Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [64]
The stairway was dark and crowded, but people kept treating each other like old friends. “You know, you look kind of tired, buddy,” one man said to Lesce. “Let me hold your jacket.” Another man offered to carry his briefcase. Lesce had had a quadruple bypass, so he was grateful. As they made their way down, people passed bottles of water through the crowd. “I never saw so much drinking water. Bottles just kept coming up.” Finally, they made it out of the tower. Lesce remembers looking at the shattered windows of a Gap store and thinking there would be a hell of a sale the next day. “Geez, I wish I could fit into those clothes,” he said to himself. But then a massive explosion of soot and concrete threw him to the ground. The first tower had collapsed. Everything went black.
A man, another stranger, helped Lesce up and directed him toward the light, out of the shopping concourse. Finally, he emerged onto Nassau Street and tried to call his wife. At that moment, there was another explosion and the second tower fell. Once again, Lesce was slammed onto the ground. And once again, a stranger helped him up.
Eventually, with the help of still more people, Lesce made his way to a hospital. When he got home, he had a message on his answering machine. “Hi, my name is Peter. I’m a survivor; I hope you’re a survivor too.” The man had found Lesce’s briefcase in the stairway of the Trade Center and wanted to return it.
From beginning to end, Lesce was held up by the people around him. When I ask him what he would have done if he had been alone on the eighty-sixth floor, he says he doubts he would have made it out. “If no one had been there, I would’ve wet my pants. I would’ve yelled. I would’ve done whatever I possibly could to communicate with somebody. Then I would have sat there and waited to die.”
The Sociology of the Beverly Hills Fire
At 8:45 P.M., a waitress had opened the door to the Zebra Room in the Beverly Hills Supper Club. Thick black smoke roared out at her. But she did not call the fire department or try to fight the fire. She ran to find the club managers. Like the office workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11, she followed the preexisting chain of command. As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role.
Servers warned their tables to leave. Hostesses evacuated people that they had seated, but bypassed other sections. Cooks and busboys, perhaps accustomed to physical work, rushed to fight the fire. In general, male employees were slightly more likely to help than female employees, maybe because society expects women to be saved and men to do the saving. Age mattered too. The younger cocktail waitresses seemed more confused. But the banquet waitresses, who tended to be older, were calm and reassuring.
And what of the guests? Most remained guests to the end. Some even continued celebrating, in defiance of the smoke seeping into the room. One man ordered a rum and Coke to go. When the first reporter arrived at the fire, he saw guests sipping their cocktails in the driveway, laughing about whether they would get to leave without paying their bills. Most people became surprisingly passive. The newspapers the next day would proclaim mass hysteria. MANY TRAPPED IN PANIC, read the headline of the Associated Press story. But later investigations would show that the vast majority of people were well behaved. In fact, children, wives, and the elderly were among the most likely to survive.
As the smoke intensified, Wayne Dammert, a banquet captain at the club, stumbled into a hallway jammed with a hundred guests, of all ages, from all different parties. The lights flickered off and on, and the smoke started to get heavy. But what he remembers most about that crowded hallway is the silence. “Man, there wasn’t a sound in there.