Question authority and save lives. posted by Richard Seymour

That's the message of this nice little article:

Proof can be found in the 298-page draft report issued in April by the National Institute on Standards and Technology called Occupant Behavior, Egress, and Emergency Communications. (In layman's terms, that's who got out of the buildings, how they got out, and why.) It's an eloquent document, in many ways. The report confirms a chilling fact that was widely covered in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. After both buildings were burning, many calls to 911 resulted in advice to stay put and wait for rescue. Also, occupants of the towers had been trained to use the stairs, not the elevators, in case of evacuation.

Fortunately, this advice was mostly ignored. According to the engineers, use of elevators in the early phase of the evacuation, along with the decision to not stay put, saved roughly 2,500 lives. This disobedience had nothing to do with panic. The report documents how evacuees stopped to help the injured and assist the mobility-impaired, even to give emotional comfort. Not panic but what disaster experts call reasoned flight ruled the day.

Via this suspect character .

I heard another story of how citizens arranged to get hundreds of thousands of their fellow civilians to safety by boating them across the Hudson (link anyone?). As usual, however, the images we got were of hysterical, irrational people running back and forth, needing firm direction from the police. And the assumption that in the face of external threats we need to become more bunkered and authoritarian remains intact in large part because the state's capacities are overestimated, while the good sense of most people in a crisis is underestimated.