Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (20 page)

McCollister herself picked up the train of her dress and wrapped it around her waist. She put her aunt and uncle in a jeep that was taking people away from the scene. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw one of her other friends leave with her husband. They had medical training, but they left. She was appalled. “You just don’t leave.” The women had been close friends, and McCollister was supposed to be in the woman’s wedding shortly after her own. But she never spoke to her again. The woman had abandoned the group.

Along with her new husband, McCollister joined a human chain that had formed to pull people out of the Cabaret Room, just off the garden. This room in particular seemed to have no end of victims. Most of them were dead or dying when they came out. One stranger died in her husband’s arms. Finally a firefighter decided to close the doors to contain the fire.

The Science of Evacuation

For a long time, engineers assumed people would move out of a building like water. They would fill the space they had, coursing down the staircases and flowing out to safety like a river of humanity. Buildings were constructed accordingly. The problem is, people don’t move like water.

Ed Galea has spent his career trying to understand crowd behavior in fires. He manages a team of mathematical modelers, behavioral psychologists, and engineers at the University of Greenwich, Old Royal Navy College Campus, in London. In his office in an ancient building alongside the river Thames, he has three framed photos of the burning World Trade Center. Another wall is decorated with eight pictures of train wrecks, plane crashes, and other assorted tragedies. If another man worked here, such a display might seem odd, even callous. But when I meet Galea here on a summer morning, it quickly becomes clear that he takes every disaster personally. I sit down amid the piles of videotapes and books, and we speak without interruption for four hours. Galea’s intensity is contagious. He knows more about human behavior in fires than almost anyone in the world, and he agonizes over the needless loss of lives.

Galea is from Australia, where he trained as an astrophysicist. His specialty was using computer models to describe how magnetic stars are born. But not many people would pay him for this service. So he took a rather dull job as an industrial mathematician in the steel industry. He moved to the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s, and, not long afterward, an airplane caught fire during takeoff in Manchester, England. It was a bizarre accident. The Boeing 737 never became airborne, and firefighters quickly doused the plane in foam. There was no crash, just a fire. The last survivor was pulled out five minutes after the plane had come to a stop. And yet fifty-five people still died. Why hadn’t they gotten out? In standard evacuation tests, this type of plane had been evacuated in just seventy-five seconds. What had gone wrong? “I couldn’t understand how fifty-five people could have died. That caught my attention.”

Fire modeling had only just begun, and the United Kingdom led the world. After London burned down twice—in 1212 and 1666—the country became a world model for fire safety. The first seminar on human behavior in fire was held at the University of Surrey in 1977. Galea managed to talk his way onto a project studying the crash at the University of Greenwich in London. But most of the early models were based on how fire moves in relatively small square rooms. And none could explain what happened on the Manchester flight. When Galea and his colleagues modeled the crash, they were amazed at how fast the fire could spread from one of the engines to the fuselage and then inside the cabin, filling the plane with black, toxic smoke. But that still didn’t explain the casualty rate on the flight. “We understood the fire, but why did so many people die? Why couldn’t they get out?”

So Galea decided to create a model to explain not the fire but the people. It was a revolutionary idea. He took the idea to the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority, which had funded his original model. They turned him down. “They said, ‘This is impossible. You might be able to model fire but you can’t model people.’ To me, that was like waving a red flag in front of a bull.”

Galea is a confident man. His website features nine photos of himself, including several of him receiving a prize for his work from Queen Elizabeth II in 2003. There are also pictures of his desk, from multiple vantage points. This is not a man to be easily put off. So Galea did what desperate professors do: he got some graduate students to work for free. For one year, they constructed a very crude model based on the scant research available into human behavior. It was called EXODUS. When Galea showed U.K. Aviation officials what he’d come up with, they agreed to give him funding—and have been doing so ever since.

The problem with treating people like water is that water molecules do not experience pain or fear. Water molecules don’t make decisions, and they don’t stumble or fall. Human beings, on the other hand, fill a space unevenly, in clusters. They take shortcuts and pause to rest when they can. Once committed to a path, they don’t easily change course. Groupthink has a momentum of its own.

EXODUS tries to treat people like people. Each evacuee receives a specific age, name, sex, breathing rate, and running speed, among other characteristics. Then EXODUS gives individuals behavioral capacities “so they can make decisions.” For instance, until EXODUS, models assumed that people would begin to evacuate as soon as an alarm went off. Of course, anyone who has ever heard a fire alarm knows this is not what happens. With EXODUS, evacuees have lives and brains. Before leaving, each performs certain tasks—like grabbing a briefcase or searching for a child. And they have the ability to see an exit sign—and follow it—or not. (In experiments with real human beings, Galea has found that many people simply fail to see exit signs, even when they are in plain view. It remains unclear why.)

Most important, the newest version of EXODUS recognizes that people move in groups. That is a difficult behavior to model, which is partly why so few models have ever tried to do it. But it is essential. Galea and his colleagues have analyzed a database of 1,295 survivor accounts from plane accidents. About half of the survivors said they were traveling with someone else at the time of the accident.

EXODUS helped Galea understand that passengers on the Manchester flight had not reacted like synchronized swimmers. Some remained frozen in their seats. Others climbed frantically over seat backs, while still others piled up at an overly narrow exit row, slowing the evacuation to a standstill. One passenger tried to open the exit door beside her, not realizing that she was actually yanking on her armrest. Human behavior, combined with the noxious mix of smoke, heat, and gases, meant that the passengers had very poor odds of getting out.

Today, Galea’s software is used in thirty-five countries. Galea would prefer that it be used before a fire—before a structure is even built. But it is often used as a forensic tool during investigations. The country with the most licenses—and a history shot through with disasters—is Korea. The United States has been “very backward in adopting this kind of technology in the design stage,” he says. “It’s very dangerous.” Before 9/11, most U.S. buildings were constructed without the help of any evacuation modeling at all, he says. Now, models are in vogue, but they vary dramatically in quality. Many of them still treat people like water.

I ask Galea when most architects, engineers, and regulators started taking human behavior seriously. “They’re still not,” he says. “We’re sometimes still told that EXODUS is too complex and has too much human behavior. They want to know, ‘If I have someone here, how long will it take to get out?’ They don’t want to know how they move or if they move in groups. These guys who build buildings don’t want to know about this.”

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

To get a better idea of what it might feel like to be in a fire, I visited the burn tower at the training academy of the Kansas City Fire Department. Kansas City has just under 450,000 people, and the fire department is the first responder for every emergency call. Each year, Kansas City firefighters respond to nearly sixty thousand requests—or 164 calls a day.

Tommy Walker, the Kansas City Fire Department’s chief of training, insists on picking me up from the airport in a typical display of firefighter hospitality. He is a rail-thin man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a gee-whiz manner who nevertheless swears like a truck driver. He’s also one of the friendliest, most patient men you’ll ever meet, so it’s a little startling every time he calls someone a “piece of shit” or a “sonofabitch,” which is often. “If I say someone’s a ‘piece of shit,’ that’s a compliment,” he explains in his Mr. Rogers voice. “I hope I don’t offend you with my language.”

Like all good fire chiefs, Walker gets evangelical when he talks about training. After eight weeks of classroom work, his cadets spend ten weeks enduring every kind of simulated hell he can invent. He makes them climb stairs through thick smoke on their hands and knees, stand next to a live fire until they can’t take the heat anymore, and crawl through a maze blindfolded until they get tangled in wires and have to cut their way out. He has seen every kind of human fear reaction, and he wants to evoke them all before a firefighter gets into a real fire. “You would be surprised at the number of people who are utterly panicked by a loss of vision,” he says. “So we find that out before we get them hot.” In every class of cadets, about 10–14 percent don’t make it through the training. “Some people just don’t take to it. I’d like to be a brain surgeon, too, but not everybody’s supposed to be a brain surgeon.” Nationwide, fire departments lose about two people a year to training accidents. But the training is so important that the risk is considered worthwhile.

To find out if I would get panicked, Walker took me out back. The burn tower is a six-story concrete, fiber, and sheet-metal structure full of old furniture and kindling. Charred La-Z-Boys, broken lamps, and worn sofas are scattered about, making the place look like a frat house that devolved into a crack house. The furniture is donated by the firefighters and their relatives, and the kindling comes from old pallets contributed by the local warehouses. The floors and ceilings are coated in black soot, and the air is acrid from thousands of training burns.

To simulate a fire, Walker’s instructors turn on the smoke. The artificial smoke is made from banana oil, which is cheap to buy and turns into thick, gray nontoxic smoke when it is atomized. Before we go in, they take me to the storeroom and dress me up in full firefighter gear, which I have to confess is totally cool. (They really do wear suspenders.) But then we go into the tower and the metal door clangs behind us. And for a moment, I actually think I might turn and run right out the door.

One thing most people don’t understand about fires is that the smoke is the main event. It is what makes it nearly impossible to find your way out. Your eyes literally close to protect you from the smoke, and you can’t get them open again. It’s an involuntary defense mechanism. Smoke is also by far the thing most likely to kill you. Firefighters rarely see a burned body. Toxic smoke from a smoldering fire can kill you in your sleep before any flames are even visible. That’s why it’s so important to have a smoke detector with a working battery.

Inside the tower, in the utter blackness, I turn on a flashlight. It doesn’t help much, since the light just reflects off the smoke like headlights in fog. In this case, my firefighter escort has an infrared imaging camera that helps identify living bodies and offers a glimpse of the terrain. We can see ourselves, ghostly silhouettes on the screen. But normal people, of course, won’t have any such help in a real fire. We creep along the wall, groping our way to the staircase and then counting the steps so that we can remember the number on our way back down. It is hard to imagine getting out of any unfamiliar structure in this darkness, especially in intense heat. In this case, there is no heat, but once we go through a few rooms, I still do not think I could get out in under two hours if I were on my own. I am in a group of two, but it is clear, even in a simulation, that it would be insane to leave my group. Two groping blind people are better than one.

Noise is the other thing most people do not expect in fires. In general, noise dramatically increases stress, and stress, as we know, makes it much harder to think and make decisions. Firefighters have learned to listen to the roar of a fire. “Sometimes you go in a fire, and it’s hot all around you. Your knees are hot, your ears are hot, the walls are hot. But you can’t see the fire,” Walker says. “You stop. You turn to the other guys with you and you say, ‘Shut the fuck up.’ And you can hear where the fire is coming from. It snaps and pops, and usually in that situation it’s right below you or adjacent to you.”

Just to make things even more challenging, fires grow exponentially. Every ninety seconds, a fire roughly doubles in size. Flashover, when the flammable smoke in the air ignites, thereby igniting everything in the room, usually occurs five to eight minutes after the flames appear. At that point, the environment can no longer support human life.

Firefighting technology has improved in quantum leaps over the past fifty years. Today, smoke detectors and sprinkler systems save thousands of lives. But fires have gotten hotter at the same time. Construction materials are far less fire-resistant today than they were just twenty-five years ago. Lightweight roof trusses can collapse after just five minutes in direct flames. Plastic furnishings serve as fuel. So a fire in a modern house requires far more water, applied sooner, than the same fire in a hundred-year-old structure.

Richard Gist, a psychologist with the fire department, has had to notify hundreds of Kansas City residents that a family member has died in a fire. Over and over again, they ask him why their loved one didn’t simply walk out the door or climb out the window. They have no concept of what it would be like to be in a fire. “I very frequently find myself standing with the survivors in a burned home explaining how their loved one died. They say, ‘Why didn’t they just…?’ You have to explain to them that it was 2:00
A.M
., and they woke up out of a dead sleep.” 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, not an easy thing to remember. That’s why Gist spends much of his time trying to get people to put batteries in their smoke detectors and practice evacuating before a fire, so that escaping becomes automatic. Echoing every disaster expert I’ve ever met, Gist says, “If you have to stop and think it through, then you will not have time to survive.”