cavedoc wrote:
I've been thinking about this for a while (Great post George). I think the most important part was the thought of the gentleman who survived the dual 747 crash in Tenerife. He made a plan on what he would do and implemented it when the time came. I think this is the message. I think that Ms. Ripley is over-simplifying to say reacting quickly is the answer. Frequently this is nothing more than panic. In hindsight it's easy to say that more 911 victims would have survived if they had all headed to the stairs immediately. But if they'd all headed immediately, and the towers didn't fall, would she be writing about how un-necessary panic lead to so many deaths in a panicked stairwell stampede? Sometimes the freeze reaction is a good one. Often it's not. While it's easy to say now that we should plan on what to do when an airplane hits our building, it's not what I would have planned for and I doubt that many who died did either. There is a saying that the first thing to do in a code (medical code blue situation) is to take your own pulse. While perhaps not literally true, it's not bad advice. Assess, make a plan, implement it. All the better if we have a plan in place already.
The first thing I do when called to some type of emergency is to review what I know about responding to that type of emergency. Usually while enroute, but sometimes I'll take a minute or two before. Freezing for a short time when something unexpected happens isn't a bad survival strategy overall since we
operate about a tenth of a second behind reality: we need a short time to process what happened. I think the thrust of Ms. Ripley's article was on the number of people who become disabled by conflicting responses during an emergency. I've experienced it, especially when I was first learning how to work in emergencies. It's a lot like when you learn to drive, you spend so much time trying to process all incoming data that it slows or stops your reaction times. As you learn how to respond you learn what things need conscious thought, what things that can be handled by automatic responses, and what can be safely ignored. Soldiers in their first firefight can experience this too, which is why trusting your training is so stressed in the military.
I think this is one reason why when teaching people CPR the thing the Red Cross stresses is not to tell someone to call for help, but to point to someone and say "you! call 911!"