How to survive a disaster: This article could save your life

By Michael Bond
In a catastrophic event, most people fail to do the
one thing that would save their life, says Michael
Bond.
At seven o’clock in the evening of 27 September
1994, the cruise ferry MS Estonia left Tallin with
989 people on board, heading for Stockholm
through the Baltic Sea. It never got there. Six
hours into the journey, pushing through a force
nine gale, the bow door broke open and the ferry
started taking on water. Within an hour it had
sunk, taking with it 852 of its passengers and
crew.
Even given the speed of tragedy, the stormy sea
and the length of time it took rescuers to arrive (a
full-scale emergency was only declared half an
hour after the sinking), survival experts were
astonished at the high death toll. It appears that
many people drowned because they did nothing to
save themselves. “A number of people… seem to
have been incapable of rational thought or
behaviour because of their fear,” concluded the
official report into the accident. “Others appeared
petrified and could not be forced to move. Some
panicking, apathetic and shocked people were
beyond reach and did not react when other
passengers tried to guide them, not even when
they used force or shouted at them.”
What happened? One person who knows the
answer is John Leach , a military survival instructor
who researches behaviour in extreme
environments at the University of Portsmouth. He
has studied the actions of survivors and victims
from dozens of disasters around the world over
several decades (and as it happens he was present
at one of them, the fire at King’s Cross
underground station on 18 November 1987 which
killed 31 people). He has found that in life-
threatening situations, around 75% of people are
so bewildered by the situation that they are unable
to think clearly or plot their escape. They become
mentally paralysed. Just 15% of people on average
manage to remain calm and rational enough to
make decisions that could save their lives. (The
remaining 10% are plain dangerous: they freak out
and hinder the survival chances of everyone else.)
Stories about survival often focus on the 15%, and
what is so special about them that helps them
stay alive. But Leach thinks this is the wrong
question. Instead, we should be asking, why do so
many people die when they need not, when they
have the physical means to save themselves? Why
do so many give up, or fail to adjust to the
unfolding crisis? In most disaster scenarios, he
says, you don’t need special skills to survive. You
just need to know what you should do. “My role as
a combat survival instructor is to teach people
how to survive. My role as a psychologist is to
teach people not to die.”
Emergency exit
We haven’t always had a clear picture of what
people really do in emergencies. Engineers
designing evacuation procedures used to assume
that people respond immediately when they hear
an alarm, smell smoke or feel their building shake
or their boat begins to list.
Yet as cases in recent decades began to show, the
real challenge is getting them to move quickly
enough. On 22 August 1985, 55 people died in a
Boeing 737 on the runway at Manchester Airport in
the UK after the plane, which was bound for Corfu,
suffered engine failure during take-off. The
government’s Air Accident Investigations Branch
reported : “Perhaps the most striking feature of this
accident was the fact that although the aircraft
never became airborne and was brought to a halt
in a position which allowed an extremely rapid
fire-service attack on the external fire, it resulted in
55 deaths. The major question is why the
passengers did not get off the aircraft sufficiently
quickly.”
Rather than madness, or an animalistic stampede
for the exits, it is often people’s disinclination to
panic that puts them at higher risk.
One of the most graphic examples of crowd
passivity in recent times occurred in New York’s
Twin Towers after the hijacked planes hit them on
9/11. You’d have thought those who survived the
initial impact would have headed for the nearest
exit pretty quickly. Most did the opposite: they
prevaricated. Those who eventually got out waited
six minutes on average before moving to the stairs,
and some hung around for half an hour, according
to a study by the US National Institute of
Standards and Technology (NIST)
. Unprepared for what was happening to them,
they either carried on as normal or hung around to
see what would happen, waiting for others to move
first. One study found that half of those who
survived delayed before trying to escape, making
phone calls, tidying things into drawers, locking
their office door, going to the toilet, completing
emails, shutting down their computer, changing
their shoes. One woman accustomed to bicycling
to work even returned to her office to change into
her tracksuit before trying to leave.
Survival mode
The prevailing psychological explanation for these
kinds of behaviours – passivity, mental paralysis
or simply carrying on as normal in the face of a
crisis – is that they are caused by a failure to
adapt to a sudden change in the environment.
Survival involves goal-directed behaviour: you feel
hungry, you look for food; you feel isolated, you
seek companionship. Normally, this is
straightforward (we know how to find food or
companions). But in a new, unfamiliar
environment, particularly a stressful one such as a
sinking ship or a burning aircraft, establishing
survival goals – where the exit is and how to get
to it – requires a lot more conscious effort.
“In emergencies, quite often events are happening
faster than you can process them,” explains Leach.
The situation outruns our capacity to think our way
out of it. Jerome Chertkoff, a social psychologist at
Indiana University, puts it another way: “Being in a
situation where your life is in danger increases
your emotional arousal, and high arousal causes
people to limit the number of alternatives they
consider. That can be bad when trying to
determine a course of action, since you may never
consider the option most likely to result in
escaping safely.”
This explains why in emergencies people often fail
to do things that under normal circumstances
would seem obvious. So the only reliable way to
shortcut this kind of impaired thinking, most
survival experts agree, is by preparing for an
emergency in advance. “Practice makes actions
automatic, without [the need for] detailed thinking,”
says Chertkoff. This means making a mental note
of the fire exits when you go to the cinema (and
imagining yourself using them), reading the
evacuation guidance on the back of the door when
you stay in a hotel, and always listening to aircraft
safety briefings however frequent a flyer you are.
“Every time I go on a boat the first thing I do is
find out where my lifeboat station is, because then
if there is a problem I just have to respond, I don’t
have to start thinking about it,” says Leach.
Typically, survivors survive not because they are
braver or more heroic than anyone else, but
because they are better prepared.
What about how you deal with other people? No
matter how well-primed you are, one aspect of
emergency situations will always be out of our
control: how those around us behave. Here, too,
the scientific understanding is at odds with
common wisdom or what we are likely to read in
the media.
Commentators often highlight the supposed
stupidity or madness of crowds during disasters –
a stampede of pilgrims, the crush of a football
crowd, the blind scramble for the exits in a burning
nightclub. In reality, this is rarely what happens.
Research shows that in most scenarios, groups of
people are more likely to help each other than
hinder. “In emergencies, the norm is cooperation,”
says Chris Cocking , who studies crowd behaviour
at the University of Brighton. “Selfish behaviour is
very mild and tends to be policed by the crowd
rather than spreading.”
Take the suicide bombings on London’s transport
system on 7 July 2005, which killed 52 and injured
more than 700. For several hours, hundreds of
passengers were trapped in smoky underground
tunnels with no way of knowing if they would be
rescued, nor if further explosions were imminent.
Amid this chaos, most people were highly
cooperative and helpful, according to survivors
interviewed by Cocking, John Drury at the
University of Sussex and Steve Reicher at the
University of St Andrews. Psychologists call this
response “collective resilience”: an attitude of
mutual helping and unity in the middle of danger.
Stronger together
Drury, Cocking and Reicher have documented
many examples of collective resilience. In 2008,
they talked to survivors of 11 mass tragedies or
incidents from the previous four decades, including
the 2001 Ghana football stadium crush in which
126 people died while trying to escape through
locked exits, and the sinking of the cruise ship
Oceanos off South Africa in 1991 (when remarkably
all 500-odd passengers survived). In each case,
group solidarity was more prevalent than
selfishness. Cocking thinks that people’s tendency
to cooperate during emergencies increases the
chances of survival for everyone. “Individually, the
best thing tactically is to go along with the group
interest. In situations where everyone acts
individually, which are very rare, that actually
decreases effective group evacuation.”
Still, some emergencies can be so disorientating
that cooperation may be beyond some people. For
a dramatic example of how differently people
behave when their life is on the line, consider the
story of the British-Irish Atlantic Odyssey rowing
team who in January 2012 attempted to cross the
ocean east to west in a record-breaking 30 days.
After 28 days, a freak wave capsized their boat
while they were still 500 miles (800 kilometres)
from their destination in Barbados. According to
Mark Beaumont, an adventurer and broadcaster
who was part of the six-strong crew, they would
all have drowned had several of them not dived
repeatedly under the upturned hull to free the life
raft and retrieve the emergency beacon, GPS
tracker, satellite phone, fresh water and food.
Deep shock
But not all of the crew reacted so rationally. “A
couple of the guys went into pretty deep shock,”
he recalls. “One of them could barely get a word
out. He just shut his eyes and shut down.” Later,
this colleague, who was a strong rower, explained
to Beaumont that he had become overwhelmed by
the situation. “I was completely out of my league,”
he told him. “I thought the best thing to do was
take up as little room as possible in the life-raft,
shut my eyes and wait for it to pass, whether that
was to die or be rescued.”
The chances are you will never find yourself in a
disaster situation. But it’s a good idea to imagine
that you will: to be aware that there are threats out
there, and that you can prepare for them, without
sliding into paranoia. “All you have to do is ask
yourself one simple question,” says Leach. “If
something happens, what is my first response?
Once you can answer that, everything else will fall
into place. It’s that simple.”