Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [71]
Just to make things even more challenging, fires grow exponentially. Every ninety seconds, a fire roughly doubles in size. Flashover, when the flammable smoke in the air ignites, thereby igniting everything in the room, usually occurs five to eight minutes after the flames appear. At that point, the environment can no longer support human life.
Firefighting technology has improved in quantum leaps over the past fifty years. Today, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems save thousands of lives. But fires have gotten hotter at the same time. Construction materials are far less fire-resistant today than they were just twenty-five years ago. Lightweight roof trusses can collapse after just five minutes in direct flames. Plastic furnishings serve as fuel. So a fire in a modern house requires far more water, applied sooner, than the same fire in a hundred-year-old structure.
Richard Gist, a psychologist with the fire department, has had to notify hundreds of Kansas City residents that a family member has died in a fire. Over and over again, they ask him why their loved one didn’t simply walk out the door or climb out the window. They have no concept of what it would be like to be in a fire. “I very frequently find myself standing with the survivors in a burned home explaining how their loved one died. They say, ‘Why didn’t they just…?’ You have to explain to them that it was 2:00 A.M., and they woke up out of a dead sleep.” If you wake up in heavy, hot smoke and stand up, you’re already dead from scorched lungs. You have to roll out of bed and crawl to an exit, not an easy thing to remember. That’s why Gist spends much of his time trying to get people to put batteries in their smoke detectors and practice evacuating before a fire, so that escaping becomes automatic. Echoing every disaster expert I’ve ever met, Gist says, “If you have to stop and think it through, then you will not have time to survive.”
Follow the Busboy
Walter Bailey was an eighteen-year-old busboy at the Beverly Hills Supper Club. On the night of the fire, he had asked to work the Cabaret Room so that he could catch some of the act. The last group to hear of the fire was the more than twelve hundred people in that ballroom.
Bailey was what they called a “party busboy.” That meant he helped prep mass quantities of food—two hundred butter bowls or one hundred salads with croutons. In the club hierarchy, party busboys ranked down at the bottom, right above dishwashers. Unlike the waiters, who wore jackets and ties, he had to wear a gold sort of smock. “It looked like something a monkey would wear—a monkey that cranks music,” says Bailey. On May 28, he had worked at the club for only a little over a year. The month before, he’d been there as a guest for his senior prom.
Shortly after 8:30 P.M., Bailey left the Cabaret Room to help out in another dining room. On his way down the hallway, he ran into a waitress. She asked him if he knew where the club’s owners were. He pointed her toward the kitchen. She whispered into his ear: “There’s a fire in the Zebra Room,” and then she headed toward the kitchen.
At first, Bailey did not believe the waitress. “She must be exaggerating,” he thought. So he went to the Zebra Room to see for himself. When he got there, everything looked normal, at first. He walked over to the doors to open them, but then he stopped. Just as he approached, smoke started curling out from the cracks at the top of the door. The smoke was actually puffing out in little bursts, as he recalls. “That indicated there was pressure behind the doors,” he says, then adding, by way of explanation, “Science was one of my favorite subjects in high school.” As he watched, the smoke started