They’ve left late.
They could hardly have chosen a worse spot to congregate. No shelter and a pine plantation across the road. Pine doesn’t burn for long, but it goes up fast and furious. Behind them is the Pheasant Creek store: petrol bowsers, gas bottles, a horde of cars full of petrol. And a fire bearing down on them. A catastrophe about to unfold before his eyes.
No. Not if he has anything to say about it.
SURVIVAL ARC
How do humans respond to disaster? Why is it that some people rise to the challenge of a crisis, taking on roles of leadership, while others either panic or retreat into their shells?
One of the first modern scholars to think seriously about these matters was an Anglican priest by the name of Samuel Prince. Prince happened to be in the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the morning of December 6, 1917 when a French munitions freighter called the Mont Blanc caught fire and exploded. Such was the power of the blast that a fragment of the anchor was thrown more than six kilometres; a gun barrel landed in a lake five and a half kilometres away. In the minutes that followed, the town was subjected to a battery of traumas almost biblical in their scope: the explosion flattened the town, blinding some one thousand people in an instant—many of the town’s residents had been at their office windows, staring with fascination at the ship burning in the harbour.
A tidal wave followed the explosion, then a fire swept through the town. That night the devastated community was hit by a blizzard that finished off many of the injured who were still out in the open. By the time the catastrophe was over, 1963 people lay dead.
Samuel Prince had been eating breakfast at a restaurant near the port when the blast occurred. He rushed to the scene, rendered what assistance he could. But he was more than a cleric: he was a thoughtful observer of human behaviour and a scholar. Certain things he saw that day stayed with him, left him wondering about humanity and how it reacted to calamity.
Why was it, he asked himself, that the first relief station was established by a troupe of travelling actors? How did patients endure emergency operations in the street without apparent pain? How was it that a soldier could spend the day working to assist victims when one of his own eyes had been knocked out?
In 1920 Prince published Catastrophe and Social Change, the first scholarly study of human behaviour in times of crisis. His main concern was that we should learn from disasters. The book begins with an epigram from St Augustine: ‘This awful catastrophe is not the end but the beginning. History does not end so. It is the way its chapters open.’
In the last ninety years psychologists, physiologists, planners and other professionals have taken up Samuel Prince’s baton, and we now know a considerable amount about the normal human response to the abnormal occurrence of disaster.
Not all of it is self-evident. You might expect widespread panic, for example, but disaster studies show that the victims are often calm, orderly, considerate of their fellow victims. Think of those long queues of people patiently making their way down the stairs at the World Trade Center, pausing to let colleagues from lower storeys enter the line, rendering aid to the injured. (One man, a quadriplegic in a wheelchair, was carried by ten of his colleagues down sixty-eight floors.) That is, in fact, a more typical response than panic.
There was evidence of such behaviour whenever people gathered in groups on Black Saturday. John Grover, the CFA captain at Kinglake West, was struck by the manner in which members of the public sheltering at the station helped each other out, assumed positions of leadership, assisted the old and the young. In Kinglake itself, a number of nurses emerged from the crowd and began spontaneously rendering aid to the injured.
But accompanying this willingness to help their fellow victims are other, more complex reactions. Psychologists who have studied the human response to disaster have identified what they term ‘the survival arc’.
The stages on this arc are:
1) Denial
2) Deliberation
3) The decisive moment
Most people who have the misfortune to be caught in a crisis will move through this arc, but they will do it at different tempos, the rate of response governed by their personalities, life experiences and training. Every stage of the arc, it can be argued, is based upon sound evolutionary logic: denial, for example, can help calm you down, give you the mental capacity to move into deliberation mode; deliberating before you act will decrease the chances of your making a fatal mistake.
People in the denial stage of the arc tend to display what psychologists call a ‘normalcy bias’: they can’t believe what’s happening. Things have always worked out okay before, why shouldn’t they now? I’ve never been killed before, why should I be now? Sure, we’ve all got to go some day, but today is never going to be the day.
These folk are seduced by the Lake Wobegon Effect—the town where everyone is above average. This is why 90 percent of drivers believe they are safer than most others, or why three out of four baby boomers imagine they look younger than their peers. Most of us think we are less likely than our neighbours to suffer a divorce, a dismissal or a heart attack.
Initially, at least, we tell ourselves there is no crisis, that everything will be okay. For this reason we tend to be slow to react and reluctant to leave the scene, even when staying increases the danger. During the September 11 attacks, for example, the occupants of the towers waited an average of six minutes before attempting to evacuate. At least a thousand took the time to shut down their computers, 40 percent of them gathered up their belongings. Seventy percent discussed the situation with colleagues before leaving. Many phoned friends and family, sent emails, stood around wondering what they were meant to do now.
Sometimes the response can seem almost like lethargy. In the 1977 Beverley Hills Supper Club fire, for example, people remained passive, waiting for somebody to take control. They were paying customers, after all, and this was a classy joint. The performers kept performing, the diners continued to eat and watch the show as smoke crept in from the kitchen. Whether or not an individual survived was largely a matter of initiative, but not necessarily their own. Sixty percent of the club’s employees tried to help their fellow victims, but only 17 percent of the guests did. One dining room had the good fortune to have an eighteen-year-old busboy with his wits about him who promptly led them all to safety. Others didn’t: many of the 165 dead were found—a bizarre image—still seated at their tables.
All of these phenomena were witnessed on Black Saturday.
‘Normalcy bias’, for example, is one of the reasons people fail to prepare their properties or leave early: they think of wildfire as some sort of distant, abstract threat. Or denial: one of the survivors interviewed for this book described the terrible moment when the fires came thundering over the hill. Her first reaction? This can’t be happening. I’ve been dreading it for years, preparing for weeks, raking and pruning all day, but it can’t be happening.
This denial can add to the indecision. Stay and defend the house, or make yourself scarce? The trouble with a bushfire, of course, is that indecision can be fatal. If you are grappling with the question of whether to stay or go when the fire—or even the smoke—is in sight, you’ve left it too late. The St Andrews firefighters still shake their heads in amazement at the fellow they came across blithely standing on a ridge completely unprotected as the fire bore down upon them all. ‘What do you think I should do now?’ he asked them.
‘I’d suggest you get the fuck out of here,’ somebody yelled from the back of the truck. ‘We are!’
The knowledge that people will act this way is one of the dilemmas the emergency authorities must face. For years they’ve been attempting to hammer home the message: it is your choice whether you stay or go, they say, but if you are going to stay, make sure you are fully prepared. If you are going to leave, leave early. But emergency planners know that many people will attempt a lethal combination of the two: they’ll plan to stay, then make a run for it when they see what a real fire looks
like.
What’s going on in our brains to make us act this way? What happens when we experience fear? Like a lot of other aspects of our behaviour, our responses to imminent danger are governed largely by the most primitive of instincts.
One’s hair, for example, might stand on end. Not a particularly useful reaction these days, but it is probably a genetic remnant of the trait that makes threatened birds flash their feathers, fish their fins. A warning: watch out, I’m bigger than I look.
At the first sign of danger, your neurons transmit a message to the amygdala, an ancient, almond-shaped mass of neurons in the temporal lobe of the brain. This in turn triggers a range of automatic responses throughout the body. The blood vessels will constrict, so that you bleed less. The blood pressure and heart rate shoot up. A slew of hormones—cortisol and adrenaline in the main—surge through the bloodstream, giving the gross-motor muscles a sort of bionic boost (which is why people in fear can be capable of great feats of strength—and also why they sometimes experience an odd chemical taste in the mouth). The muscles become taut, tensed, primed. The body creates its own chemical painkillers. We are ready for action: to flee, fight or defend ourselves.
All of this sounds positive. They all seem like reactions—hardwired into us by evolution—that will help in a crisis. But these primitive responses can also lead to inappropriate outcomes.
Sometimes, for example, the body will simply shut down. There’s more to this than a calculated decision to play dead. A survivor of the Virginia Tech massacre, the only member of his class to come out of the atrocity unharmed, reports that his body was literally numb, frozen with fear. He had no control whatsoever over his normal bodily functions.
To military psychologists, this is a well-documented reaction: in moments of extreme danger, they know, there will always be a certain percentage of soldiers who simply curl up and do nothing. Because of its security implications, physiologists have made extensive studies of this phenomenon: they know that the heart rate and temperature drop, the respiration goes up, the eyes close or gaze ahead, the pupils dilate.
For an individual in this situation, the thinking brain has been bypassed. This is why those closest to a disaster often have little memory of it other than a string of random images. The part of the brain they use for solving everyday problems, even for storing memories, is cut out of the loop. (It is also why some of the stories in this book may seem sketchy or episodic. Virtually everybody interviewed remembers events through an adrenaline-soaked haze: isolated images and incidents predominate; time is distorted.)
Paralysis must have had its evolutionary benefits. For example a predator on the plains of Africa, having learned the dangers of eating rotten prey, would be more likely to leave the unmoving victim alone. You can see this in your own backyard: a bird will instinctively attack and seize a fleeing mouse but ignore a dead one. If you were a small hominid and your attacker had the speed of a leopard and the strength of a tiger, it could be your only option.
But in situations where technology has outstripped evolution, it can increase the danger. Kent Härstedt, a survivor of the sinking of the ferry MS Estonia—the worst sea disaster of modern times— describes seeing large numbers of people standing on the deck doing absolutely nothing as the waves rolled towards them. Others made it to the lifeboats, but then just sat there, clutching the sides, making no attempt to launch the boat as the Estonia slid under the waves. Those passengers were immobilised, frozen with fear. The paralysis reaction may have had its uses in our evolutionary past, but in the case of a sinking ship, it led to death.
‘What we may be witnessing is a situation in which a previously adaptive response has now become maladaptive as a consequence of technological change,’ says Gordon Gallup, an expert on paralysis in animals. ‘Our brains search, under extreme stress, for an appropriate survival response and choose the wrong one, like divers who rip their respirators out of their mouths deep underwater. Or like deer who freeze in the headlights of a car.’
If there is one crisis in which an active response is essential, it is the bushfire. Report after report has emphasised the fact that your best chance of survival is to stay alert, patrol your property, fight for as long as you can stand. The firefighter’s axiom—hit it hard and fast—is as valid on the micro scale as it is on the macro. The crack in the window that lets in the fatal spark may be easily defendable, but you won’t notice it if you’re hiding in the bath—as 27 percent of Black Saturday’s victims were doing when they died. (The bathroom is possibly the most dangerous room in the house: it may have water but it usually has no escape route. Its reputation as a safe haven presumably comes from American tornado culture. Too much Wizard of Oz.)
Another potential consequence of stress is tunnel vision. Individuals can become so fixated upon a particular aspect of their situation that they will ignore others, potentially more fatal. In her excellent book on disasters, Amanda Ripley illustrates this with the story of an air crew coming in to land in Miami. They became so obsessed with the failure of their landing-gear green light to come on that they didn’t notice that they were losing altitude. The resulting crash killed 101 people.
There were many examples of tunnel vision in the stories that emerged from Black Saturday: the resident so worried about embers zapping through a crack in the front window that he didn’t realise the back of the house was engulfed, the firefighter so absorbed by a burning tree in front of him that he didn’t notice the flames roaring up behind.
As cortisol and adrenaline flood the body, they can interfere with that part of the brain responsible for complex thinking so that even the basic ability to reason deteriorates. The most mundane tasks—opening a door, turning on a tap, flicking a switch to start a pump—can become confusing. Emotion overwhelms the brain, often at the expense of reason, sometimes at the expense of other bodily functions—digestion, salivation and bladder control—which the amygdala recognises as less important to immediate survival. A Kinglake firefighter remembers a mother scrambling up onto the truck with her kids, then apologising because they had wet their pants. ‘They’re not the only ones,’ he replied, glancing at his crewmates.
None of these reactions, it should be remembered, are signs of moral failing: of cowardice, incompetence or irresponsibility. They are genetically programmed automatic responses to an abnormal situation that need to be understood if we are to improve our responses in the future.
Nevertheless it is true that while some people curl up and die, others automatically swing into action. Why? Genetics has a lot to do with it. Research into animal behaviour has found that the tendency to paralysis, for example, is passed on to offspring.
But in our own species the most effective response is based upon a solid foundation of preparation, training and experience. The more familiar the situation, the less chance of the brain shutting down or succumbing to the more extreme manifestations of stress. That is why firefighters practise such basic skills as bowling out hoses and operating pumps until their arms ache; they need those procedures to become ingrained, automatic. That is why every family in the bushfire zones should practise fire drills until the kids are screaming with boredom.
Police officers like Roger Wood and Cameron Caine had the kind of training and experience that made them less likely to go into panic mode or develop tunnel vision. One of the firefighters who encountered Wood at a critical moment later that night was struck by the way in which he seemed to be able simultaneously to maintain a conversation, issue instructions, make decisions and monitor the wellbeing of the people around him.
Obviously the better the training, the more effective it will be, but it need not be formal or organised. A ten-year-old English schoolgirl named Tilly Smith was on a beach in Thailand in 2004 when suddenly the tide ran out and the water began to bubble strangely. The beach was full of tourists standing around staring at the phenomenon, but Tilly’s class had seen a video about tsunamis two weeks before and she recognised the signs. She alerted
her parents, who organised a frantic evacuation of the beach minutes before the wave struck. It turned out to be one of the few in the area on which nobody was killed.
Another important element is leadership, particularly when those affected by the disaster have clustered, as they tend to do. Coming together for mutual support is a natural instinct. On September 11, 70 percent of the survivors discussed the situation with the people around them before taking any action. After the 2005 London transit bombings some victims refused to leave the Undergound, so reluctant were they to abandon the groups they’d formed.
Again, Black Saturday has its parallels. One survivor said that she was terrified to leave the truck that had rescued her, so desperate was she to remain with the group.
‘What you actually look for in these circumstances is someone who can tell you what to do,’ said Ian, a victim of the London tube bombings. ‘Even if it’s just a basic “Stay here” or “Move there”, you just need guidance, because you are a bit all over the place, as you can imagine.’ For Ian, badly injured, the most comforting thing he heard was the voice of the driver telling him to make his way out of the tunnel.
If individuals or groups demonstrate any of the negative responses outlined above—paralysis, tunnel vision, indecision—their best hope is that somebody will stand up and take control. They need people with training and experience, who have been taught to assess risks, to judge the best course of action, encourage others to follow. Massad Ayob, a veteran police officer and trainer commented: ‘The single strongest weapon is a mental plan of what you’ll do in a certain crisis. And an absolute commitment to do it, by god, if the crisis comes to pass.’
Leadership. Experience. Judgment. A commitment to a plan. When the two police officers came together at Pheasant Creek, the crowd had a pair of leaders who ticked those boxes.
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