Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [70]
Like all good fire chiefs, Walker gets evangelical when he talks about training. After eight weeks of classroom work, his cadets spend ten weeks enduring every kind of simulated hell he can invent. He makes them climb stairs through thick smoke on their hands and knees, stand next to a live fire until they can’t take the heat anymore, and crawl through a maze blindfolded until they get tangled in wires and have to cut their way out. He has seen every kind of human fear reaction, and he wants to evoke them all before a firefighter gets into a real fire. “You would be surprised at the number of people who are utterly panicked by a loss of vision,” he says. “So we find that out before we get them hot.” In every class of cadets, about 10–14 percent don’t make it through the training. “Some people just don’t take to it. I’d like to be a brain surgeon, too, but not everybody’s supposed to be a brain surgeon.” Nationwide, fire departments lose about two people a year to training accidents. But the training is so important that the risk is considered worthwhile.
To find out if I would get panicked, Walker took me out back. The burn tower is a six-story concrete, fiber, and sheet-metal structure full of old furniture and kindling. Charred La-Z-Boys, broken lamps, and worn sofas are scattered about, making the place look like a frat house that devolved into a crack house. The furniture is donated by the firefighters and their relatives, and the kindling comes from old pallets contributed by the local warehouses. The floors and ceilings are coated in black soot, and the air is acrid from thousands of training burns.
To simulate a fire, Walker’s instructors turn on the smoke. The artificial smoke is made from banana oil, which is cheap to buy and turns into thick, gray nontoxic smoke when it is atomized. Before we go in, they take me to the storeroom and dress me up in full firefighter gear, which I have to confess is totally cool. (They really do wear suspenders.) But then we go into the tower and the metal door clangs behind us. And for a moment, I actually think I might turn and run right out the door.
One thing most people don’t understand about fires is that the smoke is the main event. It is what makes it nearly impossible to find your way out. Your eyes literally close to protect you from the smoke, and you can’t get them open again. It’s an involuntary defense mechanism. Smoke is also by far the thing most likely to kill you. Firefighters rarely see a burned body. Toxic smoke from a smoldering fire can kill you in your sleep before any flames are even visible. That’s why it’s so important to have a smoke detector with a working battery.
Inside the tower, in the utter blackness, I turn on a flashlight. It doesn’t help much, since the light just reflects off the smoke like headlights in fog. In this case, my firefighter escort has an infrared imaging camera that helps identify living bodies and offers a glimpse of the terrain. We can see ourselves, ghostly silhouettes on the screen. But normal people, of course, won’t have any such help in a real fire. We creep along the wall, groping our way to the staircase and then counting the steps so that we can remember the number on our way back down. It is hard to imagine getting out of any unfamiliar structure in this darkness, especially in intense heat. In this case, there is no heat, but once we go through a few rooms, I still do not think I could get out in under two hours if I were on my own. I am in a group of two, but it is clear, even in a simulation, that it would be insane to leave my group. Two groping blind people are better than one.
Noise is the other thing most people do not expect in fires. In general, noise dramatically increases stress, and stress, as we know, makes it much harder to think and make decisions. Firefighters have learned to listen to the roar of a fire.