Disaster Histories and Telling the Right Story

It's hard to fill a book with the one disaster... so how do you tell the story you want to?

Last year (as I mentioned earlier), I got into reading about airplane crash investigations. Recently, I've come back to them - not just from Admiral Cloudberg's excellent blog, but some books as well, what I call "disaster histories" of some individual incidents. I've noticed some common weak points to those disaster histories, which raise some interesting questions in my mind.

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For one, despite my being very interested in the air disaster that's the centerpoint of the story, a lot of the books are often rather boring. That's because a lot of the book usually isn't about the disaster itself. Instead, it talks about the people involved in it - whether the pilots of the plane, the passengers, or the history of the airline.

This's because it's really hard to fill a whole book talking about what actually happened in an airplane disaster, or any similar disaster. One disaster I recently read about - the near-crash of BOAC 712 in 1968 - was over within three minutes. At a page per second, you'd barely have a book. Even when it takes longer, such as BA 009 in 1982 which flew through a volcanic ash cloud and lost engine power, it's hard to make the half-hour interesting without repeating the same reactions again and again for different passengers. Hardly any of them did, or could have done, anything to impact the disaster - so it would get very repetitive.

This makes sense. If a disaster like this happened in a novel, it'd probably be just one incident in the novel. We could read about characters plotting things that involve a plane crash (like in Millennium by John Varley, which I don't recommend), or characters trying to deal with the consequences of it (like in Airframe by Michael Crichton, which was decent enough) - but the plane crash wouldn't be the story in itself.

What actually happens, instead, is that Fire Over Heathrow (recounting BOAC 712) talks about the life histories of some of the people involved. This's very common in disaster histories: to essentially include a joint biography of the people. But in that case, it partakes of all the common flaws of biographies. I usually don't want to read about the details of (say) George Washington's childhood; I want to read about the notable things he did with his life. It's even worse in disaster histories, because usually these people's lives aren't interesting outside of their one encounter with history (in the disaster). As Wikipedia would put it, one notable incident often doesn’t make someone worth writing an encyclopedia article (let alone a book) about. Fire Over Heathrow is better than some, in that the joint biography is shorter than many.

Of course, sometimes more of the people's lives is connected with the disaster. For example, in the 1970 crash of ALM 980, the pilot had been the airline's chief pilot - so he'd been involved with some of the management decisions that led to the plane running out of fuel over the Caribbean. When 35 Miles from Shore tells the backstory of his life, the book is simultaneously building up toward the crash. And then, later on, we follow the pilot through how management responded to the emergency by blaming the individual pilots.

In writing a novel, I'd almost certainly put in tie-rods like that. But in real history, the real stories of real disasters usually aren't so well-connected.

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After thinking through this, I wondered if it might be best for "disaster histories" to be blog posts or individual chapters, not books. That'd let them be told at their own best length, without padding to fill out a whole book. I've read many good blog posts and Wikipedia articles about disasters like these, so I know it can be done well.

Of course (I immediately added to myself), there'd be an exception for when the disaster is large enough to expand beyond a blog post, such as 9/11. I've read an excellent book about 9/11 that fits well into the "disaster history" genre: Touching History by Lynn Spencer, which focuses on air traffic control on that day. With a disaster impacting the whole nation (and, quickly, whole world), and stretching across most of a day (and longer), the history of what happened during the disaster can easily take up a whole book.

But then I remembered there are things to say that can fill out a book, without becoming a biography of otherwise-not-notable people. I remembered another book I'd read last year: The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes. Author Amanda Ripley tells the stories of several disasters, while digging into people's fear responses in disaster, how they're often counterproductive, and how people can be motivated to useful action anyway.

In other words, instead of widening the scope of the story to bring in the whole lives of the people involved, she narrows the focus to debate people's individual actions during the disaster. This's analogous to the fractal detail that I enjoy so much in other sorts of history. Just like we can look at the details of how an army fought an individual battle, and debate whether they did it in the best way or whether it was a good idea to fight it in the first place - similarly, Ripley is similarly looking at how an individual person acted in a disaster and whether it was the best way or a good idea.

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But then (I corrected myself), Ripley wasn't talking about an individual disaster. She's comparing multiple disasters. I can imagine a similar book that digs into one disaster, but to get a useful analysis of human behavior you'd probably need to talk about multiple disasters. So, is this really the same sort of "disaster history"?

I have to agree, it isn't.

And that made me try to consider: what is the purpose of disaster history? Why do people read it? Why did Captain Sullenburger, after heroically landing his plane on the Hudson, go on to commission a ghostwritten book? What am I hoping to get from reading a disaster history?

Juding from the Goodreads reviews, some people really did read Sullenberger's book looking for what deeply-rooted parts of his biography prepared him to do the right things. And given his oft-repeated message crediting his training and long piloting experience, perhaps a biography was the best way to get that through to the mass market. But for myself, in most disaster histories, I'm not looking for deep psychological examinations of the protagonists.

Instead, I'm looking for the details of what happened during the disaster (which, again, could take up a couple chapters) - and then an explanation of the consequences. BOAC 712 caused airports to improve their firefighting services; BA 009 caused people to realize volcanic ash could hurt planes; ALM 980 caused the FAA to reform some rules about fuel and helped drive the ALM airline bankrupt. The Admiral Cloudberg blog which first got me into disaster histories talks about this from a very technical (but very interesting, at least to me) angle; books can give a less technical view while still telling the consequences at greater length.

Can this be told in a format shorter than a book? Absolutely. Can it fill out a book? Probably.

Of course, this might still not make a book I want to read. I'm remembering No Man's Land, the autobiography of the pilot of Quantas 72 which narrowly avoided crashing due to a computer error. After an interesting overview of the direct consequences, he spends the second half of the book talking about his psychological consequences (including PTSD) and experience with the airline afterwards. I feel very sorry for him... but I still didn't finish his autobiography. But then, there are many other good books out there.

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And - there are also many books that could be better, and many stories that could be very interesting when told from the right perspective. I do like reading disaster histories, but there are many disaster histories that could be dramatically improved by telling them from another angle.