Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [126]
9/11 Commission
The testimony of Alan Reiss can be found here: www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing11/reiss_statement.pdf. The rest of this invaluable report can be seen here: http://www.9-11commission.gov/. Details on the repeater system start on page 297.
CHAPTER 2: RISK
Hurricane Katrina Evacuation
New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s quotes come from the Associated Press and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, both dated August 28, 2005.
For a summary of the evacuation’s little-known success stories, see Coleman Warner, “Contrarians Call Katrina Evacuation a Success,” New-house News Service, Dec. 28, 2005. The figure about the number of carless households in New Orleans comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2004 Community Survey.
For the prescient five-part report on what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, see John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “In Harm’s Way,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 23, 2002, and the rest of the series, running through June 27, 2002.
Unintended Consequences of War
For more on this general concept, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.
As for the U.S. finding that the Iraq war became a “cause célèbre” for jihadists, you can see declassified portions of the report here: www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf.
Hurricane Katrina
Knight Ridder’s analysis of 486 Katrina victims showed that black victims outnumbered whites by 51 percent to 44 percent. But in the area overall, blacks outnumbered whites by 61 percent to 36 percent. The database was compiled from official government information as well as interviews with survivors of the dead. The database is far from complete. But Knight Ridder found similar patterns in another analysis comparing the locations where 874 bodies were recovered to U.S. census tract data. For more, see John Simerman, Dwight Ott, and Ted Mellnik, “Stats Shake Beliefs About Hurricane; New Information About Katrina Suggests That Victims Weren’t Disproportionately Poor or Black,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, Dec. 30, 2005.
Max Mayfield’s quote comes from a speech I saw him deliver at the National Association of Government Communicators conference in Baltimore on May 25, 2006. The poll of New Orleans residents who did not evacuate is from Mollyann Brodie et al., “Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters: Implications for Future Planning,” Research and Practice (Mar. 29, 2006).
Competing Causes of Death
For a list of the leading causes of deaths in the United States, see “Deaths: Final Data for 2003,” National Vital Statistics Reports 54, no. 13 (Apr. 19, 2006); http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_13.pdf/.
The odds of killing yourself versus being killed by someone else come from David Ropeik and George Gray, Risk, Appendix 1.
Kahneman and Tversky
Both men were prolific, but one of their most important papers on risk is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.”
The Donut Quiz
This classic problem has been cited in many studies, including Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 25–42.
Increased Driving Fatalities After 9/11
There have been at least two other studies illustrating this phenomenon. I’ve chosen here to cite the results of the most comprehensive one: Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon, “Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism,” accepted for publication in Applied Economics in 2007. Another study, which did not control for as many factors and looked only at rural interstate highway deaths, found that an estimated fifteen hundred Americans died after 9/11 because they drove instead of flying: Gerd Gigerenzer, “Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire: Behavioral Reactions to Terrorist Attacks,” Risk Analysis 26, no. 2 (2006).
One other interesting factoid from the third study on this subject: for any trip over thirty-six kilometers