[tt] [x-risk] Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2008 13:48:58 -0400
To: existential at transhumanism.org
Subject: [x-risk] Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/today/hi/today/newsid_7575000/7575407.stm

Fighting for survival

By Amanda Ripley

Author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why

If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it is because they
are. Over the past 50 years, human beings have moved into more places
that were never meant to be inhabited by our species.

We have built large, vertical cities near water, stripping the earth of
natural protection and leaving us more vulnerable to all kinds of
trouble.

At the same time, we have learned to forecast storms days before they
arrive, and we can (with enough money) build sophisticated tsunami
warning systems in our seas. But as we have built ever more impressive
gadgets, we have done less and less to build better survivors.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Not just luck

That is a mistake. Having covered the 11 September 2001 terrorist
attacks from New York City, Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans, and many
disasters in between, I can tell you that regular people matter more
than anyone else at the scene of a catastrophe.


Their behaviour makes a massive difference. Luck is not as all-important
as we expect. And in major disasters like the 2004 tsunami in southeast
Asia, regular people do the vast majority of lifesaving.

	Our disaster personalities are not, in fact, anything like our
normal personalities

After the 7 July 2005 terrorist attacks on London buses and subway
trains, the official report on the response would find one "overarching,
fundamental lesson" - emergency plans had been designed to meet the
needs of emergency officials, not regular people.

On that day, the passengers had no way to let the train drivers know
that there had been an explosion.

They also had trouble getting out - the train doors were not designed to
be opened by passengers. Finally, passengers couldn't find first aid
kits to treat the wounded. It turned out that supplies were kept in
subway supervisors offices, not on the trains.

When emergency plans are written, regular people need to be at the
table. When drills are held, regular people need to make up the majority
of the participants.

And most of all, we need to understand what exactly happens to us in the
worst of times. What happens to our brains under extreme fear? Why do we
lose some powers and gain others? And how can we learn to do better?

Period of disbelief

Our disaster personalities are not, in fact, anything like our normal
personalities. Strong men can wilt, and neurotic women can suddenly
become bold and purposeful. Everything changes.

We know that in all kinds of disaster, from ship wrecks to burning
buildings, the brain tends to go through three phases: denial,
deliberation and the decisive moment.

The first phase may be the most important one to know about in advance.
Survivors of fires, terrorist attacks and shipwrecks have all told me
how incredibly powerful this period of disbelief can be.

On the deck of the Estonia ferry, which sunk in the Baltic Sea in 1994,
one man smoked a cigarette. Others sat in groups, doing nothing, as the
water surged onto the ship.

The most common response in most disasters is not panic, but rather the
opposite.

Our first instinct is to normalize the situation - to come up with
wildly creative and reassuring explanations for why smoke might be
creeping across the ceiling or why oxygen masks might have dropped from
the airplane ceiling.

In the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, about 1,000 people took
the time to shut down their computers before evacuating.

On average, people waited six minutes before beginning to leave. Once
they entered the stairwell, they descended at the rate of about one
minute per floor - twice as long as engineers would have predicted.

There are reasonable explanations for why we respond to threats this
way, most of them rooted in our evolution.

And we can dramatically improve our response and train our brains to do
better. But understanding how we actually behave is the first step.

Once we know we tend to move in slow motion, we can learn to push
through that phase and get out faster. Buildings and planes can be
designed to help us understand what is really happening more quickly -
and get to an exit.

It is time to move past the hackneyed disaster narrative - where we
simply gape at the loss and then blame government or God alone for our
suffering.

It is time to accept that regular people matter, and work intelligently
to make ourselves more resilient.



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