Surviving a Disaster aphagetready.org SaludHEALTHinfo.com

Surviving a DisasterAdvice from the experts:

Surviving a Disaster aphagetready.org SaludHEALTHinfo.com

Surviving a Disaster

As we go about our day-to-day lives, disasters arefar from the minds of mostpeople. But 90 percent ofAmericans live and work inplaces where there aresignificant risks for earth-quakes, tornadoes, floods,hurricanes, terrorism or

The American Public Health Association APHA's Get ReadyCampaign helps Americans prepare thenselves, their familiesand their communities for for all disasters and hazards, includ-ing pandemic flu, infectious disease, natural disasters andother emergencies.

Surviving a disaster: Controlling our fears is an interview madefrom the American Public Health Association to Amanda Ripley,who is an award-winning Time magazine, who has criss-crossedthe globe to cover some of the most devastating disasters ofour time. This interview was conducted, edited and condensedby Teddi Dineley Johnson, The Nations’s Health, APHA. It hasbeen revised and translated to Spanish for publication inSalud+HealthInfo magazine.

Advice from the experts:

leadership roles. Some people emerge as heroes whileothers simply freeze.

Amanda Ripley ,authorfor the book: The Un-thinkable: Who SurvivesWhen Disaster Strikesand Why.

other natural and human-made disasters. When alife-or-death situation oc-curs, some people do bet-ter than others. In the midstof a disaster, many peoplepanic, while others assume

We literally use different parts of our brains instantly ina disaster. Everything changes. As one Sept. 11 survi-vor said to me, “You don’t ever want to have to think ina disaster.” He knew that because he hadexperienced the complete change that occurs when youare in a life or death situation. So literally you loseperipheral vision, your heart rate increases, your bloodpressure goes up, you get an injection of stresshormones which help you perform physically, butactually make it much harder to perform cognitively, soyou have a lot of trouble making decisions — evensimple decisions — or processing new information.So the reason some of us often do better than others ina disaster usually has to do with what was in our brainsbefore everything went wrong, because you won’t beable to really progress much from where you were oncethings go bad. So it really depends on what you had inyour head as far as what to do, how to do it, when to doit, before everything went wrong.

In the midst of a disaster Why somedo better than others?

How can we overcome weaknesses andboost our odds of surviving in a disaster?

The more familiarity you have beforehand with any of yourmajor risks and how to get out of them, the better you willdo. For example, if you know that you live in place that is athigh risk for flooding, which is true of many millions of Ameri-cans, then the more thinking you have done about whatyou would take with you, how you would evacuate, whenyou would evacuate, how you would deal with your elderlymother — all of those things are not going to go very well ifyou wait until you are under stress — you are not going tomake great decisions. So the more you plan strategies,step by step plans and practicing, these plans become au-tomatic and it eliminates confusion.

In general, we have certain weaknesses when it comes toassessing risk and performing well under stress. We also

CONTROLLING OUR FEARS

Surviving a Disaster aphagetready.org SaludHEALTHinfo.com

aphagetready.orgFor more information please visit

have a lot of strength, but if we canunderstand what the weaknesses arein advance, will improve our ability tosuceed. One of the biggest weak-nesses is that we tend to move veryslowly under extreme duress, and themore we have done in advance themore quickly we will push through thatphase and perform appropriately.

Why do so many of usshut down or freeze?

This is so common, so pervasiveacross every kind of high-stressevents. I have talked to firefighters,who have many related tales of peoplefreezing up, all the way to stockbro-kers who have seen it on the tradingfloor during a stock market crash. Thistendency to shut down or freeze is, inmy mind, an evolved defense mecha-nism. It is so powerful and so com-mon that I don’t think we would haveevolved to this state unless it serveda purpose. We need to understandthis better because it’s the kind of thingyou can overcome, and it’s very, verydangerous in events like fires or planecrashes. We’ve seen this many times,we know that this is a bigger risk, sowe should start planning for it in ad-vance.

Among the many survivors I havetalked to, the people who have mili-tary training or even Boy Scouts train-ing tend to perform a little better in alot of situations. But more important isnot the training but the culture, thewhole outlook on life. Research showsthat if you have what’s called an “in-ternal focus of control,” so you believethat you influence your destiny, thenyou tend to do better and recover morefully in many situations. If on the otherhand you feel like you are kind of atthe mercy of fate and are in a morepassive victim role in your day to daylife, then that could be problematic be-cause you’ll be less likely to take ac-tion and can have trouble recovering.

We all have to spend time in preparedness, so it isimportant to really prioritize. What are my biggestrisks?

It obviously depends on where you live and how you live but certainly weknow that disasters are getting more frequent and more expensive in thiscountry, largely because of wind and water events. We live in these dense,vertical cities near water, so we really have to try to focus our minds onthings like floods, and also fire, which generally kills more people everyyear than all other disasters combined.

Talk to anyone who has actually survived a disaster and they will instantlytell you that they were the first responders. Since Sept. 11 we have be-come very reliant upon first responders. In big disasters, regular people dothe majority of life saving, so the people you work and live with are the firstresponders and I really think that this is probably the most important lessonI have learned in covering disasters over the last decade.

The tendency to think that regular people will not perform well is often mis-guided. Regular people perform much better on average than we expect.So we really need to enroll regular people, engage them creatively, listen tothem in advance and have them literally at the table when we are makingdecisions about emergency evacuation drills, about how to prepare for bio-logical threats. They literally need to be at the table or else a natural biaswill warp our planning and we will end up with emergency plans that arewritten for emergency responders.

The reality is that in disasters, we don’t turn into the kinds of hystericalmobs that we see in movies. We tend to actually show each other greatcourtesy when things are going very bad and that should be enormouslyreassuring to people. So generally, people form groups and that is helpfulbecause you need information more than almost anything else in most di-sasters. Ten brains and 20 hands are better than one brain and two hands.

Are there any simple ways that we can train our fearsand thoughts to help us survive in a disaster?

There are simple things you can do that are taught to first responders andelite military units, and they basically are not that different from yoga. Weknow that the most effective way to influence your subconscious brain isthrough breathing. With controlled breathing, for example, you breathe infor four counts, hold for four counts, release for four counts, hold for fourcounts and you repeat, over and over and over again whenever you areunder stress. It could be mild stress, but it’s something I practice all thetime, in traffic and so forth.

In your book you mention who the real first respondersin a disaster are. Who are they?