Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [21]
In those early, chaotic days, rescue personnel were under orders to prioritize bodies that were in the water. Turner was not in the water, so it would be two weeks before they took his body away. About a month after the storm, Williams went to the house. She found the Santa suit hanging in her father’s bedroom closet, in its normal place. It had gotten wet, along with everything else, but her brother decided to hang it outside of the house as a reminder to those who passed that this had been the little holiday house. “We wanted people to see it,” Williams says. “I don’t know. When people passed by, maybe people who knew him as Santa Claus or whatever, would remember.”
In the confusion that followed the storm, the authorities lost Turner’s body. For five months, his family tried to find him. Morgue workers called Williams repeatedly to describe the bodies of dead men, none of whom were her father. “I kept telling them, ‘He doesn’t have a tattoo!’” Five months after he died, Turner’s body was found again and handed over to his family.
When we spoke a year and a half after the storm, Williams was having trouble forgiving her father. “It makes me so mad,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen. I took such good care of him for him to do something like that.” Since his death her family has not been nearly as close, she says. She wonders if they will ever reconnect. She agreed to be interviewed for this book because, she said, she wants other people to know how one decision can make all the difference.
Turner was nobody’s fool; he had accumulated a lot of wisdom in his long life. When Katrina came, he made a trade-off that is more complicated than it looks. As I came to know Turner through his daughter, I wanted to know more about his decision. Why had his risk calculus failed him this time—after working so well for so long? Could we predict these kinds of blind spots in our own risk equations? And if so, couldn’t we overcome them?
The Science of Risk
How are you most likely to die? Think for a moment: Given your own profile, what do you really think is most likely to kill you?
The facts depend upon your age, genetics, lifestyle, location, and a thousand other factors, of course. But overall, here are the leading causes of death in the United States:
1. Heart disease
2. Cancer
3. Stroke
Now ask yourself whether these most-likely scenarios are also the ones you worry about more than any other. Are these the risks you actively work hardest to avoid? Do you start each day with twenty minutes of meditation? Do you work out for at least thirty minutes a day? When you swim in the ocean, are you more terrified of getting sunburned than you are of getting bit by a shark?
The human brain worries about many, many things before it worries about probability. If we really were just concerned with preventing the most likely causes of death, we would worry more about falling down than we would about homicide. The nightly news would feature back-to-back segments on tragic heart-attack deaths. And we might spend more money on therapists than police (you are twice as likely to kill yourself than you are to be killed by someone else during your lifetime). It’s as if we don’t fear death itself so much as dying. We fear the how, not so much the what.
Curiously, we have only recently begun to understand how we process risk. For centuries, philosophers and especially economists assumed that people were rational creatures—if not individually than certainly overall. To measure risk, it was thought, humans simply multiplied the probability of something happening by the consequences of it happening.
It took two psychologists to point out that this was simply not true. In the 1970s and 1980s, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published a series of revolutionary papers