Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [9]
At 8:46 A.M., an American Airlines Boeing 767 traveling 490 mph struck the building eleven floors above her. When the plane hit Zedeño’s building, the effect was not subtle. It obliterated four floors immediately. From her desk, Zedeño heard a booming explosion and felt the building lurch to the south, as if it might topple. It had never done that before, not even in 1993. This time, she grabbed her desk and held on, lifting her feet off the floor. “I actually expected the ceiling to fall and the building to cave in,” she remembers. At the time, she screamed, “What’s happening?”
Talking about it now, in a deli across from the void where the towers once stood, Zedeño wonders why she didn’t immediately run for the stairs. She’d been through this before, after all. But what she really wanted, quite desperately, was for someone to answer back: “Everything is OK! Don’t worry. It’s in your head!” At the moment of impact, Zedeño had entered a rarefied zone. The rules of normal life were suspended. Her entire body and mind changed. She would wind her way through a series of phases along the survival arc. First would be a thicket of disbelief, followed by frantic deliberation, and, finally, action. We will witness all three here, but more than anything else, Zedeño’s story is one of denial.
Zedeño has revisited the moments of her escape from the Trade Center until they are worn and familiar. She now gives tours of Ground Zero to tourists from around the world. But still there are riddles she cannot decipher, behavioral glitches that don’t make obvious sense. More than anything else, she is mystified by how slow she was to accept what was happening all day long.
After the plane hit the building, Zedeño told me, she wanted nothing so much as to stay. Like her, I was perplexed by this reaction. Shouldn’t a primal, survival instinct have kicked in, propelling her to the door? I wondered if Zedeño was unusual. So I went to the National Fire Academy to find out more. The instructors at the school, located on the rolling grounds of a former Catholic college in rural Maryland, are veteran firefighters who have witnessed just about every conceivable form of human behavior in fire. I met Jack Rowley, who spent thirty-three years as a firefighter in Columbus, Ohio. When I told him about Zedeño, he told me that he saw this kind of curious indifference all the time. In fact, he came to consider one particular kind of fire a regular Saturday night ritual. His station house would get dispatched to a bar; he would walk into the establishment and see smoke. But he would also see customers sitting at the bar nursing their beers. “We would say, ‘Looks like there’s a fire here,’” he says. He’d ask the customers if they felt like evacuating. “They would say, ‘No, we’ll be just fine.’”
One of the few people who has extensively analyzed behavior at the Trade Center in both 1993 and 2001 is Guylène Proulx at Canada’s National Research Council. And what she saw fit with Zedeño’s memory exactly. “Actual human behavior in fires is somewhat different from the ‘panic’ scenario. What is regularly observed is a lethargic response,” she wrote in a 2002 article in the journal Fire Protection Engineering. “People are often cool during fires, ignoring or delaying their response.”
In a May 19, 2006, column in the Wall Street Journal, Matthew Kaminski wrote about a recent flight he’d taken from Paris to New York. Three hours out of Paris, halfway into the movie Jarhead, Kaminski heard a loud thud and felt the plane shudder and swerve. “The captain made no announcement. No one asked the flight attendants a thing,” he wrote. And yet, wrote Kaminski, a veteran traveler, “My stomach told me to worry.”
About an hour later, the pilot announced the plane would be making an emergency landing in St. John