Yemeni Flight's Lone Survivor

I am fascinated by the story of the 14-year-old woman who has turned out to be the lone survivor of the recent Yemeni airplane crash.

It's absolutely amazing to me that one, singular person could come out alive while 153 others died. 

Of course luck and chance must have played a role in her survival. But I can't help but think of Amanda Ripley's wondeful book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes. In this book, Ripley researches the thought-processes and brain chemistry of people who are able to survive major disasters. I just can't get away from the thought that there must be something outstanding about this young woman.   

I wonder what it is about this girl that makes her such a survivor. Her uncle has stated that she had a broken collar bone, had hit her head, had burns to her knees, and still managed to cling to plane wreckage for hours. According to one report, it was 13.5 hours. 

After Near-Death Experience on a Plane

An interesting article in the NY Times today about the range of reactions people have after near-death experiences on airplanes.

Some, as expected, are traumatized and experience post-traumatic stress.

“But others come through the trauma re-energized, with new sense of living and vitality — they’re very grateful, and feel blessed to have survived.” This according to Kenneth Manges, a clinical psychologist in Cincinnati. The article goes on to point out that this mirrors what researchers call near-death experiences, in which people — surgical patients, heart attack victims who have been resuscitated — report transformational experiences, in the fogged cleft between life and death.

However, still others feel burdened by the expectation that they should have had some sort of epiphany about life come out of their near-death experience.

What the article points to most, I think, is that, what was happens in the heads of people who survive plane crashes varies wildly, despite certain expectations that are often put upon them.

An excellent, step-by-step account from an O'Reilly interview that goes trough what Flight 1549 survivor Fred Beretta was experiencing and thinking/feeling. It overgeneralizes more than this article would suggest is accurate, but it gets at what Beretta is thinking very well.



And another survivor of the same flight who seems a little more rattled.

Averted Disaster

Since hearing of yesterday's plane crash, I've been wondering a lot about what Amanda Ripley would think of the averted disaster.

Ripley authored the book The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why, and I've blogged about her work before.

Well, The New York Times has answered my question with an interview with the woman herself! As you would expect, she praises the survivors calm thinking and orderly behavior.

And she also notes, that the pilot's landing, while laudable, is only one part of the survival equation. Another great step he took was getting on the intercom and warming passengers to brace for impact. Ripley says, "We know people are so obedient in disasters, so it's really helpful to get that kind of command."

I recommend the interview, and I also highly recommend the book. It goes in-depth into how the human brain responds when put into extreme, disaster scenarios. It might help you survive a disaster, but if nothing else, it's a fascinating read, and treats a dramatic topic in a non-sensationalistic manner.

You have minutes to escape—forget the stuff!

KUOW's Weekday had a show this morning asking listeners to call in and share what item they would take with them if their house were on fire. I'm just finishing up Amanda Ripley's amazing book on disasters, so this is all particularly fresh in my mind ... but please ... if your house is on fire, don't take anything with you. Just get out!

Make sure your family and pets are safe if you must and then get out. One of the reasons people die in emergencies is because they go through an urge to gather—looking around them, trying to decide what they need to take with them. According to Ripley's research and interviews, when planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, some workers looked around their cubes and deliberated whether they needed their purses, the mystery novel they were reading, etc., before they left. It slows down the mental process. And the faster you can get your conscious brain to move into the message that it's time to escape, the better off you are.

I wish Weekday hadn't perpetuated this dangerous notion that everyone has time to pick one dear object. It's not true. Not everyone even has time to escape a fire alive. And that should be the one and only priority if you ever find yourself in a fire. Forget the Rick Steves DVDs. (That was one of the items mentioned on the program today.) No thing matters as much as preserving life when it comes down to it.

Don't let your subconscious brain decide that, in an emergency, there is time to grab one important thing. The last thing you need to do in a disaster is waste time deciding which one object is most important to grab.

Most common causes of accidental death

When you worry about dying in an accident, what do you worry about? Earthquakes? Plane crashes? Terrorist attacks? Hurricanes? According to author Amanda Ripley, what we most worry about has nothing to do with what we are most at risk for.

What are the most common causes of accidental death?

1. automobile accidents
2. poisonings
3. falling

I'll be most people could have guessed number one. Two and three surprised me though. I have NEVER worried about being poisoned to death or dying by falling, at least not since I was a child and playing make-believe.

Ripley uses dread to explain the disconnect. And I'm over-simplifying a bit here in order to summarize, but here's a nifty equation she came up with to explain what is likely to scare us:

Dread = Uncontrollability + Unfamiliarity + Imaginability + Suffering + Scale of Destruction + Unfairness

Take an automobile accident for example: it's on a small scale, most likely; you have control because you can drive the vehicle; it's familiar to most of us; and when car crashes happen, they're quick, so the time for suffering is short.

Contrast that with a plane crash in which you wouldn't have control; it could be minutes between when the cause of a crash occurs and the plan actually crashes; the scale is usually much larger with many more deaths; and it's usually much more catastrophic in our imaginations.

So, even though it would be more rational to fear a car crash over a plane crash, many of us probably find the scales tipped the other way when it comes to anxiety.

Regular People

I've just started reading The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—And Why by Amanda Ripley. I picked up the book because of a gripping interview Ripley gave on the Diane Rehm show, so I was pretty certain I would like the book before I started it.

Ripley's work is fascinating. She studies the way people behave in disasters by interviewing survivors and putting herself through disaster simulations to look at two things:

1) what happens to people during disasters; and
2) what types of people survive disasters.

As I said, I've only just started, but already, I'm really impressed by one facet of her research: Ripley's focus on regular people. She writes:

"These days, we tend to think of disasters as acts of God and government. Regular people only feature into the equation as victims, which is a shame. Because regular people are the most important people at a disaster scene, every time" (p. xiii).

Ripley goes on to cite the example of a series of sewer explosions in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1992. "Regular people" had used car jacks to lift rubble off of survivors; they used garden hoses to force air into voids in which people were trapped. Nearly all of those who ended up being rescued were rescued in the first two hours—by "regular people"—before medics, police, government officials, or search dogs could even reach the scene (p. xiii).