Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

This year, for the first time, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will recognize a regular, non-governmental human (or organization) for acts of superior leadership and innovation—through a new honor called the Rick Rescorla National Award for Resilience.

This is a big deal. For years, schmucks like me have been haranguing the federal government for failing to highlight the stories and wisdom of the regular people who make our country more resilient. Instead of talking about how government is going to make us safe, we ought to start listening—to the t-shirt vendors, the flight attendants, the survivors and the guy in the aisle seat, to the Rick Rescorlas of the world who have shown us how the public can prevent and respond to disasters with grace, courage and initiative.

Well, now DHS is doing it, in at least one symbolic and important way. Please send your nominations asap to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). More details and the nomination form can be found here. The deadline is June 1, 2012.

The award was named after Rick Rescorla, the head of security for Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in the World Trade Center. I wrote about Rescorla in The Unthinkable, and I’ve talked about him around the country. His story is impossible to forget once you’ve heard it. So let me share some of it here, now that we have a good excuse…

Rick Rescorla was one of those thick-necked, former soldier types who spent the second halves of their lives patrolling the perimeters of marble lobbies the way they once patrolled a battlefield. He was disciplined in everything he did, and he understood the power of the human brain to get better through practice.

After the 1993 bombing and the fiasco of an evacuation that followed, Rescorla decided that Morgan Stanley employees had to take full responsibility for their own survival— something that happened almost nowhere else in the Trade Center. He knew it was foolish to rely on first responders to save his employees. His company was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, a village nestled in the clouds. Morgan Stanley’s employees would need to take care of one another.

From then on, Rescorla started running the entire company through frequent, surprise fire drills. He trained employees to meet in the hallway between the stairwells and, at his direction, go down the stairs, two by two, to the forty-fourth floor. He noticed they moved slowly, so he started timing them with a stopwatch—and they got faster.

The radicalism of Rescorla’s drills cannot be overstated. Remember, Morgan Stanley was an investment bank. Millionaire, high-performance bankers on the 73rd floor chafed at Rescorla’s evacuation regimen. They did not appreciate interrupting high-net-worth clients in the middle of a meeting. Each drill, which pulled the firm’s brokers off their phones and away from their computers, cost the company money. But Rescorla did it anyway. He didn’t care whether he was popular.

When guests visited Morgan Stanley for training, Rescorla made sure they all knew how to get out too. Even though the chances were slim, Rescorla wanted them ready for an evacuation.

On the morning of 9/11, Rescorla heard an explosion and saw Tower 1 burning from his office window. A Port Authority official came over the public address system and urged everyone to remain at their desks. But Rescorla grabbed his bullhorn, his walkie-talkie, and his cell phone and began systematically ordering Morgan Stanley employees to get out. They already knew what to do, even the 250 visitors who were taking a stockbroker training class and had already been shown the nearest stairway.

Rescorla had led soldiers through the Vietcong-controlled Central Highlands of Vietnam. He knew the brain responded poorly to extreme fear. Back then, he had calmed his men by singing Cornish songs from his youth. Now, in the crowded stairwell, as his sweat leached through his suit jacket, Rescorla began to sing into the bullhorn. “Men of Cornwall stand ye steady; It cannot be ever said ye for the battle were not ready; Stand and never yield!”

Moments later, Rescorla had successfully evacuated the vast majority of Morgan Stanley employees out of the burning tower. Then he turned around. He was last seen on the 10th floor, heading upward, shortly before the tower collapsed. His remains have never been found.

Rescorla taught Morgan Stanley employees to save themselves. It’s a lesson that had become, somehow, rare and precious. When the tower collapsed, only 13 Morgan Stanley colleagues—including Rescorla and four of his security officers—were inside. The other 2,687 were safe.

Thanks to the folks at USC’s Master of Arts in Teaching Program for this nice graphic on $ and education around the world.

Via: MAT@USC | Master’s of Arts in Teaching

But this raises another mystery: We’ve known for a long time that more money does not tend to lead to more learning, once you get past a bare minimum (which we did a long time ago). So here’s my question: Where does all that money go in the U.S.??

Why do we spend so much more? Has anyone seen a good answer to this? I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to things that other countries’ education budgets don’t have to cover (i.e. health care for teachers). One report (PDF here) states that this difference alone could account for up to 8% of the variation between our expenses and those of other nations. Well, if that’s true, that’s not actually very much.

Has anyone tried to compare countries’ spending while controlling for differences in how non-salaried benefits get distributed from place to place? Also, I’d love to see what percentage of our spending goes to technology compared to the spending in other countries… Anyone ever seen anything that reveals the story behind the money? I may be missing something, but I can’t seem to find any really strong analysis of the money story—even though we are talking about huge sums of money…

On the Titanic, 70% of the women and children survived—but only 20% of the men. Cue the orchestra!

But was the Titanic the exception? A new study investigates whether women and children really do have an advantage on a sinking ship.

It is so refreshing, first of all, to see a study focus obsessively on the thing that matters most in a disaster—the behavior of the humans involved. Naturally, the results show that life is more complicated than the movies.

The study, out of Sweden, concludes that it is in fact worse to be a woman on a shipwreck, based on a study of 18 maritime disasters involving over 15,000 people. The survival rate of women was 27% vs. 37% for men (see Table C1). But children have the lowest survival rate of all at 15%. And crew members have the highest rate of anyone at 61%!

The authors have some compelling data, but their conclusion jumps the shark:

Taken together, our findings show that behavior in life-and-death situation is best captured by the expression ‘Every man for himself’.

Um, really? I look at the same set of facts and make a very different conclusion.

The most important detail in the study is actually the crew survival rate. To me, these figures show that the most valuable asset in a disaster is not gender; it’s experience.

The crew members knew where the life boats were. They knew how to operate them. And they knew how to swim.

They weren’t afraid to take action; they weren’t waiting for instructions; they weren’t down below trying to save the children (a likely explanation for the death of at least some of the female passengers.)

This doesn’t mean that crew members are all cowards who flee in the life boats while passengers die. That may happen sometimes, but the opposite also happens. Crew members, given their roles, may go to extreme lengths to help rescue passengers. And who knows? The passenger survival rate might be even worse if crew members did not have this inclination.

Personally, I think the question of chivalry on a sinking ship is less interesting. There are too many compounding factors in a real disaster to be able to isolate whether people were being gender neutral or not. (Indeed, even more women might have died if the women-and-children-first slogan had never existed. Who knows?)

Anyway, the good news here is that knowledge matters. Under strain, the brain reverts to what it knows best. If you’ve got muscle memory for getting into a life boat, you’ll be better off than someone who doesn’t. This kind of study should encourage cruise ship safety directors (not to mention building and airplane personnel) to give people physical experience trying on life jackets and releasing life boats. These are not onerous tasks; you do them with crew members all the time. Now do them with the rest of us.

Thanks to Freakonomics and @DaniloBalu for noticing the study!

New America Foundation is hosting an unusual conference on resilience today. They’ve defined it creatively, which I like, including every angle from a resilient psyche to resilient capitalism. Plus, it gives me the perfect excuse to catch up with Admiral Thad Allen (retired), the Coast Guard Commandant who let the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and then oversaw the response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

We’ll be talking about resilience, along with several other veterans of the subject, this afternoon.

I’ll be joining some other, smarter folks to talk about bioterrorism at a Cornell event at the Woodrow Wilson Center in DC tonight. Is it possible to prepare for bioterrorism in a reasonable and intelligent way? Or can you not really have all those words in the same sentence?