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

Author:Amanda Ripley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction, Sociology, Psychology, Science, Self Help, Adult, History
ISBN: 9780307449276
Publisher: Crown Publishers
Published: 2008-06-01T10:00:00+00:00

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

To get a better idea of what it might feel like to be in a fire, I visited the burn tower at the training academy of the Kansas City Fire Department. Kansas City has just under 450,000 people, and the fire department is the first responder for every emergency call. Each year, Kansas City firefighters respond to nearly sixty thousand requests—or 164 calls a day.

Tommy Walker, the Kansas City Fire Department’s chief of training, insists on picking me up from the airport in a typical display of firefighter hospitality. He is a rail-thin man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a gee-whiz manner who nevertheless swears like a truck driver. He’s also one of the friendliest, most patient men you’ll ever meet, so it’s a little startling every time he calls someone a “piece of shit” or a “sonofabitch,” which is often. “If I say someone’s a ‘piece of shit,’ that’s a compliment,” he explains in his Mr. Rogers voice. “I hope I don’t offend you with my language.”

Like all good fire chiefs, Walker gets evangelical when he talks about training. After eight weeks of classroom work, his cadets spend ten weeks enduring every kind of simulated hell he can invent. He makes them climb stairs through thick smoke on their hands and knees, stand next to a live fire until they can’t take the heat anymore, and crawl through a maze blindfolded until they get tangled in wires and have to cut their way out. He has seen every kind of human fear reaction, and he wants to evoke them all before a firefighter gets into a real fire. “You would be surprised at the number of people who are utterly panicked by a loss of vision,” he says. “So we find that out before we get them hot.” In every class of cadets, about 10–14 percent don’t make it through the training. “Some people just don’t take to it. I’d like to be a brain surgeon, too, but not everybody’s supposed to be a brain surgeon.” Nationwide, fire departments lose about two people a year to training accidents. But the training is so important that the risk is considered worthwhile.

To find out if I would get panicked, Walker took me out back. The burn tower is a six-story concrete, fiber, and sheet-metal structure full of old furniture and kindling. Charred La-Z-Boys, broken lamps, and worn sofas are scattered about, making the place look like a frat house that devolved into a crack house. The furniture is donated by the firefighters and their relatives, and the kindling comes from old pallets contributed by the local warehouses. The floors and ceilings are coated in black soot, and the air is acrid from thousands of training burns.

To simulate a fire, Walker’s instructors turn on the smoke. The artificial smoke is made from banana oil, which is cheap to buy and turns into thick, gray nontoxic smoke when it is atomized. Before we go in, they take me to the storeroom and dress me up in full firefighter gear, which I have to confess is totally cool.

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