Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (30 page)

The easiest way to get a paralyzed animal to snap out of its daze is to make a loud noise, Gallup found. The sound of a door slamming shut will do the trick. An animal will start suddenly and try to flee. Sometimes this would happen in the lab by accident: if a researcher sneezed or a car backfired. “Any sudden change will terminate the response,” he says. Otherwise, animals can stay in their trance for hours. They can even die that way. (Gallup has found that about 30 to 40 percent of mice actually die while paralyzed, presumably of cardiac arrest.) The paralysis response is so powerful that “playing dead” can turn into being dead.

Paralysis seems to happen on the steepest slope of the survival arc—when almost all hope is lost, when escape seems impossible, and when the situation is unfamiliar to the extreme. Sometimes it works. But paralysis remains mostly a mystery. Aside from Gallup, very few people have researched it seriously, which is a shame. In a way, the paralysis response is so good that it has had us all fooled. Victims appear motionless, overwhelmed, and useless, so researchers move on to the next subject. But there, trapped in a still life, might be one of the most interesting and problematic defense mechanisms in the animal kingdom.

8

Heroism

A Suicide Attempt on the Potomac River

T
HE SNOW STARTED
out lovely, blurring the edges of Washington’s hard buildings and bleaching the memorials storybook white. But by midafternoon on January 13, 1982, it had turned unforgiving. Great groaning piles of snow fell from the sky like mud. Government employees were liberated early, stacking the city’s streets with traffic. Normally, it took Roger Olian, a sheet-metal worker at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, half an hour to get home. On this day, after driving for two hours, he was only halfway there. It would have been faster to walk.

By the time he got to the Fourteenth Street Bridge, which crosses over the Potomac River from D.C. into Virginia, Olian’s old red Datsun pickup truck was protesting. It had needed a new battery for a while and now it was desperately low on gas, too. Worried the car might stall and never start again, Olian kept the radio and the windshield wipers off.

When the Boeing 737 sliced into the bridge span next to him at 4:01
P. M
., Olian didn’t even see it. Encased in his snow-covered truck, he didn’t hear or feel the crash. It was only when the car in front of him stopped that Olian had any indication that something strange had happened. The driver got out and walked back to his truck. Olian rolled down his window, and the man’s shouts jangled through the snowbound quiet.

“Did you see that?”

“What’s that?”

“A plane! A plane just crashed into the river!” the man screamed.

Olian dismissed him. “I thought, ‘This guy is nuts.’ All I wanted to do was to get out of there.”

But the man kept yelling. “I think that plane might explode!”

“So get in your car and go!” Olian told him, rolling up his window.

The man did as he was told. But as Olian started to follow him, he noticed that the other cars were behaving oddly too. “It was as if you’d dropped food into the middle of an anthill and all of a sudden the ants started to move in weird ways. So I thought, ‘Maybe that guy was right.’” Without thinking too much about what he was doing or how he would start his truck again, Olian eased over to the shoulder and parked. If a plane had gone down without him even noticing, he thought, it must have been a small private plane. “Well, maybe I could see what’s going on,” he said to himself. “Or maybe somebody needs help, maybe I could do something—some nominal thing, and it will be interesting.”

“This Is Not a Small Plane”

What makes a person risk his or her life to save someone else? It’s one thing to carry someone’s briefcase as you evacuate a burning building, or to help a frightened stranger to her feet. Small acts of kindness don’t cost very much, and they have clear evolutionary value, as we’ve seen. But how do we explain truly irrational acts of generosity? Heroism, much as we revere it, is rather incomprehensible. Isn’t it exactly the kind of behavior that should get naturally selected for extinction?

This chapter is about exceptional grace. We have already dissected exceptional failure, known as panic. And we’ve explored the far more common default behavior called paralysis. But for almost every disaster, there is a hero. Sometimes there are hundreds. The following is not a celebration of heroes. That is the topic of many other worthy books. This chapter is an attempt to understand, not applaud; to look the hero straight in the eye and ask: what the hell were you thinking?

As Olian jogged down toward the river, he could make out a dozen other people, drivers like him who’d emerged to investigate. They were clustered on the riverbank tying scarves and jumper cables together, trying to make a lifeline. In the water, about seventy-five to a hundred yards from shore, Olian saw the tail section of a passenger jet. “My first thought was, this is not a small plane,” he remembers. “My second thought was, where is the rest of it?”

As he got closer, Olian saw something else. Six people were in the water, floating amid the pieces of airplane, trying to keep their heads above the slush. They were the passengers. Olian realized immediately that there was no obvious way to save them. The river was frozen over, so no boat could get through. The plane had shattered the ice between it and the shore, making it equally impossible to walk to safety. And the snowstorm was so bad that Olian couldn’t imagine a helicopter making it out. As he approached the river, he could hear the survivors’ calls for help. Their cries bounced across the frozen landscape. “You knew they knew they were in trouble,” Olian says. But the bystanders on the river and on the bridge above could only watch.

As he reached the water, Olian didn’t stop to talk with the people gathered there. He didn’t take off his steel-toed boots or remove the five pounds of keys in his pockets. He just jumped in. He needed to let those people know someone was trying to save them, he said later. That was all. “They had to see someone right now. If I was ever confident of anything in my life, it was this,” he says in his slow, methodical way. “Worst-case scenario, I would be totally ineffective in saving them, but at least I would give them hope.”

Olian is bald now, with a white beard and wire-rimmed glasses that make him look like a man who likes to read classics and collect wine. But he actually spends most of the day outside doing hard physical work. He runs his own small tree service, a profession he took up in 2002 when he was laid off from his government sheet-metal job after twenty-eight years of service. He often works alone, climbing up into the treetops like an acrobat and cutting down unwanted branches. When we meet at his small red-brick home in Arlington, he is wearing a denim shirt, tan jeans, and the kind of earth-tone sneakers you see on people at technology start-ups in Seattle. His long arms hang languorously by his sides, like a basketball player’s.

We sit in the living room, next to the woodstove, which Olian periodically feeds with wood from a symmetrically stacked pile of logs. As we talk, he gently pets Sandy, a miniature poodle and one of two small dogs that he and his wife dote over. For the first half hour or so, Olian doesn’t meet my gaze very often. He stares down at the dog as he describes that strange, long-ago day on the Potomac. When Pumpkin, the other dog, comes over to lick Sandy’s nose, Olian interrupts his story to fuss over them. “Oh, look, they’re kissing!” he says. As he relaxes, Olian looks up more often. Eventually, the dogs move on to other things.

The Hero On Board

Air Florida Flight 90 had taken off that morning with ice and snow on its wings. The Boeing 737, en route to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, had been delayed almost two hours while snow was swept off the runways at D.C.’s National Airport. Shortly before 3:00
P.M
., the airport had reopened. The flight crew had deiced Flight 90, but not as thoroughly as they should have. When the plane took off, it strained and stretched to reach up to the sky, but the armor of ice weighed it down.

Joe Stiley knew the plane was going to crash before it even left the runway. He traveled constantly for his job as an executive at GTE. He flew in 737s out of National Airport about once a week. Maybe because Stiley had also been a pilot himself, he noticed things that most people didn’t. For one thing, the crew hadn’t finished deicing the plane. He could see them through his window. And when the plane finally took off, he could tell it was going far too slowly. He got into the brace position and told his secretary, Patricia “Nikki” Felch, to do the same thing. “What I said was, ‘Nikki, we’re in deep shit. Do what I do.’ I put my head right up next to my rear end.”

Stiley looked up once more before the plane crashed. He saw through the window that the plane’s left wing was slanted downward. He put his head back between his legs. That day, January 13, was his son’s birthday. Before the plane slammed into the bridge, Stiley apologized to God for leaving on a business trip on that day. He ached to think that his son would forever remember his birthday as the anniversary of his father’s death.

Just seconds after takeoff, less than half a mile from the airport, Flight 90 hit the Fourteenth Street Bridge like a wrecking ball, destroying seven cars, killing four people, and tearing away a section of the bridge wall. The plane broke into a dozen pieces on impact.

When the plane hit the bridge, Stiley remembers, it felt a lot like being rear-ended hard in a car. The impact rattled him down to his bones. Hitting the water, though, was much worse. “That impact was unbelievable.” He could feel himself blacking out. “I didn’t expect to wake up.”

When Stiley came to, he was sitting upright in his seat with water up to his neck. Felch was still next to him. He could hear other people moaning around him. Then the plane started to sink. It slipped underwater and kept drifting downward for what seemed like a very long time, until it finally settled on the bottom of the river. While this was happening, Stiley made a checklist in his head. He had much to do. First, he needed to free his left leg, which was horribly broken and pinned in the wreckage. He also had to unbuckle his seat belt. Then he had to help Felch. Like many of the survivors in this book, his military training had taught him to always make a plan. It probably saved his life. “There is a tremendous benefit to having that training,” he says. “You don’t sit there wondering what to do. You do it.”

Once the plane stopped falling, Stiley started working on the checklist. He wrenched his leg free, unbuckled his belt, and started to help Felch. He had to break her foot to get it free. Then the two of them swam over the other seats, past the college kids they had been chatting with on the runway. They couldn’t stop to help anyone else. They’d been underwater for too long. Their lungs were throbbing. They kept swimming, clutching each other’s hand, and groping through the black water. Finally they broke through to the surface. As they sucked in the twenty-four-degree air, they saw the tail section of their plane sticking out of the water about ten yards away. It was the only thing to hold on to. They helped each other swim toward it. Then they saw Kelly Duncan, a twenty-two-year-old flight attendant, and the only member of the crew to survive. She came over to hold on to the tail too. Then Priscilla Tirado surfaced, screaming. “Where is my baby? Does anyone see my baby?” In less than five minutes, she had lost her two-month-old infant and her husband forever. Stiley swam over to Tirado and floated her over to the little group of survivors. She pulled so hard on his tie she almost choked him to death, he remembers.

Snow fell intermittently. The drops of water on Stiley’s eyelashes froze into tiny icicles. Both of his legs were broken, as was one arm. All of the passengers were seriously injured. Stiley found a life vest floating in the water, but he couldn’t open its plastic packaging because his hands were so cold. Finally Duncan ripped it open with her teeth. They put it on Felch, and Duncan pulled the inflation cord. Despite her injuries and her relative inexperience, Duncan performed masterfully that day, just as she had been trained to do.

By now, quite a crowd had gathered on the bridge above. They were staring down at the little band of survivors. Some dangled pieces of rope. But Stiley didn’t think he could make it over to the bridge, especially not while dragging Felch. And he knew he couldn’t make it to the riverbank, which was much farther away. So he stayed where he was, clinging to the steel fragments of airplane. He remembers looking up at the crowd at some point and seeing cameras staring back at him.

Stiley checked his watch to see how long they’d been in the water. Ten minutes. He remembered from his Navy training that people tend to go into cardiac arrest after about twenty minutes in extremely cold water. He tried to move the parts of his body that weren’t broken, to generate heat. Finally, Stiley saw flashing red lights. Rescue workers raced down the riverbank with their gear. “Oh, they’re here! Thank God,” Stiley thought. “They showed up just like they were supposed to.” But then he watched as the rescue workers ran to the water’s edge and came to a stop. There was nothing they could do. “They became spectators like everyone else.”

Until that moment, Stiley had been trying to reassure the other survivors. One man, who was pinned into his seat next to the tail, had been mumbling repeatedly, “I’m not going to make it out of here.” Stiley had countered such talk with relentless optimism. He encouraged everyone who could move to try to do small exercises to stave off hypothermia. But now, watching the rescue workers watch them, he felt an emptiness open up in his chest. “I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, I survive an airplane crash and I’m going to sit out here and freeze to death with ten thousand people watching.’”

Electric Cold

When Olian jumped into the water, he was wearing all his clothes, a jacket, and a wool cap, but no gloves. The water cut to the bone. “It was like getting electrocuted,” he remembers. Someone on the shore shouted to him to take the makeshift lifeline. He grabbed it and tied it around him.