• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1427 0

in Manhattan, the kind of day when the city actually sparkles through its layer of grit. The financial district was full of workers on their lunch hour. He was in the fire truck headed up Fulton Street when he heard a massive explosion. About two hundred feet in front of him, a gas tank had exploded on an ice cream truck, injuring 106 people and blowing out windows all around. People were screaming. Some were covered in blood. But no one yet knew what had happened, and it was impossible to see anything. “Wall Street was absolutely packed with cars and people. We couldn’t even see where a hydrant was.” The firefighters flipped on the lights and siren to try to clear a path. Hundreds of people, suddenly noticing the truck, started running toward it, away from the fire.

Then something strange happened: when the people got to the truck, they turned and started running alongside it—as it headed directly for the explosion. “It was a very strange phenomenon,” Cline says, chuckling. “People will follow you, even when they don’t know why they’re following you.” As the firefighters stretched the first hose line toward the fire, they had to navigate through the throng of onlookers. It was only after enough police arrived on the scene that the crowd could be pushed back to safety.

Now Cline trains firefighters and rescue workers to beware the herd instinct: “I tell them, ‘If something goes wrong, people will tend to follow you—which is not what we want. We want them to go the other way!’” He advises officials to use loud, clear warnings and gestures to preempt the herd instinct.

“What you actually look for in these circumstances is someone who can tell you what to do,” Ian, a victim of the 2005 London transit bombings, later told investigators. “Even if it is a basic ‘Stay here’ or ‘Move there,’ you just need guidance, because you are a bit all over the place, as you can imagine.” Ian suffered severe burns to the chest and legs when the blast hurled him onto electrified cables in the train tunnel. After briefly losing consciousness, he heard the voice of the train driver, who told him to make his way out of the tunnel. This instruction, Ian told investigators, was enormously reassuring.

Our obedience to authority in a disaster can be an asset, if the people in charge understand it. For years, aviation safety experts could not understand why passengers did so little to save themselves in plane crashes. They would sit in their seats instead of going to an exit. Those who did get up had an infuriating tendency to reach for their carry-on baggage before leaving. Then, once they made it to the exit door, they would pause for a dangerous amount of time before jumping down the slide. And in plane crashes, remember, you usually have a matter of seconds, not minutes, to get out.

In a series of experiments, safety officials ran regular people through mock evacuations from planes. The trials weren’t nearly as stressful as real evacuations, of course, but it didn’t matter. People, especially women, hesitated for a surprisingly long time before jumping onto the slide. That pause slowed the evacuation for everyone. But there was a way to get people to move faster. If a flight attendant stood at the exit and screamed at people to jump, the pause all but disappeared, the researchers found. In fact, if flight attendants did not aggressively direct the evacuation, they might as well have not been there at all. A study by the Cranfield University Aviation Safety Centre found that people moved just as slowly for polite and calm flight attendants as they did when there were no flight attendants present.

On August 2, 2005, Air France Flight 358 skidded off the runway in Toronto, Canada, during a violent storm. The plane, arriving from Paris and full of passengers, slid into a gully at a speed of 92 mph. The fire was immediate and intense. Half the exits of the Airbus A340 were either blocked or unusable due to malfunctioning slides. Cable TV broadcast live images of the smoking hulk of metal. But all 297 passengers and 12 crew members got out alive.