Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why Read Online Free PDF

a man in a uniform, no matter how shrill the alarm, we check in with one another. This “milling” ritual is part of the second phase of deliberation. How and with whom you mill can dramatically influence your chances of survival. For now, it’s fair to say that milling is a useful process that can take a painfully long time to complete.
    “Get Out of the Building!”
    Luckily, one of Zedeño’s colleagues passed through the denial phase immediately. He screamed at her: “Get out of the building!” His brain worked faster, for reasons we’ll go into later. Zedeño still wonders what she would have done if he hadn’t told her to leave. As it was, she still found ways to delay a little longer. First, she reached for her purse. Then she started walking in circles in her cubicle. “I was looking for something to take with me. It was like I was in a trance.” She picked up a mystery novel she’d been reading. Then she looked for more things to take. This gathering process is common in life-or-death situations. Facing a void of unknown, we want to be prepared with as many supplies as possible. And, as with normalcy bias, we find comfort in our usual habits. (In a survey of 1,444 survivors after the attacks, 40 percent would say they gathered items before leaving.)
    Finally, Zedeño headed into the stairwell. She was taking action, the last stage in the process. But her journey had only just begun. She would cycle through the phases of “disaster think” over and over. Disbelief and deliberation would continue to stall her descent. “I never found myself in a hurry,” she says. “It’s weird because the sound, the way the building shook, should have kept me going fast. But it was almost as if I put the sound away in my mind.”
    On average, the estimated 15,410 people who got out of the Trade Center took about a minute to make it down each floor, the NIST findings show. A minute may not sound like a long time, but it was shocking to people who design and build tall buildings. It was twice as long as the standard engineering codes had predicted—and the buildings were less than half full. In a 110-story building, a minute per floor is just too slow.
    Most of the people who died on 9/11 had no choices. They were above the impact zone of the planes and could not find a way out. Of the thousands who had access to open stairwells and time to use them, all but about 135 did manage to escape, the NIST report found. But the most important finding from the Trade Center evacuation is what did not happen. The attacks took place on the same day as the mayoral election in New York City. Many people had stopped at the polls to vote and were late to work. Others had taken their children into school for the first day of classes. Meanwhile, the New York Stock Exchange does not open until 9:30 A.M ., so the trading firms were not fully staffed yet. And the Trade Center’s visiting platform did not open to tourists until 9:30 A.M .
    The fires caused by the 9/11 attacks were the deadliest in American history, killing 2,666 people. Had the buildings been full that morning, the slow evacuation would have translated into more than five times the casualties. It’s hard to imagine that kind of body count. This was already an unprecedented tragedy for the United States, after all. But had the attacks happened at a different time, at least fourteen thousand people would have been killed, according to NIST’s conservative estimates based on the rate of movement on 9/11. And the exasperating crawl of the evacuation would have been a topic of endless public debate.
    Since the first skyscraper was built in 1885 in Chicago, these monuments to human engineering have been designed without much consideration for how human beings actually behave. The people who work in skyscrapers have never been required to undergo regular full-evacuation drills, which could dramatically improve their escape times. When they do have drills, most people see them