Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [63]
In airplane crashes, passengers have died because they ignored a closer exit to follow the rest of the crowd. Others have risked their lives because they climbed over seats to regroup with the rest of their family before evacuating. On 9/11 at least 70 percent of survivors spoke with other people before trying to leave, the federal government’s study found. They made thousands of phone calls, checked TV and Internet news sites, and e-mailed friends and families. Many people even took milling breaks on their way down the stairs, stopping off on random floors to call their spouses again and check CNN one more time.
That morning, Louis Lesce was on the eighty-sixth floor of the North Tower. He was a career counselor teaching a class to Port Authority employees. Before class started, he was sitting alone in a conference room reading through resumes. He felt the initial shake when the plane hit the tower. Having lived in Tokyo, he figured it was an earthquake. He kept reading. But then there was an explosion, and tiles started falling from the ceiling. The resumes scattered into the air. He remembers that they seemed to float through space in slow motion, so that he could read the name on top of each one. Lesce jumped up, jolted out of denial and into deliberation. He didn’t know anyone very well in the office, since he’d been teaching there only for a few months. But he immediately flew into the hallway in search of companions.
In a disaster, strangers are not strangers anymore. John Drury, a social psychologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, has analyzed group behavior in a wide range of disasters—from sinking ships to stadium stampedes. He had assumed that crowds with a common connection (like soccer fans) would behave very differently than anonymous strangers. But it turned out that the disaster itself created an instant bond between people. “Even if they started out quite fragmented, they came together and showed an enormous amount of solidarity,” Drury says.
Lesce’s floor was relatively empty on the morning of 9/11, but he did find five others. They walked through another door toward the elevators and ran into black smoke. They turned back, moved into an office, sat on the floor, and started caucusing. “What’s going on? What are we supposed to do?” Lesce asked.
“An airplane hit the building,” someone said, after getting a cell phone call. “Remember in 1948?” Lesce interjected. “A DC-8 crashed into the forty-second floor of the Empire State Building.”
The smoke was getting worse. “Maybe we should break a window,” someone else suggested.
Lesce wasn’t sure. “Are we going to be sucked out?” But he seemed to be in the minority, so he backed down. This is the very definition of groupthink: human beings do not generally like to go against the consensus of the group. So group members will work hard to minimize conflict. Dissent is uncomfortable. “If anyone wants to break the window, be my guest,” he said.
“How do we break it?” someone else asked.
“We could throw this flowerpot through the window. That should do it.”
Again, Lesce was worried. “Well, we could hurt someone down below,” he said.
Someone else noticed a ball-peen hammer in the room. “We could use this.”
Lesce and the rest of the group stepped back into the hallway while one man smashed the window. There was a whooshing sound, but no one was sucked out.
Now there were new problems, however. Smoke from outside seemed to be channeling in through the window. Hot shrapnel flew into the room, burning people’s skin. Still, the group kept exchanging theories and ideas. No one discussed looking