Pondering the 'Unthinkable': Amanda Ripley

AMANDA RIPLEY'S NEW book, "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — And Why" is a valuable resource for those who want to take a common-sense, intelligent, practical look at life under pressure. But the book will also appeal to the chronic worriers and disaster fetishists who are the most likely to pick up this trove of eye-opening information.

"The Unthinkable" is a fast read, filled with facts, stats and anecdotes, but the conclusions it reaches are hardly radical: To survive a disaster, it helps to keep one's composure, have well-drilled escape plans, maintain functioning smoke detectors, listen to your flight attendant's lecture and so on. Ripley even notes that infinitely more people die of cancer, heart-disease or old age than of terrorism, plane crashes or earthquakes.

But next to these reiterations of common knowledge are frequent insights gleaned from the worlds of evolutionary psychology, regular psychology, CAT scans, lab rats, post-disaster studies, Ripley's own extensive interviews with survivors and so on.

Ripley, a reporter for Time Magazine and a former staff writer at Washington City Paper, takes readers inside fires, stampedes, tsunamis, airplane crashes, floods and massacres.

Ripley also maintains a Web site, which includes "a real-time disaster map of the world," the author said. The site also contains her blog, which is "more reactive to breaking news" about disasters and provides "a lot of specific tips and theory on how the brain performs during different disasters."

She spoke with Express about hajj stampedes, the stress of a crisis, evolutionary psychology and which disasters Washingtonians should prepare for.

» EXPRESS: In D.C., which disasters we should be prepared for?
» RIPLEY: I remember looking on the D.C. homeland security site for my own benefit and I think they have 11 different hazards on that site. That's a great example of where the government should do a better job of helping you prioritize, because nobody's going to prepare for 11 different things.

The ones that seem most worthy of thinking about are floods, which happen almost everywhere these days and are generally undervalued by your brain. We tend to, for a lot of reasons, underestimate the impact of floods. ... It's unlikely that a tornado would come into the city, but tornados in this area are not unheard of.

In general, fires kill more people everywhere in this country than all other disasters combined, so fire is another one that people should probably think about more than they do. And, of course, terrorism would be the other one.

» EXPRESS: You do a great job of taking the reader into a fire; I learned a lot from that part of your book. Can you talk about the experience of being in a fire?
» RIPLEY: Yeah, I spent a good deal of time on fires because they're so common and so hard to imagine.

I went through a couple of different simulations in a plane-crash simulator that the FAA does and also a burn-tower that the Kansas City Fire Department let me go through. In both cases they fill the space with non-toxic smoke and you have to find your way out. All of this is really helpful. It makes it quite clear that smoke is the main event — in many, many disasters, period — but certainly in all fires. And it's hard to imagine how quickly you lose all vision.

The reason it's important to know that is it makes suddenly very clear why you might want to have some awareness of how to get out places where you live and work, because you literally cannot see your hand in front of your face.

The other thing that was striking was that even under a small amount of stress, people start behaving a bit differently. These are simulations, so everybody knows that they're safe and fine. On the plane crash simulator, some of the flight attendants I was with — a minority — got visibly stressed trying to get out of the plane. Some of them hit their heads on the overhead bins and that sort of thing, which you wouldn't expect from people who are quite comfortable in a plane.

It shows you how much your brain changes in an unusual, unfamiliar situation — like a fire.

» EXPRESS: How can people train their minds to think clearly in a crisis situation?
» RIPLEY: The first thing to recognize is that it's very unlikely that you, or people around you, will panic. We have this common mythology about disasters: That people are going to become hysterical and start pummeling each other. That almost never happens.

A much bigger problem is something called "negative panic" — where you don't move at all, or you move very, very slowly. That's one of the main points: You're unlikely to panic. You're more likely to do nothing.

So my hope is, first of all, by understanding that those are the likely outcomes, you can work through them more quickly, should you ever need to. But the more that you've done beforehand to make, say, finding the staircase easier for your brain, the better you will perform.

» EXPRESS: I've always wondered about the stampedes during the hajj [the annual Islamic pilgrimages to Mecca where hundreds and even thousands of people have perished in stampedes] and, of course, your book provides a good look at them. But even after reading your book, I don't understand why the Saudi government hasn't taken more action to prevent them. It's mind-boggling. Can you explain that?
» RIPLEY: I'm glad you asked that. A lot of people don't pay attention to the stampedes because it feels very far away — although it often isn't.

I think what you see again and again is that stampedes happen because there are too many people in too small of a space. It's not this mysterious, mystical tragedy. It's really a very clear matter of physics.

The Saudis got themselves into a very difficult situation where they opened up the hajj to everyone, which is part of the whole point of the hajj: that everyone, rich or poor, should be there. As airfare got cheaper and cheaper that opened it up even further — it really changed dramatically over 50 years in the 20th century and it became totally out-of-line with the infrastructure that they had.

They would change the infrastructure, to adapt — and they have invested millions of dollars in making the infrastructure more suitable to the crowd size — but they always seem one step behind the crowd size. And part of this is a culture that can easily fall back on the time-tested defense of governments everywhere, which is, "God willed this to happen."

And that's really challenging for people who care about this deeply — in Saudi Arabia and all over the world — they keep running up against this fatalistic vision of the world and also a lack of respect, of trust, for the public. There's this assumption that people bring this upon themselves by misbehaving, which, by the way, you see in every country, in varying degrees. It's this endless struggle. They seem to be doing better — getting realistic about their responsibilities — but we'll see how this year goes.

After the 2006 disaster, some clerics issued fatwahs declaring that pilgrims don't have to wait until noon to do the stoning ritual — spreading out the crowd over the entire day — which is a very simple, reasonable thing, and yet it took a long time to get to that point.

But in the 2007 hajj, no one was killed in a crowd-crush, so you see some progress.

» EXPRESS: Do you think it's correct to say that your book has a great focus on evolutionary psychology?
» RIPLEY: I found myself frequently turning to evolutionary psychologists, because so much of the book is about the fear response, which involves a very primitive of our brain. ... We can learn a lot from the research that has been done on animals if we just open our minds to the idea that the human fear response is more complex, and at the same time more connected to animals, than we think.

You know, when people shut down in a disaster, we often say that they've just "gone into shock." But that masks a much more interesting and complex behavior that we need to understand in order to do better. ... If you look at evolutionary psychology to understand some of our more mysterious behaviors, then you start to see why we do what we do. And you also start to see that sometimes our behavior is wildly inappropriate for modern emergencies. So that might explain, for example, the tendency for so many people to shut down in a disaster. Why would we do that? How would we evolve, if that was what we did?

Well, until very recently, plain-crashes were not part of our human condition. Saber-toothed tigers are a very different kind of threat. There are lots of remnants that are really interesting intellectually and really important for us to understand for practical reasons.

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Written by Express contributor Tim Follos
Photo by Greg Martin