Horizon (1964) s47e07 Episode Script

This programme contains scenes which some viewers may find From the disasters we might face once in a lifetime To those we face every day.
You may think something like this may not happen to you.
But thinking the unthinkable won't happen, won't help you if it does.
Your ability to cope, ability to concentrate and focus disappear.
Surviving a disaster is not just a question of luck.
In the event of an emergency situation, you need to be able to do things right the first time.
Pay attention, because what you learn in the next 60 minutes may just save your life.
The time to start thinking about what you do in an emergency is not when you are in an emergency.
Then there was no time to be scared.
Every second can mean the difference between life and death.
There was no need for some When I did see it on the television, I wondered how anybody lived through that.
Then it would dawn on me that I was in there as it was tumbling down the runway.
No matter how terrible a disaster might look from the outside, the reality is, in most cases someone gets out alive.
Whether it is a plane crash, a terrorist attack or a shipwreck, in every disaster there is usually something you can do to increase your chances of survival.
One of the things I remember is the water actually, coming into the cafeteria.
Seeing lots of people around frozen to the spot and I could never understand why they weren't doing I could hear other people screaming, panicking, dying, injured, I do not know.
My left leg, basically the skin had been blown away and there was lots of blood and broken bones.
Is there something that separate us survivors from those who do not make it? To investigate, horizon has gathered a team of leading survival experts and between them they have studied the world's biggest catastrophe is.
Strained the emergency services in the psychology of disasters.
Taken down hours of survivor testimony and conducted hundreds of crash-test.
We have distilled decades of their research and experience into the key things you need to know to stay alive.
People don't appreciate in these situations, every second can mean the difference between life and death.
For evacuation expert, Professor Ed Galea, survival is more than just a job.
Can I have a room please below the 6th floor? When I check into hotels, I ask for a room below the 6th floor.
The reason being, most ladders on fire trucks cannot reach above the six floor.
So, if you are below the six law you have a chance of the fire services rescuing you.
Whenever I go I am looking for ways to get out.
In case something goes wrong.
You may think this is over-cautious, but his studies show who gets out, who doesn't and wife.
This is my smoke hood.
I have this by my side all the time, at home I have won by my bed.
You never know when the alarm is going to go off.
Having something like this can make the difference between your life and your death.
Once he has checked in, he always checks he can get out.
I count the number of stores I am away from the staircase, because in the event of evacuating in the dark, I know how many doorways a way I am from the stairs.
I always walk the staircase evacuation route all the way to the ground.
I don't want to have to discover this route for the first time during an emergency situation.
I want to know how to get out, and I want to know I can get out.
His research uses eyewitness testimony and sophisticated computer modelling to understand how we behave in an emergency.
Everything from nightclub fires to plane crashes, even 9/11.
As well as those emergencies, a little closer to home.
When I first took the smoke hood home and suggested to my wife she needed to practise putting it on, she thought I was crazy.
I showed her some of the examples how rapidly fire can spread.
Now she can put it on in 30 seconds flat.
In many of the cases he has studied, one obstacle to our survival appears time and time again, the failure to react even when the threat is staring you in the face.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with fire.
West Yorkshire police are tonight 40 people were killed in the fire at Bradford City football ground.
At least 200 people were treated in hospital with serious burns.
It was only when I realised my coat was smoking and a few people around me, we were on fire.
I realised it wasn't a dream anymore and it was real.
People have become complacent about fire and don't appreciate how quickly it can spread.
How situations can change from an apparently benign a situation to a life threatening situations.
One notorious example of this complacency is the Woolworths fire in Manchester in 1979.
About 1000 people were in the building when fit smoking choking smoke followed by the flames.
People were running through their lives, smashing the glass with their hands and feet to get some air.
People were trapped and screaming out for help.
10 people died in the shop.
Nine of them in the cafeteria.
While others were fleeing for their lives, Ed believes these people fatally underestimated the danger.
People who had purchased and paid for their meal, their fish and chips for example.
Even though they could see the smoke, smell smoke and here the alarms going off, they felt they had sufficient time to complete their meal before evacuating.
In many disasters involving fire, people assume they have more time to evacuate than they do.
Ed has seen it so often, he has given it a name.
Friendly fire syndrome.
The general public underestimates the severity of fires and how dangerous they can be.
People know really longer live with fire.
So, we tend to take our time in reacting to dangerous fire situations.
In the days world, people's only - in today's World peoples and the exposure to fire might be lighting their barbecue.
There is evidence of friendly fire syndrome in one of the greatest When aeroplanes struck the World Trade Center answer to my the 11th, 2001, to the watching world there was little doubt a major disaster was unfolding.
But inside the building, not everyone reacted as you might expect.
One of the most surprising things we found from the World Trade Center study was how long it took people to react to the aeroplanes hitting the buildings.
People took between five to eight minutes before they actually started to disengage from their normal activities and begin to engage in the evacuation process.
And some people took even 20, 30, 40 minutes before they started to evacuate.
People did things like finish their e-mail, shut down their computer, file things away, lock things in the safe.
Some people even decided they wanted to go to the toilet before they start of the evacuation process.
Ed and his team devised detailed computer simulations to model the evacuation.
But the hundreds of interviews they conducted revealed the biggest delays were due to people trying to work out what to do.
They were getting on the phone, trying to ask people what was going on.
They went to the television to see what was going on.
They got together in groups to see what was going on to discuss what they were going to do.
friendly fire syndrome.
People don't appreciate in these situations, every second counts.
Every second can mean the difference between life and death.
People are prepared to do seemingly trivial things, such as finish an e-mail rather than evacuate.
Whilst Ed has found people fail to evacuate at the first sign of danger, sometimes at the expense of their lives.
Other studies have uncovered a possible cause.
It could simply be a matter of peer pressure.
Hugh I just thought someone else was going to say something soon.
The major reason people ignore major threat signals like fire alarms is peer pressure.
The fact is we would feel stupid if we responded to it and nobody else did.
People don't want to seem silly amounts there appears.
After all, most alarms are false alarms, so why should I seem to be the first to leave my desk and go.
The power of peer pressure was revealed in an experiment, first conducted in New York in the late 1960s.
People were led into what they were told was a waiting room.
When the participants were in the waiting room they were filling out forms waiting for the experiment to start.
Unbeknown to them it had started.
The researchers put smoke into the room from under the door.
They were interested in how long those participants would remain a while In the first part of the experiment, participants were left in the room on their own.
In that situation, 75% of them to report the suspected fire.
But when they were accompanied by actors instructed to ignore the smoke, something more disturbing happened.
Just 10% left the room.
Many of them stayed for a very long period of time.
Even up to the point that they could barely see their own hands in front of their faces because there was so much smoke.
The original experiment concluded that peer pressure is able to exert its power because the participants, like many in the Twin Towers, con see the fire itself.
There was an element of doubt that they were in danger.
I was surprised that I didn't do anything at all.
I was just waiting.
I just thought that someone else is going to say something soon.
The lesson that we learn from the smoking room experiment is that despite there being obvious and somewhat extreme threats, peer pressure will mean that people will remain at their desks long after they should do.
Who knows, this could be one of the major explanations for what happened in the Twin Towers.
What happened that day, we may Huge disast disasters like 9/11 are extremely rare.
But the disasters that happen daily kill thousands of us every year.
You don't have to be a statistician to know that everyone dies eventually.
These offices, statistics are compiled for the Government on every aspect of our lives.
And our deaths.
I don't think working with statistics is in any way more bid.
I think it is sensible to avoid the things which cause premature death to have a realistic idea of what the risks are that you face.
Myer Guckman has been pouring over this catalogue of death for eight years and surprisingly, his message is upbeat.
After the initial risk to babies, there is very little risk of dying from the age of one-year onwards and in fact, the lowest risk of dying is between the ages of five and nine.
After that, the risk increases gradually by relatively few people die before the age of 50 and we would classify any death before the age of 70 as premature death.
Almost three-quarters of these premature deaths are preventable.
Many of them are due to accidents.
300 deaths a year from fires.
200 from drowning and smaller numbers from other types of accident for example, choking and suffocation.
As well as being avoidable, many accidental killers are surprising.
Accidental poisoning kills 1,000 people a year.
That includes people drinking bleach or some other chemical.
But there is one type of fatal accident that stands out in the statistics.
And it is something you might not think was so deadly.
Hidden away deep in the Derbyshire countryside the health and safety laboratory.
Researchers here are devoted to preventing all manner of accidents.
From major industrial incidents to transport disasters and all manner of explosions.
But it is in the pedestrian safety section that they are tackling a cause of the biggest accidental killer.
This is the ramp test.
This enables us to test a combination of flooring and footwear and we can introduce surface contamination, usually water.
The operator, as you can see, he is wearing a harness and he is hooked on to a device.
We increase the angle of the ramp until the operator slips.
Slipping isn't something many of us would consider a risk, but using this device, a portable skid resistance tester, researchers have identified many hidden dangers in our places of work.
We have a profile surface, that physical pattern will give you Inter lock with your footwear and if you thread in the right place you are wearing the right footwear, you may get Inter lock, bup people walk on the peaks of these profiles here and that has a similar surface finish to that side so what we see is a lot of accidents on these in workplaces.
But slipping can lead to something much worse than a trip to casualty.
We reckon that 40% of falls from heights are actually initiated by slips or trips, but sadly many of the people involved in those accidents are not around to tell us.
In 2007, falling resulted in 3318 deaths.
Including 140 falling out of buildings.
17 falling off cliffs.
While falling may at first glance seem trifal, in 2007 it killed 350 more people than died on the UK's roads.
Driving would kill many more, but for the efforts of another branch of the safety industry.
It wean until the 1960s that people believed car accidents could be made survivable.
Until then, the human body was thought to be too fragile.
In a crash, you are travelling at a speed relative to the outside world and what happens is the vehicle in which you are sitting actually decelerates rapidly, but you keep going at a constant speed.
Direct impact on to your skull causes localised skull fracturing and compression of the brain.
The high impact to the chin causes your head to retate and twists the brain within the skull.
And that will cause you severe brain injury.
Very high desell rations in the chest are likely to cause bruising to internal organs and rupture your heart from your backbone.
Despite our frailties, scientists have gone to great lengths to make this every day disaster more survivable.
Car design has got better, we are getting to the point where not only are people surviving accidents, but surviving accidents with less injury and having the ability to go and open the door and walk-out of the car.
After what would have been seen before as a non-survivable accident.
Key to these advances are the thousands of crash tests conducted every year.
None of which would be possible without an army of willing volunteers.
This is the Hybrid III.
This is our current crash test dummy and he represents the average male.
But to represent the smaller people, we have a small female Hybrid III dummy.
We have child dummies as well to look at child restraints in cars and we have a range.
They go from a 12-month-old, 18-month-old all the way up to six years down here.
Although dummies are designed to be indestructable, they damage themselves from time to time because of the impacts we put them through, therefore we have to carry a number of spare parts.
These dummies are far from simple mannequins, their precision, scientific imstrewments.
We can see the head and the heads.
Here we have the neck and we have a series of load cells measuring the loads between the neck and the head to give us the potential of breaking your neck.
You can see the chest here.
It is made of steel ribs and inside the chest we have a a device we measures the force from the seatbelt and the airbag.
While a dummy can measure the physical forces in a crash, it can't tell you what injuries those forces would cause.
To understand that, you would have to use a real human body.
That's what was done by a a researcher, Larry Patrick of Wayne State University, Detroit.
Dead bodies were dropped from various heights to see what injuries they sustained.
The bodies were not too difficult to get as long as we didn't want very many of them.
The bodies were donated for research at the med school.
To calculate the forces that caused injury, Patrick screwed accelerometers into the back of the corpses heads.
It is a type of job that is not pleasant, but after a while you get used to it and suffered through it.
In the early days we didn't know what the human tolerance was to impact.
What forces it took to go and break bones or what accelerations it was that would cause injury to internal internal organs, those early tests were vital for understanding how the body reactsz in im- reacts in Professor Patrick took his experiments further.
He needed to know if his study with corpses was applicable to the living and that meant only one thing.
I was the volunteer.
It was a matter of I was in charge of the lab and if anybody got hurt, I was responsible.
I figured if I hurt myself, that was one thing, but I didn't want to take a chance on hurting anyone else.
I had about six impacts and that was enough for a day.
The data from Professor's Patrick's research is used today to check that dummies behave in the real way as a human being.
Chest impact, coming down now.
The 50 years since, car safety has transformed our chances of survival.
Ready, head drop, one, two, three - drop.
But no matter what scientists achieve, it will never make up for the major cause of these every day disasters.
Our failure to assess Although we might think we make rational and logical judgements about the dangers we face.
Eat your breakfast because you will soon find yourself in trouble.
The evidence suggests otherwise.
When you ask people how they assess risk they give you quite a detailed explanation of the complex and analytical processes that they go through.
But in reality people are using intuitive, gut type reactions.
Based on simple thinking or emotion.
If someone told you that a dog was vicious, you wouldn't put your hand to that dog's face.
Whereas, if you have a toaster and you have a piece of bread stuck in it and it is turned on, you will you will stick a knife or fork in to pull it out.
The toaster is just as vicious as a dog, it can hurt you.
But there is no emotional reaction.
There is no emotional connection that this is dangerous and this is risky and it is without the emotional reaction that we find ourselves doing some very, very It is not just a matter of a motion.
This looks dangerous.
Will Macy that car? I think I had better have a word with them.
There is something else we base our perception of risk on.
Our memory.
It you had been looking and listening all away across, that wouldn't have happened.
But some images are more memorable than others.
Frets like plane crashes and terrorism, while victim to care very often, they really dramatic memory traces and because of that, those traces are highly accessible.
We know, there for people can consistently overestimate the likelihood of those events because of those memory traces on more accessible than they all to be, given how frequently these things Paradoxically, it seems the threats that gets attention are the ones less likely to kill us.
Two teenagers were killed in separate incidents in the early hours of New Because our brains use simple short cuts to estimate risk, instead of doing a logical analysis, we will always be more afraid of things like Mac and we got up every day killers.
That doesn't mean major disasters don't happen.
But when they do, science has discovered there are some simple things you can do to increase your chances of survival.
And that's thanks to the him valuable testimonies up the survivors themselves.
It was black and the noise, the metal went on for ever.
It seems like it didn't stop.
On 28th September, 1994 the car ferry, Estonia was making a routine crossing from Tallinn to Stockholm.
At one and 12:00am, while many of the passengers were asleep, water was seen breaching the car deck.
Within 40 minutes, the ship would sink.
In that time, each of the nine and and 89 passengers and crew would face like order trying to escape.
- 989.
Amongst them quarter ball.
His decision not to spend extra money booking a cabin below the waterline almost certainly saved his life.
He slept in the cafeteria and was able to make his escape.
With a dozen other survivors, he watched ship sting - sink.
It was like something out of a film.
The moon had suddenly come out and everything was, and there was lights.
The boat disappeared.
It was in a red, smoky haze and then the real storm moved in.
One of the questions people ask me is where there was good.
There was no time to be scared, there was literally in no time, your main focus is getting off the ship.
As the Estonia rolled onto her side, Paul became trapped in the cafeteria.
There was a point when all the chairs and tables, ashtrays and everything in the cafeteria suddenly went and slid in one go.
There was no lack jacket or a liferaft, there was one white belt and boats generators had failed.
It was pitch black.
There was no way In the final moments before the Estonia sank, Paul clambered up pipe work on this ceiling and a onto the up to an Hull way of the ship.
From there, he scrambled aboard the last remaining like rack.
There were people lying around us all the talents of had them here.
So, you were never sure of anything after that.
- dying of hypothermia.
It was a very scary place to be because you never knew were there the next wave was going to what you awake and the like, you never knew when you last moment was coming.
People were dying consistently from the would go to the end of that six out of all deal.
- all deal.
And people were taking a long time to dive.
In the right way up, like rats have Academy - canopy to After five hours, four people remained alive to be winched aboard a helicopter.
It was terrifying.
Of the 989 passengers and crew on board, just 137 survived.
Whilst his escape may appear miraculous, the key to his survival could be the changes that occurred in his mind.
Star the lot of people assume in an emergency situation, their thinking, the perception, the way the mind Works is going to stay the same.
It is not the case, it changes and a lot of people on opera perk for that.
From the moment I realised there was something wrong with the ship, I had a strong sense of tunnel vision which concentrated my mind on making the decisions I needed.
I am purely thinking about what will save me.
Tunnel vision is a common effect of high stress situations.
Initially, our body is preparing for action and of rain is focusing on what her that the danger is.
It is focusing on that to the exclusion of everything else.
People describe it as looking through a tunnel.
It is a positive thing and it is exactly what you want.
One of the strange things from the word go, is I don't remember anyone's face until I actually got on board the helicopter and I was safe in other people's hands.
There was no sound, effectively apart from the wind.
I don't seem to recall any crashing, breaking all people screaming at all from inside the ship.
It just seemed to be incredibly quiet.
All, I just to remember it.
That seems to be part of the tunnel vision effect.
Paul believes it was his tunnel vision that enabled him to get off the sinking ship.
But disasters can invoke such extreme mental states, that after the event, many survivors recollections can be flawed or non-existent.
On 19th July, 1989, United Airlines flight, 232 took off from them there.
One hour and seven minutes into the flight, the tale mounted engine exploded.
It said that the hydraulic lines for the flight controls.
- it's added.
There was a very, very loud, loud bang.
The aeroplane and vibrated and jerked a little bit.
That's when they lost basically the control of the plane.
The captain did make an announcement.
He told us, he said, I am not kidding you, it will be it rough landing.
Shortly before 4pm, the pilots attempted an emergency landing.
I think I heard the wheels touched the runway, but after that it was nothing but a renders, horrific noise.
- horrendous.
It just became black, it was black and the metal and the noise went on for ever.
It's seemed like it didn't stop.
One of the very first things I remember he ring after that, his I heard a man's voice shouting, you can't go about that way there is fire there.
You could already smell the fuel.
All I remember is, on book telling my seat belts.
In the moments after the crash, Judy experienced another perceptual change reported by many survivors.
Time distortion.
It went on for ever, it seemed like it didn't stop.
I really don't have any idea, I have been told it was probably seconds, may be a minute and a half.
I really don't have any way of knowing.
I think when you are in a situation like that, you don't have any cat - a time concept.
To me, it seemed like maybe a minute and a half.
Your sense of how fast or house loan time is moving changes.
Most of the time you begin to see it going by very, very slowly.
Your brain has shifted into a high gear and it is taking in more information.
As the results of this you get a sense time as low down, but it is only your brain is operating more effectively and faster than before.
It is a good thing, because it means you are now paying close attention to your environment and what is going on around you.
It will help you survive and make the right decisions.
While the time distortion helped save Judy, it came at the expense of other brain functions.
She remembers very little of how she got out and much of what she does remember is simply wrong.
They said we were upside- down and I said, I wasn't upside down.
They said, did you see the lights? I said, no I didn't see the lights, and they said it was because they were of May.
What is happening is the brain is diverting things away from normal processes.
Normal memory, normal thinking.
All of that is essentially been stopped and put somewhere else.
Afterwards immediate recollection of what happened could be mistaken, flawed, huge holes in it.
You can think stuck happened when reality it didn't.
You can be convinced your recollection is correct, but it isn't.
It took one of the National guardsmen who brought in pictures and showed me the aeroplane was upside down that finally convinced me.
Professor Silke believes the way our brains change in a crisis increase our chances of survival.
But only up to a certain point.
There is a limit to how much stress we can handle.
Up to a certain point it is good, helps improve your performance.
But once you go through a certain threshold, your performance collapses.
Your ability to cope, concentrate and focus begin to disappear.
This isn't a good thing.
It is something very serious, something that could happen to you.
There seemed to be plenty of opportunity to escape, but they were rooted to the spot.
When our lives depend on it, some of us might waste of valuable seconds doing the wrong thing.
In an aeroplane crash, something as simple as undoing your seatbelt can be daunting.
They tend to press the button on the seat belt buckle, as they would in a car, rather than pulling the lever.
54 people were killed when an aeroplane packed with families burst into flames Analysis of the 1985 Manchester Airport disaster reveals evidence of how poorly we can respond in a crisis.
In escaping from the aircraft, instead of going out of the exit straight away, they stopped to take their luggage out of the overhead cabins.
The fact they were in an emergency, like threatening situation has not registered.
Survivors spoke of mass panic.
Most of those who died was sitting in the back of the aircraft.
Firemen said the heat was so In some cases people were unable to act.
One of the common behaviours amongst the victims was behavioural inaction, they remained remained frozen in their seats and they remained frozen in their seats, until the point they are engulfed in flames or toxic fumes.
There was no need for so many people to have died.
Smoke and flames poured from the engine.
A fireball swept through the rear of the cabin.
It took only Manchester is not an isolated case.
The sinking of the Estonia is notorious for recounts of behavioural inaction.
Although the alarm was sounded almost 30 minutes before the ferry sank, some passengers did nothing to save their own lives.
One of the things that I remember clearly is the water actually coming into the cafeteria and seeing lots of people around just frozen to the spot and I could never really understand why they weren't doing anything to save themselves.
There seemed to be plenty of opportunity to escape, yet they were just rooted to the spot.
They were shouted at to put life jackets on and they didn't respond.
Even when life jackets were handed to them or thrown at them, they did not respond.
We hope our instinct for survival would preserve us in a disaster, but the truth is, relatively few of us will cope well.
If you have got a group of people in a threat situation, in a disaster situation, you would expect about 12 to 15% of those will know what they are doing.
Most people, 70%, to 75% are going to be stunned.
They will be bewildered, they will be doing something, but it may not be well co co-ordinated.
They will be staggering towards survival.
Nerp Nerp between 3% to 15% are likely to show freezing behaviour, weeping, screaming, hysterical, there is no way we can tell who will cope well with it and who isn't.
Because we will never know whether we will freeze until it is too late, we should do what we can to prevent it happening.
Fortunately, experts are agreed on what we can do to reduce our chances of being overwhelmed.
In the event of an emergency situation, you need to be able to Survival psychologist, John Leach, found the key to surviving a disaster is preparation.
In this facility, off shore workers are taught how to get out of a helicopter if they are involved in a crash at sea.
When a disaster happens, the situation is unpredictable, the events are novel, and they contain threat information and they are generally overwhelming.
And the main effect of all that is that your normal luxury of being able to think and plan is gone completely and you are forced to rely on whatever you have left, whatever you have put together, whatever you have planned prior to the event and has been stored away.
The key thing is preparation.
The time to start thinking about what you would in an emergency isn't when you are in an emergency, that's the wrong time to start thinking about it.
You need to think about it when you are not under stress and there is no real danger.
In the relative safety of a training exercise, your brain is able to create a plan and store it away until needed.
The first time I thought about it was today, I have never thought about crashing in a plane really before.
You don't think of going through a drill, you think of get out of here quick and keep breathing because this is it now.
If I don't get out of here quick, that's the end.
Training also helps by introducing the physical sensations that will trigger that plan automatically in a real disaster.
When a helicopter ditches, they get the warning order, the impact and the water coming in and disorientation of the water swirling and the helicopter going upside down.
It is triggers which will pull out the appropriate evacuation procedures.
In other words, people can behave correctly without thinking.
This is one of the reasons why training for the police and the other emergency services is so important.
That's when they get their thinking done.
It is during training exercises.
So when they reach the real thing, they are not coming up with a plan there on-the-spot.
They are using a plan they have already worked out in training and they are implementing it on the ground.
Very few of us have the opportunity to take part in these kind of drills.
But there are still things we can all do in our every day lives to prepare for the unthinkable.
One, two.
Whenever I discuss this with other people, at first they think you are crazy, why are you doing this?We can walk our escape route in a hotel.
My whole working life, my research has shown that in the event of an emergency situation, you need to be able to do things right first time.
It is essential to be able to do this.
We could fin out out where out the life rafts are on a ferry.
I want to go there with my eyes shut.
The chances are it will happen at night, and it might be in smoke and you might be crawling your way there.
On a plane, we can think through what we would in the event of a crash.
Mental imaginary would help.
This involves visualising the situation and visualising what you would do if you are in the situation and if it happens, you can pull the plan out and implement it there and then.
That's where it gives you an advantage.
It doesn't mean your plan is perfect, but it does save you time and it does take the pressure off you and that's where you see the real benefits.
Any preparation you can do will help programme your brain for survival.
Even something as mundane as a fire drill could save your life.
On 9/11, one company, Morgan Stanley, managed to evacuate nearly all its staff.
One of the reasons is that for years the head of security, Rick Rescorla, had been subjecting his colleagues to frequent fire drills.
Rick Rescorla has become a legend when it comes to the World Trade Center.
He managed to train the people in Morgan Stanley to such an extent that virtually everyone from Morgan Stanley managed to get out on 9/11.
What they knew was that they had to react quickly.
There was very little hesitation.
People knew where to go and they knew what to expect on the stairs.
Very few other people in the World Trade Center had that understanding of the situation, had that understanding of what to do.
The majority of people didn't know where the stair cases where on 9/11.
Of the 3800 Morgan Stanley employees who worked in the World Trade Center, just 13 lost their lives.
Everyone is agreed that knowing what to do can increase your chances of survival, but there are some experiences for which there can be no rehearsal.
There is a thing which I have called the reality principle and there are some things that you are not going to walk away from.
When you get hit, you get hit and that's it.
On the morning of the 7th July, 2005, Susan Harrison was taking the Tube to work as usual.
It was an extremely busy day and ror ren dusly - horrendously busy and at King's Cross I can walk to work and it takes ten minutes and I was feeling lazy and decided to stay on the Tube.
There was nothing unusual about the journey in any way.
It was just an average London Tube journey.
I was in the front carriage which was the same carriage as the bomber.
About a minute after the train left King's Cross Station, Germaine Lindsay detonated a bomb killing 26 people.
We have roughly 100 injured.
One female is struggling to breathe.
We need at least ten ambulances to Russell Square, please.
The blast was just four meters from where Susan was standing.
When the bomb went off, it was like a huge pressure against my chest and I could feel myself being pushed across the carriage.
You could hear other people screaming, panicking, dying, injured, I don't know.
I tried to get up.
And it was at that point I realised that I was seriously injured myself.
My left leg was basically the skin had been blown away and there was broken bones and blood, lots of blood.
Susan was minutes from bleeding to death.
Luckily I was wearing a cardigan that had a belt and I was able to stop the blood flow.
I have no doubt that saved my life.
It took 30 minutes for the first paramedic to reach her carriage, fortunately Susan did have medical training, but just as significantly, she had the confidence to take control.
There was no emotional feeling, it was just this is what I need to do to survive.
This is how I'm going to get out of this Tube.
Whilst the most important thing in a disaster might be to have a plan, it will count for nothing unless you are prepared to put it into action.
We have cases where you have a weaker, slower, less intelligent person, survives one of these situations while right beside him, you have a smarter, stronger faster person who doesn't and what's the difference? The difference you find is the person who survived, their self-confidence was higher.
The more self-confidence you have, the greater your ability to cope with stress and to deal with it and to keep on dealing with it and the lower lower your confidence, the more likely is you will freeze and you won't be able to cope.
I need today survive.
It is a survival thing, I guess.
Your brain is saying "You need to get out of I never thought I was going to die, ever.
In most disasters, someone gets out alive.
If we take anything from what the survivors and experts say, it is that should the worst happen, what you do really could make the difference.
At no point did I ever think I wasn't going to make it.
If you started to feel that you wherein going to make it, then you would perish quickly in that situation.