Conversations about disasters are often tinged with dismay and grief. In the aftermath of a large fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in the North Kensington area of London on 14 June, the world witnessed a story being circulated about a child rescued from the 16th floor of the building 12 days after the fire broke out. What initially seemed to be a miraculous slice of good news, with users on social media buying in the heartening story, eventually turned out to be a false narrative.
Around 80 people are presumed to have been killed in the fire, which took around 200 freighters more than 24 hours to control, but only after it had destroyed at least 150 homes in the tower and its vicinity. Narrative serves as the terminus a quo for recovery. A wide array of discussions is now being held in the regular media and social media, and the UK government is coming up with the stricter implementation of fire safety policies to prevent further catastrophes.
Amanda Ripley in her book ‘The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – And Why’, which later turned into a PBS documentary, says that we worry about horrible things happening to us, but we do not know much about what it actually feels like. We flirt shamelessly with risk today, constructing city skylines in hurricane alleys and neighbourhoods on tops of fault lines. But as we build ever more impressive buildings and aeroplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors.
Our disaster personalities are more multifaceted and primordial than we think. But they are also more pliable. As William Irwin Thompson said, “Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. “ It’s only when catastrophes hit us that we realise our potential. Disasters often start quite modestly, and it’s a proven fact that majority of serious accidents, including significant aircraft damage, severe injuries and fire, are survivable.
Luck during disasters is not to be trusted. Also, relying solely on the response by emergency officials may not be of much help, given that no professional lifesaver or staff of emergency response team can be everywhere immediately. In many instances, delayed or poor mitigating measures by the authorities have rather exacerbated the situation than resolving it appropriately. Many forms of disasters may be predictable, but surviving them may not. The bigger and more complex the catastrophe, the more and probably longer we will be on our own.
