Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [50]
When they pulled up to the building, the parking garage was blocked by an electronic gate requiring a code. Next to the gate was a guard. Shacham didn’t know the code. “What am I going to tell him, this guard?” He slowed the car to a stop and paused. Then he flashed his headlights. The guard opened the gate. “It was a miracle.”
Now what? How would he get inside? Where would he go if he did? Shacham had another idea. He stopped the car next to the guard and asked, “Is John inside?” The guard looked bored. “I don’t know. Go inside and check,” he replied. It worked. The dealer in the passenger seat had seen enough. “Let’s go,” he said. Shacham turned the car around. He had passed the test.
There are people whom psychologists call “extreme dreaders”—people who have a tendency to live in a state of heightened anxiety. Then there are people like Shacham. What makes him able to negotiate extreme fear so well? How does he navigate through the fog of deliberation without a map? When I ask him this question, he says it’s not that he doesn’t feel fear; he does, every time. But a calmness resides just adjacent to the fear. “You have to be very cold-blooded,” he says. But what makes someone “cold-blooded”? Is it genetics? Experience? A chemical imbalance? What makes the difference?
The Profile of a Survivor
The answer is out there, I was told by trauma psychologists and other disaster experts in Israel and the United States. But it is slippery. We all have ideas about what we might do in an emergency. But we are probably wrong. There are ways to predict behavior under extreme duress, and they aren’t what you might expect. People who are leaders or basket cases on a normal day at the office aren’t necessarily the same in a crisis.
But before behavior even comes into play, our basic profile can dramatically alter our odds. Our handicaps tend to be the same ones that plague us in normal day-to-day life. If you are very overweight, for example, you will almost certainly have a lower chance of survival in most disasters. In car crashes, we know that heavy people are more likely to die than thin people. That’s partly because very overweight people have more health problems in general. So they have a harder time recovering from any injuries. Their bodies also have more difficulty handling intense heat. For the human heart, the strain of a crisis can be far more deadly than the actual threat. That’s why more firefighters die from heart attacks and strokes than from fires.
There is the cruel reality of physics, too. Overweight people move more slowly and need more space, so they have more trouble escaping. On 9/11, people with low physical abilities were three times as likely to be injured while evacuating the Trade Center. This problem has gotten worse as Americans have gotten bigger. Body fat even changes crowd dynamics. When people walk down a staircase, they sway slightly from side to side, taking up more space than their actual body width. The heavier people are, the slower they move and the more they sway—and the fewer people can fit down a staircase.
Sex matters too. It is far better to be a man in certain disasters, and a woman in others. Men are more likely to be killed by lightning, hurricanes, and fires. Nearly twice as many men die in fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That’s partly because men tend to do more dangerous jobs. But it’s also because men take more risks overall. They are more likely to walk toward smoke and drive through floods. “Women tend to be more cautious,” says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Laboratory at the University of South Carolina. “They are not going to put themselves or their families at risk. They are going to be out of an area before the rains come.”
Remember that equation for dread? It’s different for men and women. Almost every survey ever done on risk perception finds that women worry more about almost everything—from pollution to handguns.