Sociology of Crisis. A Start Via 9/11/01

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Recall the experience of fire drills in school. The fire alarm rings and the students and teachers immediately suspend their work, line up, and quickly march out of the building along designated routes. With the plan and the drill there is a fixed social response to an anticipated (contingent) crisis.

This drill fits the paradigm of sociology that links action to law/consensus which, in turn, is called into existence by a particular environmental circumstance. A fire-crisis sets the environmental moment that leads to the arranged exit-the-building action.

Social settings under threat take this form. For ships at sea there is the abandon ship drill. For airline flights there is verbal instruction and demonstration at the start of every flight. Plans are in place in areas threatened by hurricane, flood, earthquake, tornadoes. In high risk occupations there are contingency plans and equipment (gas masks, guide ropes, portable radios) for several kinds of threats–think of firemen, police, miners, seamen, pilots and crew, train and subway engineers, soldiers, oil rig workers, truck drivers and so on. The purpose is to reduce damage, injury and death when the feared event strikes. An auxiliary function is the reduction of anxiety of what had been the unknown. If you hang around bulls you learn to respect their power but you also learn their limits and you learn the defensive responses you have available to protect yourself–this knowing is a defense against anxiety and panic.

(With anxiety and panic we move toward psychological territory. As suggested above, social context can limit it. But in the other direction, anxiety and panic can be contagious and can envelope a group. It is easy to talk about but if you fall into it you are someplace else that is like an uncomfortable antechamber of hell. I fell into it once with serious danger approaching. I was able to slide above it with the rational though that this was my worse option, it increased my actual danger. Above all I had to be clear and concentrated. In that instant I controlled it and gave it up. There is a choice here against unconscious emotion.  If you reach that moment and can, take it. Any preparation we can provide for ourselves through training, discussion or conceptual framing is a defense against anxiety. Without cool we are into blind running and yelling, helter skelter. Once past anxiety it becomes a high tension search comparable to looking for a key to a lock, or the solution to a puzzle, or the resolution of a mystery but with a threatening outcome if we fail. We want to know how to either defeat or neutralize the threat or to escape from it.)

The particular form and content of the 9/11/01 attack on the World Trade Center was not anticipated but the fact of the attempt was. Remember that the building had been attacked ten years before and a evacuation and response plan was in place. The classic model in play: anticipated threat, plan with instruction and drill to be activated when the actual aggression starts.

When the attack went in the defensive plan clicked on. The evacuation by foot down the fire-proof stair-wells began and was successfully carried out for most of the people on the floors below the points of impact. The electricity was out so this took place in semi-darkness or worse. The photos and videos of the balconies of the ground floor entrance halls show the very orderly line emerging. They were covered by the plan and it worked.

The vast majority of casualties on 9/11 occurred in the floors above impact because the foot routes out were blocked or thought to be blocked. A few found their way through but the rest not. Down and out worked for the lower floors but not for the upper. The other two options for escape, out through the side of the building or out onto the roof were not available These avenues had not been developed. There was neither plan nor equipment. In fact access doors to the roofs had been purposely locked and no key or other way through provided.

The result was a classic situation of the human group in desperate circumstances–no emergency plan with training in place or if in place non-operable. What is the group as a unit or its members individually to do? We can all empathize with the feeling of the need to act without definitive focusing clues.

It was a situation of uncertainty upon uncertainty. The fire and heat, extensive damage. no idea of the danger that the building would collapse so quickly, unsure of rescue attempts. Some contact with the outside world through cell phones, but these apparently not connected with a command center with an answer.

We might call this moment a case of specific anomie–there is a lack of workable rules (plans) for a specific contingency that materializes. This is different than the generalized situation of no rules at all. It is like a fuse blown that governs only the lights in one room, but that is the room you are in.

We call the people involved a grouping. The question of their social order and association prior to the onset of the crisis is open. We presume that there is no plan in place or that it has proved inappropriate. They have not immediately been overpowered by the threat and have bypassed or tamed any anxiety. What do they do next? Several characteristics of association come into play. The size of the grouping, whether it is face-to face or dispersed (or some combination), whether members know each other, and whether some prior social order has been shared by them in whole or in part?

The small face-to-face group even if made up of strangers (so long as they share some language or sign system) has some chance to quickly evolve as a unit (either setting up as a cadre of the whole or separating into different functions (plans, coordination, research or intelligence, special skills.) They can act together. The counterattack against the terrorists by the passengers of the 9/11 flight over Pennsylvania fits this form exactly. In a short time this grouping of passengers and flight crew witnessed the take over of the plane and the killing of some key or simply targeted people, They were given the margin of time by the terrorists flying west and then back toward the east. Through their cell phones the passengers received word of the nature of the other attacks of planes into buildings They organized themselves as a counterattack group and carried out their attempt to retake the ship. In the morning they were peaceful travelers and now suddenly they transformed themselves into shock troops. A startling group change. They missed by a hair. The plane crashed but the terrorists were thwarted in their plan to destroy another iconic building.

A remarkably intelligent, brave and active group given the short edge of time to understand the desperate nature of their situation through cell phones and their own observations were able to plan and coordinate a violent action entirely beyond their ordinary experience. It was sui generis (generated within the group and not dependent on external orders or permissions.)

Those in the upper reaches of the towers had another situation. The enemy immolated and gone. The local environment impossible–fire, destruction. The official escape plan not working. They, a larger group, dispersed. No obvious route out. They appeared to organize into small units or two or more. They communicated in passing, starting toward a shared understanding. But organization of the whole did not seem to develop.

Some of those trapped by fire and confronted with an unbearable choice of burn or jump went through the side of the building.

Each instance of threat against a grouping without a fixed plan of response in place has its own dynamic and rolling out. Anyone who is caught up in a such a situation is, with whatever mates present, on his own. All we can do is talk in and around the premises, establish an awareness and sensitivity, point out theoretical possibilities and past instances.

We’ll come back to this topic.