Free Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why by Amanda Ripley Page A

hurricanes is humanmade (due to the overpopulation of the coasts, faulty levees, and depleted wetlands), the direct threat (wind and rain) is natural. If we consider the equation for dread, this makes sense: nuclear and chemical waste are far less familiar to us than weather, and they carry the potential for mass-scale casualties and suffering. If hazards have personalities, nuclear waste is the disheveled man standing on the street corner swearing. No one wants to get near him, regardless of how harmless he is. Hurricanes, on the other hand, are the slow, plodding types that the neighbors will later say looked perfectly harmless.
    There is something else we need to understand about Turner. The year before Katrina, he had given in to his children’s pleadings. He had evacuated for Hurricane Ivan. But the experience was traumatic. The traffic jams were horrendous, partly due to poor planning on the part of city and state officials. A trip from New Orleans to Baton Rouge that normally took eighty to ninety minutes took as long as ten to twelve hours. Turner rode with his other daughter all the way to Austin, Texas, in a car jammed with people and possessions, and he vowed never to do it again. Firsthand experience was more powerful than any official warning could be; the palpable risks of evacuating seemed stronger than the abstract risks of staying.
    Turner lived a life of small rituals. He went to Mass every day at 8:00 A.M . Every Tuesday, he played golf with his brothers. On Saturday, Williams came over to clean his house. And every Sunday, she took him to the cemetery to pay respects to her mother. They never missed a Sunday. Turner didn’t like the idea of disrupting his routines. The day before Katrina hit, he told his daughter he didn’t want to evacuate because he wanted to be able to go to Mass on Monday morning.
    Remember Zedeño’s fog of disbelief after a Boeing 767 smashed into her building on 9/11? That disbelief, a natural and often helpful product of the human brain, sets in well before the crisis. In certain people facing certain threats, the fog can be impenetrable. “It just didn’t adjust in his head” is how Williams puts it.
    Elderly people don’t like to evacuate. In 1989, after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, retirees and people over age seventy were least likely to evacuate—regardless of how close they were to the reactor. That’s partly because, even if they have a good means of leaving, older people do not like change, generally speaking. Turner had lived in his house for over three decades. Like his old shotgun house, it was well built, and it had survived many hurricanes. So why wouldn’t it survive this one?
    It turned out that Turner’s house did survive. It flooded with five feet of water, but the walls and the roof held strong. It was the man that the hurricane claimed.
    Overconfidence
    When it comes to old-fashioned risks like weather, we often overestimate ourselves. Of the fifty-two people who died during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, for example, 70 percent drowned. And most of them drowned in their cars, which had become trapped in floodwaters. This is a recurring problem in hurricanes. People are overconfident about driving through water, even though they are bombarded with official warnings not to. (This tendency varies, of course, depending on the individual. One study out of the University of Pittsburgh showed that men are much more likely to try to drive through high water than women—and thus more likely to die in the process. But more about the individual profile of a risk taker in Chapter 4.)
    Less than one year after Katrina, a research team from the Harvard School of Public Health interviewed 2,029 people who live in high-risk hurricane zones in eight states. They asked them what they would do if government officials said they had to evacuate before a major hurricane. Incredibly, with the images of the Superdome still on rotation