Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [79]
Some people, like Brigadier General Nisso Shacham, the police commander in the southern half of Israel, seem unusually resilient in the face of extreme stress. Credit: Samantha Appleton/Noor
To understand resilience, military psychiatrists have studied U.S. Special Forces soldiers. Even their blood chemistry is different from that of other soldiers. Credit: David Bohrer
Groups are just as important as individuals in a disaster. In 1977, a ferocious fire destroyed the glamorous Beverly Hills Supper Club outside Cincinnati, Ohio, killing 167 people. A study of the crowd behavior showed that most people performed according to their assigned role that night. Credit: Dave Horn Collection
The last phase of the survival arc is the decisive moment. Given the right mix of conditions, catastrophes like a stampede can happen. Since 1990, more than 2,500 people have been killed in crowd crushes during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Islam’s holy places in Saudi Arabia. This picture shows the normally peaceful crowd outside Mecca. Credit: Khalil Hamra/AP
Saudi security officers and rescue workers gather by the dead bodies after a stampede in Mina on January 12, 2006. At least 346 people were killed, and nearly 1,000 were injured. Credit: Muhammed Muheisen/AP
The most common reaction to a life-or-death situation is to do nothing. A kind of involuntary paralysis sets in, as experienced by a young man trapped in a classroom during the massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007. Here, students console each other at a campus vigil the night of the shootings. Credit: Stephen Voss/WpN
Sometimes people will take seemingly inexplicable risks to save total strangers. After Air Florida Flight 90 crashed into the frozen Potomac River in Washington, DC, on January 13, 1982, dozens of people watched from the banks as the survivors clung to the wreckage. Eventually, three men jumped in to help, and a U.S. Park Police helicopter pulled the survivors to safety. Credit: Charles Pereira/U.S. Park Police
What causes heroism? Roger Olian jumped into the freezing water the day of the Potomac River disaster because he had something to lose if he didn’t, he says. “If you didn’t get anything out of it, I mean flat-out nothing, you wouldn’t do it.” He is pictured here beside the Air Florida crash site, twenty-five years later. Credit: Katie Ellsworth
Every disaster holds evidence of the human capacity to do better. On 9/11, Rick Rescorla, head of security for Morgan Stanley and a decorated Vietnam veteran, sang songs into a bullhorn to keep people moving. He had spent years training the company’s 2,700 employees to get out fast in an emergency. Credit: Eileen Maher Hillock
Part Three
The Decisive Moment
6
Panic
A Stampede on Holy Ground
FOR MORE THAN fourteen hundred years, Muslims have journeyed to Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad. The pilgrimage, or hajj, is required of every Muslim who can manage it. So the ritual has become one of the largest annual mass movements of human beings in history. People leave their homes with their life’s savings in their pockets, anxious about the adventure ahead, and they return with stories of finding peace in the most unlikely of places: in the middle of a scorched desert, deep inside an undulating crowd of strangers from all over the world.
But over the past two decades, something awful has happened to the hajj. In 1990, a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel killed 1,426 people in minutes. The list of dead included Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, Malaysians, Turks, and Saudis. Four years later, another stampede killed more than 270 pilgrims. After that, the tragedies began to follow a sickening rhythm, coming