Fire Marshals in 1993
The quote on training comes from Rita F. Fahy and Guylène Proulx, “Collective Common Sense: A Study of Human Behavior During the World Trade Center Evacuation,” NFPA Journal (Mar./Apr. 1995): 59–67. The emphasis is mine.
9/11 Commission
The testimony of Alan Reiss can be found here: www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing11/reiss_statement.pdf. The rest of this invaluable report can be seen here: http://www.9-11commission.gov/. Details on the repeater system start on page 297.
CHAPTER 2: RISK
Hurricane Katrina Evacuation
New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin’s quotes come from the Associated Press and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, both dated August 28, 2005.
For a summary of the evacuation’s little-known success stories, see Coleman Warner, “Contrarians Call Katrina Evacuation a Success,” New-house News Service, Dec. 28, 2005. The figure about the number of carless households in New Orleans comes from the U.S. Census Bureau, 2004 Community Survey.
For the prescient five-part report on what a major hurricane would do to New Orleans, see John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, “In Harm’s Way,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 23, 2002, and the rest of the series, running through June 27, 2002.
Unintended Consequences of War
For more on this general concept, see Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan.
As for the U.S. finding that the Iraq war became a “cause célèbre” for jihadists, you can see declassified portions of the report here: www.dni.gov/press_releases/Declassified_NIE_Key_Judgments.pdf.
Hurricane Katrina
Knight Ridder’s analysis of 486 Katrina victims showed that black victims outnumbered whites by 51 percent to 44 percent. But in the area overall, blacks outnumbered whites by 61 percent to 36 percent. The database was compiled from official government information as well as interviews with survivors of the dead. The database is far from complete. But Knight Ridder found similar patterns in another analysis comparing the locations where 874 bodies were recovered to U.S. census tract data. For more, see John Simerman, Dwight Ott, and Ted Mellnik, “Stats Shake Beliefs About Hurricane; New Information About Katrina Suggests That Victims Weren’t Disproportionately Poor or Black,” Knight Ridder Newspapers, Dec. 30, 2005.
Max Mayfield’s quote comes from a speech I saw him deliver at the National Association of Government Communicators conference in Baltimore on May 25, 2006. The poll of New Orleans residents who did not evacuate is from Mollyann Brodie et al., “Experiences of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees in Houston Shelters: Implications for Future Planning,” Research and Practice (Mar. 29, 2006).
Competing Causes of Death
For a list of the leading causes of deaths in the United States, see “Deaths: Final Data for 2003,” National Vital Statistics Reports 54, no. 13 (Apr. 19, 2006); http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr54/nvsr54_13.pdf/.
The odds of killing yourself versus being killed by someone else come from David Ropeik and George Gray, Risk, Appendix 1.
Kahneman and Tversky
Both men were prolific, but one of their most important papers on risk is Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk.”
The Donut Quiz
This classic problem has been cited in many studies, including Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 25–42.
Increased Driving Fatalities After 9/11
There have been at least two other studies illustrating this phenomenon. I’ve chosen here to cite the results of the most comprehensive one: Garrick Blalock, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Daniel H. Simon, “Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism,” accepted for publication in Applied Economics in 2007. Another study, which did not control for as many factors and looked only at rural interstate highway deaths, found that an estimated fifteen hundred Americans died after 9/11 because they drove instead of flying: Gerd Gigerenzer, “Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire: Behavioral Reactions to Terrorist Attacks,” Risk Analysis 26, no. 2 (2006).
One other interesting factoid from the third study on this subject: for any trip over thirty-six kilometers (in other words, any trip in which flying is even an option), the air remains safer than the road, according to Michael Sivack and Michael J. Flannagan, “Flying and Driving after the September 11 Attacks,” American Scientist (Jan./Feb. 2003).
The Personalities of Hazards
Paul Slovic, The Perception of Risk.
Fire Deaths
The National Fire Protection Association has a wealth of information on fires—when they happen, why, and what would prevent them from happening. It’s all on their website at www.nfpa.org.
Least Hazardous States
This list comes from Dennis Mileti’s Disasters by Design, which was published in 1999. The list can be expected to change with time.
Three Mile Island
See Robert A. Stallings, “Evacuation Behavior at Three Mile Island.”
The Lake Wobegon Effect
The data on Hurricane Floyd drownings come from: “Morbidity and Mortality Associated with Hurricane Floyd—North Carolina, September–October 1999,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 49, no. 17 (May 5, 2000): 369–372.
Men are more than twice as likely as women to die during a thunderstorm, according to a study by Thomas J. Songer at the University of Pittsburgh, which is described here: “Seventy Percent of Thunderstorm-Related Deaths Occur in Men,” Public Health (Fall 2003).
The survey of people living in hurricane zones is here: Robert J. Blendon et al., “High-Risk Area Hurricane Survey.”
For more on our tendency toward unrealistic optimism, see Shelley E. Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind 10–11; and Neil Weinstein, “Unrealistic Optimism About Susceptibility to Health Problems: Conclusions from a Community-wide Sample,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine. The survey measuring predictions of terrorism risk is here: Jennifer S. Lerner, Roxana M. Gonzalez, Deborah A. Small, and Baruch Fischhoff, “Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism: A National Field Experiment,” Psychological Science 14, no. 2 (Mar. 2003).
The Connection Between Weather and Stocks
See David Hirshleifer and Tyler Shumway, “Good Day Sunshine: Stock Returns and the Weather.”
Our Dependence on Emotions
For the full story of Elliot, see Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error.
Crafting Better Warnings
The survey of passengers involved in airplane evacuations comes from: National Transportation Safety Board, Emergency Evacuation of Commercial Airplanes. And for more on the suggestions of U.K. civilians, see Lauren J. Thomas, Sophie O’Ferrall, and Antoinette Caird-Daley, Evacuation Commands for Optimal Passenger Management.
Dennis Mileti is one of the foremost experts on warnings in the world. He has published hundreds of reports on the subject. For one of his very helpful primers, see Dennis Mileti et al., “Public Hazards Communication and Education: The State of the Art,” Natural Hazards Informer.
Newspaper accounts of “freak” falling deaths are actually very easy to find. Here are the sources for the two examples I cited: Louise Hosie, “Toddler Dies After Cutting Neck on Vase,” Scottish Press Association, and “Young Polish Man’s Dream of New Life Ends in Tragedy,” Wexford People.
Gambling and the Brain
To understand more about what happens to your brain in a casino, see Camelia M. Kuhnen and Brian Knutson, “The Neural Basis of Financial Risk Taking,” Neuron.
Case Studies—Good Warnings and Bad
The story of Vanuatu comes from Costas Synolakis, “Self-Centered West’s Narrow Focus Puts Lives at Risk,” The Times Higher Education Supplement.
The Bangladesh example comes from Philippa Howell, “Indigenous Early Warning Indicators of Cyclones: Potential Application in Coastal Bangladesh,” Disaster Studies Working Paper 6.
&n
bsp; Tilly Smith’s quote about the tsunami comes from Duncan Larcombe’s article in The Sun.
The Personal Strategies of Risk Experts
When I interviewed risk experts, I asked them how their studies had influenced their own behavior. They had different answers, depending upon their lifestyles and the focus of their research. But the one response I heard from at least three different experts was that they do one main thing differently: they don’t drive unless they have to.
The quote from Bruce Schneier comes from the May 17, 2007, entry on his blog: www.schneier.com/blog.
Television News
For more on how TV footage of disasters correlates with stress levels, see M.A. Schuster et al., “A National Survey of Stress Reactions After the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks,” New England Journal of Medicine.
CHAPTER 3: FEAR
The 1980 Hostage Crisis in Colombia
Asencio’s story is drawn from my interview with him, as well as news articles from the time and his own book on the subject: Diego and Nancy Asencio with Ron Tobias, Our Man Is Inside.
The Brain and Fear
One of the best in-depth descriptions of how the brain processes fear—and all emotions—is The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux.
The data about the fear reactions of World War II soldiers is from Samuel Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, Vol. II.
The study of 115 law enforcement officers involved in shooting incidents is here: J. Michael Rivard et al., “Acute Dissociative Responses in Law Enforcement Officers Involved in Critical Shooting Incidents: The Clinical and Forensic Implications,” Journal of Forensic Science.
Self-Talk in Crisis Moments
The story of a soldier’s conversation with himself comes from Mark Bowden’s book, Guests of the Ayatollah.
Perceptual Distortions in Police Shootings
Ninety-five percent of eighty officers involved in shootings reported having experienced some kind of distortion during the incident—from tunnel vision to auditory blunting to slow-motion time—according to David Klinger, “Police Responses to Officer-Involved Shootings,” NIJ Journal, no. 253 (Jan. 2006).
Interestingly, another study of forty-four officers found that 9 percent actually experienced an out-of-body experience during shooting. See R. M. Solomon and J. M. Horn, “Post-Shooting Traumatic Reactions: A Pilot Study,” in Psychological Services for Law Enforcement, ed. J.T. Reese and H. A. Goldstein (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986), 383–394.
The story of the police officer who saw “beer cans” floating past his face comes from Alexis Artwohl, “Perceptual and Memory Distortion During Officer-Involved Shootings,” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin (Oct. 2002): 18; www.fbi.gov/publications/leb/2002/oct02leb.pdf/.
Slow-Motion Time
At press time, Eagleman’s results (co-authored with his graduate students Chess Stetson and Matthew Fiesta) are under review for publication. He shared the results with me over the phone and via e-mail.
For more on this subject, also see the fascinating work of Peter Hancock, a professor at the University of Central Florida who researches time distortion and other stress effects for the U.S. military; http://www.mit.ucf.edu/timeperception.asp.
Learning to Do Better
For more on how police officers learn to master their fear response, see Alexis Artwohl and Loren W. Christensen, Deadly Force Encounters.
The importance of knowledge in reducing injury rates on 9/11 is from Gershon’s survey.
For more on Siddle’s combat-performance research, see Bruce K. Siddle, Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge.
Tunnel Vision
To experience a mild version of this phenomenon for yourself, check out the video demos put together by the Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois: http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.htm.
The details on the crash of the Eastern Air Lines jet in 1972 come from the official investigation: National Transportation Safety Board, Eastern Air Lines, Inc., L-1011, N310EA, Miami, Florida, December 29, 1972.
The story of the crash-landing of United Flight 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989 comes largely from the recollections of Al Haynes, the plane’s captain, which can be found here: airdisaster.com/eyewitness/ua232.shtml.
The preliminary results of the Rhode Island cell-phone study come from the following press release: http://www.uri.edu/news/releases/html/ 02-0610.htm.
Learning to Do Better, Part II
The juggling study is here: Bogdan Draganski et al., “Neuroplasticity: Changes in Grey Matter Induced by Training,” Nature 427 (Jan. 22,2004): 311–312.
A description of Darren Laur’s knife-attack experiment can be found here: Darren Laur, “The Anatomy of Fear and How It Relates to Survival Skills Training,” http://www.lwcbooks.com/articles/anatomy.htm.
For the study on the brains of meditators, see Sara W. Lazar et al., “Meditation Experience Is Associated with Increased Cortical Thickness,” NeuroReport.
On the importance of control, real and imagined, see J. Amat et al., “Medial Prefrontal Cortex Determines How Stressor Controllability Affects Behavior and Dorsal Raphe Nucleus,” Nature Neuroscience 8, no. 3 (Mar. 2005).
Rosemberg Pabón, aka Commandante Uno
The quotes from Pabón, the hostage-taker-turned-government-functionary, come from the only interview I did not do myself. Sibylla Brodzinsky, a reporter in Bogotá, conducted the interview on my behalf, and I am grateful for her excellent work.
CHAPTER 4: RESILIENCE
Resilience Defined
Over the past five years or so, disaster researchers and trauma psychologists have begun to focus more on the people who recover from disasters—instead of the people who don’t. This is a massive and important shift, and it comes, naturally, with jargon. In clinical and research circles, the words resilience, recovery, resistance, and hardiness are all separate but related concepts. Because this is a book for the layperson, I hope the experts will forgive me for using the word resilience to mean, in a way, all of the above. Resilience, in this book, refers to whatever it is that makes some people able to perform extraordinarily well during a disaster—and then recover relatively quickly and fully afterward. For more on resilience, see Al Siebert, The Survivor Personality.
Physical Fitness
For more on the effect of obesity in car accidents, see Charles N. Mock et al., “The Relationship Between Body Weight and Risk of Death and Serious Injury in Motor Vehicle Crashes,” Accident Analysis and Prevention 34, no. 2 (Mar. 2002): 221–228.
The increased odds of people with low physical ability getting injured on 9/11 comes from Gershon’s survey of Trade Center evacuees.
Gender
For more on how race and gender subtly shape our risk equation, see Dan M. Kahan et al., “Culture and Identity-Protective Cognition: Explaining the White Male Effect in Risk Perception,” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
The Oxfam study on the female victims of the tsunami is here: Oxfam International, “The Tsunami’s Impact on Women,” Oxfam Briefing Note (Mar. 2005).
The greater likelihood for females to have been injured in the Trade Center comes from Gershon’s survey data.
Poverty
The data on African American and American Indian fire fatalities come from U.S. Fire Administration/National Fire Data Center, Fire in the United States 1992–2001, 13th edition (Emmitsburg, MD: U.S. Fire Administration, Oct. 2004).
For more on the effect of poverty on disasters worldwide, see James McCarthy et al., eds., “Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Insurance and Other Financial Services (2001), 451–486; and Matthew E. Kahn, “The Death Toll from Natural Disasters: The Role of Income, Geography and Institutions,” Review of Economics and Statistics 87, no. 2 (May 2005): 271–284.
The comparison between the Northridge and the Pakistani earthquake was made by geophysicist John C. Mutter in the following arti
cle: Claudia Dreifus, “Earth Science Meets Social Science in Study of Disasters,” New York Times, Mar. 14, 2006, Science Desk.
Arrogance
For more on resilience overall and the survival value of self-confidence specifically, see George A. Bonanno, “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?” American Psychologist 59, no. 1 (Jan. 2004): 20–28.
Military Research
For more on Charles Morgan’s study of soldiers at Survival School, see Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Plasma Neuropeptide-Y Concentrations in Humans Exposed to Military Survival Training,” Biological Psychiatry and Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Relationship Among Plasma Cortisol, Catecholamines, Neuropeptide Y, and Human Performance During Exposure to Uncontrollable Stress,” Psychosomatic Medicine.
The questionnaire used in Morgan’s study was the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale. The three sample questions listed in this book are adapted from this questionnaire. For more on this evaluation tool, see J. D. Bremner et al., “Measurement of Dissociative States with the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale (CADSS),” Journal of Traumatic Stress 11 (1998): 125–136.
For Morgan’s findings on dissociation in soldiers, see Charles A. Morgan III et al., “Symptoms of Dissociation in Humans Experiencing Acute, Uncontrollable Stress: A Prospective Investigation,” American Journal of Psychiatry.
As for the Vietnam veteran twins, for Mark Gilbertson’s study on the relative size of the brothers’ hippocampi, see Mark W. Gilbertson et al., “Smaller Hippocampal Volume Predicts Pathologic Vulnerability to Psychological Trauma,” Nature Neuroscience.
For Gilbertson’s analysis of the twins’ overall cognitive performance, see Mark W. Gilbertson et al., “Neurocognitive Function in Monozygotic Twins Discordant for Combat Exposure: Relationship to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 115, no. 3 (2006): 484–495.
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