The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--And Why

Categories: In the News , Science , Nonfiction

Amanda Ripley, a writer for Time magazine has written a fascinating exploration of The Unthinkable:  Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why. 

This isn’t a Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook, although Ripley certainly advocates planning ahead to meet the disasters you’re most likely to face in your life, since in a catastrophic situation you may not be able to rely on emergency response teams. 

It’s more about the reaction process people go through as they face sudden disaster and how each individual’s combination of instinct and experience and training can be lifesaving or fatal in the circumstances.

Through interviews with experts and with survivors of well-known disasters—9/11, the 2006 tsunami, Katrina, the Columbine shootings, and even the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire—Ripley tries to trace the common factors in people’s reactions to catastrophe. 

Ripley recounts the common physical and psychological reactions people have to disaster—denial and delay in reacting, a strange slowing and speeding of time, the loss of sensory input, even a trancelike state.  She reports what experts know about how these reactions vary—does personality, genetics, gender, class, or race affect a person’s likely responses? 

Training certainly does, both in helping people to snap out of the denial phase and in helping them to come up quickly with effective decisions about how to act.  (As she points out, our basic evolved responses and instinctive risk analyses aren’t always the best in modern disasters.) 

Who’s around you and how they react also can make a fundamental difference in your ability to survive, so Ripley also explores the “social” side of disaster, groupthink and panic.  Surprisingly, she reports that group panic is not as common as people think.

And what about heroes?  What makes them react so differently from everyone else?  Is there any way to predict who will react heroically? 

This is very painful reading at times, but it's truly engrossing.