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Hard landing
Aug. 27th, 2009 08:48 amI flew to Sydney on Tuesday night and gave a workshop there. I had a lovely dinner of pork buns, soup and Asian dumplings with a dear friend, and the workshop was fairly uneventful. Sometimes I am surprised by myself in workshops. It's like an acting gig, or like flirting; I try and engage people, make them laugh, make sure they keep eye contact with me. It's exhausting but there is a performance high to it as well.
The flight back was a bit crap - 40 minutes on the tarmac, 40 minutes back in the airport while they fixed the plane, and then we had to wait for 20 minutes because someone hadn't turned up when we got back on. We had a really hard WHUMP landing in Melbourne, at which a guy behind me yelled "Oh SHIT!" while everyone else gasped. When they announced "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Melbourne, where the temperature is 12 degrees" the same guy yelled "WOOOO! GO MELBOURNE!" which made everyone laugh and broke the tension.
On the bright side, I bought a fascinating book in Sydney Airport and read the whole thing by the time we got home (except the conclusion). It's The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why. Absolutely incredible look at how people behave in disasters, where we overestimate and underestimate ourselves, how the body reacts and how to cope with the ways it gives extra help but takes some things away as well. The most important messages I took away from it were:
1. It is important to have a plan, read the safety information card, and understand the risks well before you are faced with a disaster, because your cognitive functions will be impaired during it. Some people lose the ability to solve simple problems like unbuckling their seatbelt. Others actually go blind, temporarily. And many people just shut down completely and go passive. The body can do some amazing things to give you extra chemicals and stuff while you're in disaster mode but it nearly always takes something away too.
2. Attitude matters. If you believe that your actions can influence what happens to you, and if you believe you can learn from good and bad experiences, you are more likely to do well in a disaster situation.
3. Practicing what actions you might be forced to take in an emergency will help you if it happens - especially practicing physical actions. Imagining what you'll do, in your mind's eye, will help you do it on autopilot when you can't think.
4. Being realistic about the risks is important, and the risk will vary depending on where you live, work, travel and what you do. For instance, I have a very low risk of being in a flood (since I live and work on high ground), earthquake (they do happen here occasionally but generally cause little damage) or cyclone (don't happen this far south). There are other risks which have more potential to affect me and those are the ones I need to plan for.
On that topic, your chances of being killed in a plane crash are much lower than being killed in a car crash. However, researchers estimate that an additional 2,300 people in the US were killed after September 11 2001 because they were too scared to take a plane and drove instead of flew. This is emotion and dread vs actual risk.
5. We both overestimate and underestimate ourselves and our fellow humans. We tend to arrogantly think that we are better prepared than the other people around us and less likely to be affected by disaster. If we've lived through previous disasters, we're more likely to overestimate our chances to survive the next one; people who lived through previous hurricanes saw no reason to evacuate for Katrina, because their house had always survived before.
Public officials tend to both underestimate and overestimate the public; they assume the majority of us will panic, which is rarely the case; they assume we will understand the risks and what their warnings mean, which is not always the case. They tell us what to do but not why. If the flight attendant who announces "It is important to fit your own oxygen mask first before helping children" added "because in the case of rapid decompression you will be unconscious in 10 seconds and your child will not be able to help *you*", or "Do not inflate the lifejacket until you leave the aircraft because it will make it far more difficult for you to get out", then people would be more likely to obey. People have died in crashes for both those reasons.
I keep bringing this back to the bushfires. One of my colleagues lives in an affected area and reckons that 90% of the people who died would have stayed and died anyway, even if the warnings had been louder and clearer and sooner. On the other hand, one reason they didn't evacuate sooner was that they assumed people would panic if asked to evacuate. In fact, that was not the case, and people who were evacuated in a convoy by the cops did so calmly. And one of the key messages in the interim report is that people did not feel they had the information they needed. They were told the danger was extreme but not *how* extreme. Many people have said that if they'd known the Fire Danger Index in their area was estimated at over 300 (normally it only goes up to 100) then they would have left sooner. But the FDI is not made public.
I would really like to get into the policy-making area and make a difference in some of this stuff.
The flight back was a bit crap - 40 minutes on the tarmac, 40 minutes back in the airport while they fixed the plane, and then we had to wait for 20 minutes because someone hadn't turned up when we got back on. We had a really hard WHUMP landing in Melbourne, at which a guy behind me yelled "Oh SHIT!" while everyone else gasped. When they announced "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Melbourne, where the temperature is 12 degrees" the same guy yelled "WOOOO! GO MELBOURNE!" which made everyone laugh and broke the tension.
On the bright side, I bought a fascinating book in Sydney Airport and read the whole thing by the time we got home (except the conclusion). It's The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why. Absolutely incredible look at how people behave in disasters, where we overestimate and underestimate ourselves, how the body reacts and how to cope with the ways it gives extra help but takes some things away as well. The most important messages I took away from it were:
1. It is important to have a plan, read the safety information card, and understand the risks well before you are faced with a disaster, because your cognitive functions will be impaired during it. Some people lose the ability to solve simple problems like unbuckling their seatbelt. Others actually go blind, temporarily. And many people just shut down completely and go passive. The body can do some amazing things to give you extra chemicals and stuff while you're in disaster mode but it nearly always takes something away too.
2. Attitude matters. If you believe that your actions can influence what happens to you, and if you believe you can learn from good and bad experiences, you are more likely to do well in a disaster situation.
3. Practicing what actions you might be forced to take in an emergency will help you if it happens - especially practicing physical actions. Imagining what you'll do, in your mind's eye, will help you do it on autopilot when you can't think.
4. Being realistic about the risks is important, and the risk will vary depending on where you live, work, travel and what you do. For instance, I have a very low risk of being in a flood (since I live and work on high ground), earthquake (they do happen here occasionally but generally cause little damage) or cyclone (don't happen this far south). There are other risks which have more potential to affect me and those are the ones I need to plan for.
On that topic, your chances of being killed in a plane crash are much lower than being killed in a car crash. However, researchers estimate that an additional 2,300 people in the US were killed after September 11 2001 because they were too scared to take a plane and drove instead of flew. This is emotion and dread vs actual risk.
5. We both overestimate and underestimate ourselves and our fellow humans. We tend to arrogantly think that we are better prepared than the other people around us and less likely to be affected by disaster. If we've lived through previous disasters, we're more likely to overestimate our chances to survive the next one; people who lived through previous hurricanes saw no reason to evacuate for Katrina, because their house had always survived before.
Public officials tend to both underestimate and overestimate the public; they assume the majority of us will panic, which is rarely the case; they assume we will understand the risks and what their warnings mean, which is not always the case. They tell us what to do but not why. If the flight attendant who announces "It is important to fit your own oxygen mask first before helping children" added "because in the case of rapid decompression you will be unconscious in 10 seconds and your child will not be able to help *you*", or "Do not inflate the lifejacket until you leave the aircraft because it will make it far more difficult for you to get out", then people would be more likely to obey. People have died in crashes for both those reasons.
I keep bringing this back to the bushfires. One of my colleagues lives in an affected area and reckons that 90% of the people who died would have stayed and died anyway, even if the warnings had been louder and clearer and sooner. On the other hand, one reason they didn't evacuate sooner was that they assumed people would panic if asked to evacuate. In fact, that was not the case, and people who were evacuated in a convoy by the cops did so calmly. And one of the key messages in the interim report is that people did not feel they had the information they needed. They were told the danger was extreme but not *how* extreme. Many people have said that if they'd known the Fire Danger Index in their area was estimated at over 300 (normally it only goes up to 100) then they would have left sooner. But the FDI is not made public.
I would really like to get into the policy-making area and make a difference in some of this stuff.
