Disasters happen. When they do, it is normal, everyday people who are the heroes.
By Amanda RipleyAugust 14, 2024 at 1:12 p.m. EDTThis column is adapted from the updated version of Amanda Ripley’s book “The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes — and Why.”
On the day in July that a 20-year-old man named Thomas Crooks tried to assassinate former president Donald Trump, too many officials and agencies came up short, as we’ve heard again and again.
But we’ve heard far less about another category of first responders — one that appears at every major emergency — who have received very little scrutiny or credit.
Who were among the first to notice that there was a man behaving suspiciously on a nearby roof? Who repeatedly relayed this threat to law enforcement, insisting that they listen? And after the shooting stopped, who remained orderly and cooperative, generally speaking? It was regular people, like you and me, and it almost always is.
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In a perfect world, we would not rely on the general public as our first defense against mass shooters or any other threat. But here’s the thing: we will rely on them when disaster strikes. That’s just reality. So why not start recognizing what regular people do — and plan accordingly?
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FollowI’ve interviewed dozens of survivors of all kinds of catastrophes, from tsunamis to plane crashes, and I can tell you that they know extraordinary things, lessons rarely discussed in official homeland security briefings. I ended up writing a book about these ordinary people — and what they wanted the rest of us to know. Because it was not just helpful; it was hopeful.
Disasters don’t always turn into the exact nightmare you expect. And you have more power in those moments than you think.
The trouble is, authority figures do not respect the potential of regular people. Instead, they underestimate them. They don’t include them in their emergency plans. They don’t help them prepare and train for these moments. They don’t level with them about the risks they face. So, regular people have very little idea what to expect.
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We don’t know, for example, that we will probably get tunnel vision in a life-or-death situation, which means we can miss opportunities to help ourselves and others. We’ll likely experience everything in slow motion. We probably won’t feel fear at all, not right in the moment. Instead, we will go through a period of profound denial before we accept what is happening around us.
The biggest mistake many of us will make in a real-life disaster is to shut down and freeze altogether (a survival instinct researchers call “negative panic”). Sometimes this lethargy is helpful. Other times, it’s deadly (in, say, a burning building).
After each calamity, the congressional hearings and media scrutiny always focus on the government — and what it did or didn’t do. That’s important. Leaders must be held accountable. But it’s not the whole story. Regular people shouldn’t feature into the equation only as either victims or perpetrators. We can do far more good than we imagine.
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Consider: The odds are somewhere around 50/50 that we’ll see another pandemic that kills at least as many people as covid-19 before the year 2050, according to Metabiota, a risk-modeling company that tracks infectious-disease risks and outbreaks. If we prepared for this with regular people in mind, we could protect many more lives — and leave our institutions less broken, our civilization less scarred. But everything — everything — depends on rapidly building trust, which might be the scarcest resource of the 21st century so far.
Last time around, in March 2020, more than a week after covid-19 was declared a pandemic, Trump confided to journalist Bob........