#honestly I'm kinda irked at Ripley on Williams' behalf

[mumblingsage]

I've talked about Amanda Ripley's disaster survival book The Unthinkable before, and it turns out there's a new edition for 2024, if that's additional incentive to check it out. Today I'm remembering her chapter about Robert Olian, a bystander who attempted to rescue the survivors of Air Florida Flight 90 after the crash in the Potomac in 1982.

Olian saw the crash, and he and a few other witnesses stood on the shore of the freezing river, tied together a makeshift lifeline of scarves and jumper cables, and he set off with it to try to reach the survivors.

He was only a tiny portion of the way there when he realized he had bitten off way more than he could chew. As Ripley puts it:

At that point, Olian was just halfway there. He'd been in the water for about fifteen minutes. If it took another fifteen minutes to get to them, and it would probably take more since he was exhausted now, what would he do next? If he somehow summoned the strength to carry every one of them back across the football-filed length of water, it would take yet another thirty minutes at least. Realistically, there was no way his body--or the survivors--could last another forty-five minutes in that water. He remembers staring at the tail section of the plane and noticing how smooth it was. Even if he made it out there, there might be nothing to hold on to, he thought. "I was pretty sure I was gonna die," Olian says. "But that was OK. I had an internal calm and good feeling about that. I was not going to turn my back on those folks."

As you can tell from the bits of present tense, Olian did survive--a helicopter arrived and headed for him, thinking he was one of the plane passengers. He waved it toward the actual passengers to rescue them, while his fellow bystanders-turned-rescuers hauled him back to shore by the rope that was still tied to him.

Looking back, he said his motivation was a mix of overconfidence - at the time he jumped in, he truly believed he'd be strong enough to reach the survivors and help them, underestimating the depth of the water - and insecurity: he would have felt like a coward if he hadn't tried to help. And "If rational thought had entered my head at any point, I wouldn't have done it."

He didn't take off his steel-toed boots or remove the five pounds of keys in his pockets. He just jumped in. He needed to let those people know someone was trying to save them, he said later. That was all. "They had to see someone right now. If I was ever confident of anything in my life, it was this," he says in his slow, methodical way. "Worst-case scenario, I would be totally ineffective in saving them, but at least I would give them hope."

And in the end, according to the survivors, he did. Watching a guy try to swim to you with a rope is at least something to do while you cling to the wreckage of your plane; the hope he might make it also gave them the motivation to keep clinging on and keep their heads above the freezing water. They survived long enough for the helicopter to arrive (one of the six surviving passengers, Arland D. Williams Jr., was caught on the wreckage and rather than spend time trying to work himself free, passed the rescue lines the helicopter dropped to the other five. Tragically, by the time rescuers returned to get him, he had drowned. He received a number of posthumous honors including a stretch of the repaired 14th Street bridge being named for him. Ripley gives Williams short shrift in her book and highlights examples of heroism from the other five passengers, but his Wikipedia page has links to other accounts in his honor.)

I guess some of this could be turned into an object lesson somehow. The importance of hope, observations about selflessness and heroism, the advice to, if you must attempt to swim across a frozen river, at least make sure someone's tied a cable to you so they can haul you back. Olian's always stuck with me as an example of a hero who failed in his rescue attempt and, if you were to be highly cynical, made a bit of a fool of himself - and yet he's inspiring all the same.