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

as a waste of time. They overestimate how well their minds will perform in a real crisis. When the alarm goes off, they know they are being interrupted and inconvenienced, but they don’t necessarily know how much they might one day appreciate the remedial help.
    When she gives tours of Ground Zero, the number one question Zedeño gets asked is, How did people behave in the stairwell? Were people panicking? No one expects the answer they get. “Everybody was very calm, very calm,” Zedeño tells them. Only one woman got hysterical—screaming and hyperventilating in the staircase. Zedeño gives her the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t know what this woman saw,” she says. The woman was walking with a man who had blood on his forehead. The man kept repeating, “We were the lucky ones, we were the lucky ones.” Zedeño and the rest of the crowd moved to the side in the narrow stairway so the two of them could go ahead.
    Crowds generally become very quiet and docile in a true disaster. Of course, on 9/11, no one in the stairways expected the towers to collapse. We’ll never know how they would have behaved had they known. But even in other, more overtly dire situations, crowds don’t tolerate irrational panic behavior. Most of the time, people remain consistently orderly—and kind, much kinder than they would have been on a normal day. One of Zedeño’s coworkers weighed over three hundred pounds and was in a wheelchair. He worked on the sixty-ninth floor in 1993—and in 2001. Both times, his coworkers carried him all the way down the stairs.
    During the first thirty floors of her descent, Zedeño learned that the explosion she’d heard was a plane hitting the tower. She promptly made up a story for herself to explain what had happened. Her brain reached into its database of patterns for a reasonable explanation, in other words. “I said to myself, ‘Poor pilot. He must have had a heart attack or a stroke.’” She would revise the story again and again that day, underestimating the gravity of the attacks each time.
    At the forty-fourth floor, someone told Zedeño and the people near her to switch stairways. She’s not sure who said this, but she remembers someone saying there were fires below in that staircase. So they all filed out into the sky lobby and queued up at another stairway entrance. Zedeño stood facing the windows of the sky lobby. About seventeen minutes had passed since the first plane hit.
    Suddenly, another explosion shook the tower. Zedeño looked up and saw balls of fire and black smoke. “I don’t remember the sound, for some reason,” she says. Like many people in disasters, her memory and her senses switched on and off at certain key points. But she does remember somebody screaming: “Get away from the windows!” Zedeño turned and ran toward the center of the building.
    Until now, Zedeño had been mostly calm and quiet. But as she ran from the explosion, she felt a new sensation. She was filled with a rush of anger. I ask her whom she was angry at, expecting her to say whoever was causing the explosions. But what she says, very slowly and deliberately, is this: “How…could…I…have been so stupid to put myself inside this building again after what happened in 1993? I should have known better.” Zedeño was furious at herself. As she ran, she experienced a moment of clarity—which can be decidedly unhelpful. “I kept saying to myself, ‘I’m on the forty-fourth floor of a building. Where am I going? I’m still way up high. I can’t go anywhere!’”
    Then everything changed again just as quickly. The group stopped running, the anger faded away, and things returned, instantly, to the previous calm. “Every single one of us turned around and marched right back to the stairway as if nothing ever had happened,” Zedeño says. She smiles when she says this. She knows it sounds strange. Disaster victims often oscillate between horrifying realizations and mechanical