Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [86]
But the situation still did not look catastrophic. After all, the plane had stopped moving and the pilot had called for an evacuation. There were no injuries from any kind of crash impact. Airport fire and rescue trucks had already arrived and begun spraying foam all over the plane.
The problems began at the exit in the middle of the plane, over the wing. A young woman seated in 10F, just beside the exit, had trouble opening the hatch. She was unfamiliar with how it worked, and her amygdala was in charge. She spent precious seconds pulling on what turned out to be her armrest. Finally, her female friend in the next seat stood up and pulled at the release handle. The hatch, which weighed forty-eight pounds, fell into the plane across the chest of the original passenger, trapping her in her seat. The other passengers then intervened, lifting the hatch off of her. Finally, forty-five seconds after the plane had come to a halt, the door was opened, according to the investigation report issued by the British government.
The passengers still had at least a couple of minutes to get out. But then the situation deteriorated further. Alarmed by the smoke and intense heat, many passengers rushed toward the exits and stumbled, falling onto the floor of the aisle. Others then started climbing over the seat backs to get past the pileup. One passenger standing farther up in the plane looked back and saw a tangle of human bodies in the center section. It appeared no one could move forward in the chaos. “People were howling and screaming,” he later told investigators.
This is the deadly “faster-is-slower” effect, as crowd experts call it. Above a certain speed, people moving for an exit will actually get out much later than if they had moved more slowly. An arch of bodies is created around an exit as everyone tries to get out at the same time. The friction leads to a clog, which slows down the entire evacuation. Imagine trying to walk out a narrow door moving shoulder to shoulder with five other people. You would knock into one another as you tried to gain access to the opening, spending time and energy squeezing past the other bodies before even getting to the door. If one of you tripped, the jam would become exponentially worse. The faster you tried to leave, in other words, the smaller the doorway would essentially become.
In the Manchester crash, the area by the overwing exit was not yet engulfed in flames, but it nevertheless became a death trap. People clogged the path, with some bodies half out of the exit. The last passenger to leave the plane was a young boy, who was pulled from the exit by a firefighter, five minutes after the plane had stopped. Fifty-five people died that day. Another fifteen were seriously injured.
A better word for panic might be overreaction, says G. Keith Still, the expert on hajj crowds. Something happens, some sudden stimulus, to cause a dangerously dense crowd to overreact. In the Manchester crash, it might have been the rush of heat or the slowdown caused by the confusion at the exit. In some cases, all it takes is one or two people to panic, dooming everyone. In a survey of 457 U.S. passengers involved in serious evacuations in the late 1990s, a large number of people reported misbehavior by a few. Twenty percent saw other people climbing over seats; 29 percent saw people pushing. Just over 10 percent said they saw passengers arguing with other passengers. And 6 percent actually admitted pushing someone else. At dusk on February 1, 1991, a Skywest plane collided with a USAir Boeing 737 plane at Los Angeles International Airport. Everyone on the Skywest plane died immediately. On the USAir plane, nineteen passengers died from inhaling smoke—ten of them while waiting in line to use the right overwing exit. The investigation found that the delay was caused in part by a scuffle between two passengers.
In the hajj, a stampede can be caused by people suddenly changing