Surviving Disasters: Panic and Resilience

"It is hard to re-create panic in a laboratory without violating basic ethical principals."

I just finished Amanda Ripley's "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes and Why." It was a fascinating book, and there were a lot of takeaways. The most interesting ones were around panic and around resilience. Bear in mind, I am vastly simplifying her findings.

In a crisis, people typically act calmly and politely. We are often inundated by disaster footage of wildly emotional people. Remember, though, that the media chooses what sells. Photos of calm, orderly people filing out of wreckage does not sell magazines.

*However,* there are times when panic ensues and things go badly. Crowd crushes and stampedes are the most frequently used example. The book characterizes panic as an "overreaction" to a situation.

The recipe for panic is: First, people must feel trapped. Second, people must feel a sensation of helplessness where they "see their feelings reflected around them." Finally, a sense of profound isolation: "surrounded by others, all of whom feel utterly powerless, we realize we are exquisitely alone. We understand that we could be saved--but no one is going to do it."

Ripley's conclusion was that panic is "one of the more preventable human mistakes in the disaster portfolio." If places of mass gathering were designed properly and traffic control measures were well thought out, the number of these panic-induced disasters would decrease dramatically. Check out this blurb about the prevention of deaths in the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. If that isn't a call for more scientists and engineers, I don't know what is!

The second topic I found interesting was how resilience made the difference between survivors that were traumatized for the rest of their lives and survivors that moved on.

People who tend to have resilience "have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events, a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life's turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs tend to act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster." Ripley goes on to say that this worldview is basically built on confidence (natural "arrogance"and self-esteem from training and experience) and often a high IQ.

There are also people who are physically more capable of handling stress, but my takeaway was really about how to you can improve your self-esteem from training and experience. There was a story about a police officer who did meditation while listening to the sound of his car's siren. During high speed chases, he found his calmness and clarity would manifest by hearing the siren. If you can figure out a way to trigger a destressor with a stressor, you are golden!

In the spirit of training, I'll offer two tips:

First, if you wake up in heavy, hot smoke and stand up, you're already dead from scorched lungs. You have to roll out of bed and crawl to an exit.

Second, if you are caught in a crowd crush, there isn't much you can do. If possible, try to work your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backwards.