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 of 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."Ripley looked into survival rates for the flooded areas of New Orleans during Katrina. Neither race nor income was a good predictor, nor does she attribute the disaster primarily to the incompetence of local officials. At least half of survivors readily admitted they could have left if they'd really wanted to, so why didn't they? Age was a strong predictive factor. Ripley has two theories. One is that people of a certain age had weathered Hurricanes Betsy in 1965 and Camille in 1969, leading to a fatal misapprehension of the risk from Katrina. Those hurricanes, she suggests, killed more people in 2005 than when they hit in 1965 or 1969, just from their impact on attitudes. (The flip side is that twice as many people as expected evacuated during Rita a few week later, an over-reaction that led to its own problems.) Another theory is that many of us, as we age, because gradually less capable of acting decisively to turn our routines on their heads. Heaven knows I don't think we could dislodge my mother-in-law from her house with dynamite, even if a Category 5 storm were bearing directly down on her. We'd have to slip her a Micky and carry her out.
Age aside, though, and strangely, in many fires people don't leap for the exits the way you'd guess they might. You'd like them to go all Jason Bourne, springing into action a nanosecond after perceiving the threat, but instead they stop, consider, mill around, and sometimes inexplicably become rooted to the spot, even before you take into account the intense panic and disorientation that come with heavy smoke. Ripley's Kansas City contact told her about training sessions in which young firefighters were made to crawl blindly through smoke until they were tangled in wires, from which they had to cut themselves loose. The very thought makes me want to get up this instant and walk outside, but who knows whether I'd go rigid in the grip of the wires, or take maniacally effective action to break free? I still vividly remember the feral crouch my brain went into when I underwent smoke-filled tunnel training. I kept moving purposefully, but only by an extreme effort of will that didn't leave much room for high-level cognition. I'll never understand how people can spelunk.
"That Bourne--he's hard to catch."
