Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [68]
The Science of Evacuation
For a long time, engineers assumed people would move out of a building like water. They would fill the space they had, coursing down the staircases and flowing out to safety like a river of humanity. Buildings were constructed accordingly. The problem is, people don’t move like water.
Ed Galea has spent his career trying to understand crowd behavior in fires. He manages a team of mathematical modelers, behavioral psychologists, and engineers at the University of Greenwich, Old Royal Navy College Campus, in London. In his office in an ancient building alongside the river Thames, he has three framed photos of the burning World Trade Center. Another wall is decorated with eight pictures of train wrecks, plane crashes, and other assorted tragedies. If another man worked here, such a display might seem odd, even callous. But when I meet Galea here on a summer morning, it quickly becomes clear that he takes every disaster personally. I sit down amid the piles of videotapes and books, and we speak without interruption for four hours. Galea’s intensity is contagious. He knows more about human behavior in fires than almost anyone in the world, and he agonizes over the needless loss of lives.
Galea is from Australia, where he trained as an astrophysicist. His specialty was using computer models to describe how magnetic stars are born. But not many people would pay him for this service. So he took a rather dull job as an industrial mathematician in the steel industry. He moved to the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s, and, not long afterward, an airplane caught fire during takeoff in Manchester, England. It was a bizarre accident. The Boeing 737 never became airborne, and firefighters quickly doused the plane in foam. There was no crash, just a fire. The last survivor was pulled out five minutes after the plane had come to a stop. And yet fifty-five people still died. Why hadn’t they gotten out? In standard evacuation tests, this type of plane had been evacuated in just seventy-five seconds. What had gone wrong? “I couldn’t understand how fifty-five people could have died. That caught my attention.”
Fire modeling had only just begun, and the United Kingdom led the world. After London burned down twice—in 1212 and 1666—the country became a world model for fire safety. The first seminar on human behavior in fire was held at the University of Surrey in 1977. Galea managed to talk his way onto a project studying the crash at the University of Greenwich in London. But most of the early models were based on how fire moves in relatively small square rooms. And none could explain what happened on the Manchester flight. When Galea and his colleagues modeled the crash, they were amazed at how fast the fire could spread from one of the engines to the fuselage and then inside the cabin, filling the plane with black, toxic smoke. But that still didn’t explain the casualty rate on the flight. “We understood the fire, but why did so many people die? Why couldn’t they get out?”
So Galea decided to create a model to explain not the fire but the people. It was a revolutionary idea. He took the idea to the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority, which had funded his original model. They turned him down. “They said, ‘This is impossible. You might be able to model fire but you can’t model people.’ To me, that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”
Galea is a confident man. His website features nine photos of himself, including several of him receiving a prize for his work from Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. There are also pictures of his desk, from multiple vantage points. This is not a man to be easily put off. So Galea did what desperate professors do: he got some graduate students to work for free. For one year, they constructed a very crude model based on the scant research available into human behavior. It was called EXODUS. When Galea showed U.K. Aviation officials