Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [76]
The Grand Bayou Model
Just as individuals can be more or less resilient, so can groups. Groups perform as well during a disaster as they performed before it. The healthier an office culture or family, the better it can absorb stress and recover. High-functioning groups know how to communicate and help one another, and they have the resources to do it. Even at the cellular level, camaraderie promotes survival. Multiple studies have found that people with supportive social networks tend to have stronger immune systems.
Recently, psychologists and disaster researchers have become obsessed with this idea of group resilience. Where does it come from and how can we make more of it? Instead of just studying people who are traumatized by disasters, psychologists have turned their attention to the healthy majority—the people who don’t need their help. There are even software applications designed to create resilience through social networks. If every town had a sort of emergency MySpace community, the reasoning goes, then everyone would fare better in an actual emergency. And, in fact, during the 2007 wildfires in southern California, some of the best information came from neighborhood blogs—and photos taken with cell phones. “This is a neighbor-helping-neighbor situation,” San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders told a crowd of evacuees at Qualcomm Stadium.
In 2005, the citizens of Grand Bayou, a remote Louisiana coastal town, had very little advanced technology. What they had were long traditions, close relationships, and a culture of self-sufficiency. For three hundred years, this Native American and Cajun fishing community had occupied a treacherous stretch of the Gulf, accessible only by water. Grand Bayou was there before the levees, before the oil tankers, before the National Weather Service.
In all that time, Grand Bayou never lost anyone to a hurricane. Rosina Philippe grew up in Grand Bayou. When storms approached, no one waited for an official evacuation order. “We know how to get ourselves out of harm’s way, announcement or not,” says Philippe. Residents would talk with one another and decide when it was time to leave. All of them would pile onto about twelve oyster, fishing, and work boats, hitching them all together in a long convoy. They had done it many times before. Grand Bayou was not an affluent community, but the connections between the people who lived there were strong. “Everyone has family,” Philippe says. “If someone didn’t want to go, we would make them go.” The children of Grand Bayou loved evacuating. It was like a big slumber party. “You’re going out on a big ol’ boat ride with all your friends,” says Philippe’s teenage daughter, Anisor Philippe Cortez.
Grand Bayou’s 125 residents evacuated two days before Hurricane Katrina made landfall, before the mayor of New Orleans had called for a mandatory evacuation. Philippe, her daughter, her sister, and her sister’s family, along with a few friends, piled onto a work boat with plenty of provisions. Then they hooked onto the rest of the Grand Bayou convoy and headed out. The trip to a safe harbor took about two hours, and no one was left behind.
The citizens of Grand Bayou had the resilience to survive Katrina. They had maintained the ties that keep groups strong—the kind of ties many Americans have lost. But over the previous fifty years, builders and oil companies had changed the landscape around Grand Bayou, destroying the wetlands that normally protected it. The town’s residents had fought against this development for years, to no avail. They had elevated their houses above flood level, only to see their houses sink again as the development marched on. In 1980, you could walk on land from one house to the next in