about tsunami. You have a plan, and you don’t have to worry.”
After the drill ended, a strange thing happened. People didn’t seem to want to leave. “It was like this whole community-building event,” says Johnson, laughing. “People are giving me hugs, and saying, ‘Thanks for doing this.’ You see the appreciation.”
There was one sheriff’s deputy at the drill. A few people asked why there weren’t more. Where was the fire department? Where were the thundering trucks and the flashing lights? It was an excellent question, and the answer might have been the most important part of the drill. The firefighters and police officers were absent by design. Because in a real tsunami, they will not be there. It will just be us, on our own, carrying one another to high ground.
So as you drive to work tomorrow, on top of long buried sewer pipes or across fault lines strained by the weight of our ambition, as you walk home tonight under low-flying airplanes and over frozen rivers, take a minute—just a minute—to contemplate your disaster personality. You’ve made each other’s acquaintance, after all this time, by finishing this book. Now that you have, you should keep in touch. You might need each other one day.
Author’s Note
Survivors offer our greatest hope for reconstructing disasters—not just the plot, but also the smells, the sounds, and the spontaneous acts of kindness. Their memories of the banal and the horrifying are portals into the unknown.
It is important to acknowledge, though, that memory is imperfect. I have in some cases interviewed five survivors from the same disaster and heard five very different sets of facts. These distortions of time and space happen for good reason, as other parts of this book explain. The passage of time also leads to revisions, as our minds work to create a narrative of the event that makes sense, and as media reports begin to congeal around a story line. Then there is also the simple problem of forgetting. Memory fades, of course, and in some cases, I’ve asked survivors to remember details from two or three decades ago.
I have tried to compensate for the frailties of memory in three ways. First, I checked and supplemented survivors’ recollections with official investigations, books, and media reports. All told, I have consulted more than 1,000 articles from academic journals and mass-market media and at least 75 official reports on specific accidents from the plane crash in Tenerife to the