THE THIN WHITE LINE: the history of a future avian influenza pandemic

Chapter 3: Pandemic

Interview with "Jane," a Vancouver housewife

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA

[“Jane” is a housewife living in the suburbs of Vancouver who actively participated in one of the many looting incidents that occurred during the Great Panic. Her real name has been withheld at her request.]

    You would hear about crowds going crazy and stampeding at shopping malls or rioting at Third World soccer stadiums and it always sounded tragic, but also kind of silly. It just seems so obvious that when you go out looking for trouble, you’ll find it.
    I had no idea what I was talking about. Now I do. So now you listen to me because I have learned a few distressing things about human nature.
My husband worked for the water treatment plant and was considered an essential worker. I worked at home as a mother of three young children. I watched every scrap of news I had time to watch. When I could, I mean. I had pulled my kids out of their school before it was even closed, and it was an endless battle to keep them in the house and from killing each other. I keep a well stocked house, we had backups of everything. We are a well-informed family that believes in taking precautions against the unknown.
    One night, my husband sat down with me and told me about a meeting they had at the plant. He said that I should go out the next day and buy up more supplies. I told him that we had extra of everything down in the cellar.
    “Besides, you’re an essential worker, so the government has said you’re a priority,” I says. I had heard this on the news. I says: “Didn’t they tell you that? You get extra food. You get extra drugs. You get the vaccine first when it comes out.”
    He says to me: “That’s right, I’m an essential worker, and my boss just told me that they may make us live out there at the plant until this all blows over.” He says: “If that happens, and I’m not saying for sure it will, you and the little ones will be on your own for a while without me. I want you and the kids to have what you need.”
    I can tell you that I was mad as hell at the government right at that moment. We are good citizens doing everything we were supposed to. My husband was reporting to work and wasn’t about to abandon his community. My sister had already gone to her place in the middle of the woods near Summerland, and had invited us to join her and her family there. We could have gone at any time. We could have gotten out somewhere safe. We had that option. People were leaving Vancouver on anything that moved, they called it an exodus on the news. But we weren’t about to leave our home or abandon our duties. Imagine if all the plant workers left——where would the city be without clean water? They’d be drinking water with germs and chemicals in it and everybody would be much worse off than they were, that’s where! And then he tells me that the reward for our loyalty is that they might kidnap him away from me and leave me and my young kids defenseless and on our own.
    I was pretty mad. But I don’t believe in staying mad at a problem. My mother had raised me to take things in stride and confront life’s challenges head on.
    The next day, I got up early and drove out to the Safeway store. I went early. I wanted to be one of the first into the store so I could take my time and make sure I got every item on my list that needed getting. My kids, in particular, wanted every sugared cereal under the sun even though such things had gotten outrageously expensive. This was when you could still do some real shopping, before everything started to run out and the prices went through the roof. It was before the government started controlling prices and instituted rationing by limiting purchases and making you shop on certain days, and only one small group at a time.
    When I got there, there was this huge crowd. I’m not good at guessing numbers, so I won’t even try to tell you how many people were there, but I can tell you I was wondering how they were even going to all fit into the store. Some people looked cold and tired, like they had stayed there all night waiting. There were two carts left and me and a lot of other people came upon them at the same time. I grabbed one and held on for dear life, and I got to keep it. I am a woman but I can be very strong when I have to be. God help the man who ends up standing anywhere between a woman and the health of her babies. He will not win. She will tear him apart if she has to.
    I was lucky to see a friend, who invited me to join her in her place in line. She started talking about the superflu. Everybody in line was talking about the superflu. “Did you hear this, did you hear that,” that kind of thing. “I hope they still have my kids’ favorite ice cream. I hope they’ll let us in before it starts to rain. I hope the prices haven’t gone up again. I hope they still have sugared cereals.” I hope I hope and so on.
    I remember she gave me some hand wipes to disinfect the handle of my cart. I had not brought any as I had heard of stores putting disinfectant bottles out front for this purpose. But these had apparently been stolen. I was very grateful to her for this help. I didn’t want to spend all this effort preparing for the flu, only to catch it in the process.
    Behind us, a scuffling: Somebody had started coughing, and people were kicking and shoving him out of line, threatening to kill him if he didn’t leave. I shivered and kept my head down. If I was going to do this I had to stay focused.
    Then the doors opened.
    People had been waiting so long, and were so worked up with anxiety about getting what they needed for their families, and getting them before everybody else took them, that they all surged forward together. I lost my friend immediately. I just started running with everybody else. I ended up in the middle of a stampede.
     There were two cops outside shouting at us to slow down but nobody listened. The crowd sort of shrank away from them, people were doing this weird cringing run like they were trying to sneak through in plain sight. In other words, nobody stopped no matter what the cops said. I know that some people fell, but it was impossible to help them. Carts overturned and crashed. I stepped on something soft and felt it snap under my shoe. I just kept going. If I stopped, I would have been trampled.
    There was screaming, I remember that clearly.
    People kept crowding in around me, and the crowd stopped and started. We were too close to each other. Everybody wanted everybody else to keep their distance. But we didn’t want to get left behind either. Nobody wanted to stop and proceed in an orderly fashion. I was in the middle of a dense mob in which everybody wanted a shortcut. I stayed with the crowd, sensed its rhythms, moved with it, tried to get into and stay in the middle of all the people. That seemed the safest thing to do at the time.
    Once inside the store, people didn’t stop moving. They held lists in their hands but just started grabbing whatever seemed nearest. I started doing the same. Otherwise, I had stopped thinking. I was like some kind of animal, see. All I knew is that the government was going to take my husband from us and leave us on our own, and if we didn’t have plenty of food, we might die. I didn’t pour my life into raising three good children only to see them die of hunger during a pandemic. We were going to survive.
    The problem was the store must not have gotten its next shipment, because many of the shelves had already been cleaned out. There was almost no fruits and vegetables, no eggs, no fresh meat, no bread. I went straight for the cans. I pulled 10 cans of tuna fish into my cart and from there started grabbing deviled ham.
    And then there was a loud cry, and they came like a wave out of the ocean.
    The people in the back of the line had gotten into the store, saw the shelves emptying, and went crazy. They started ramming their carts into people to get past. Suddenly everybody was fighting to get ahead, get some food, any food, before everybody else got it first. It was like a chain reaction. We all surged forward from this one big push.
    I started shopping at a run. Not only did I want to get my chance at the food, I didn’t want anybody sticking their hands into my cart and stealing what I’d gotten. Behind me, I heard carts grinding together, blocking the aisle. People were cursing and some of them were hitting at each other. When I turned back for a quick look behind me, I saw somebody pulling out a knife. I didn’t stay to see what happened next. It was a free-for-all everywhere I went. People were buying anything, everything.
    By the end of my shop, my cart was overflowing. I had been an aggressive shopper and felt like I had fought and won a battle. I forced my way towards the front of the store. People were packed everywhere. I could see some of them with no carts, holding a single bottle of V8 juice or some other food or drink against their chests. The lines at the registers were backed up.
    Then the stampede started again.
    A couple of teenagers started it by grabbing things out of an old woman’s cart. She yelled at them to stop, but they didn’t. A man came over and grabbed some items, too, then a woman. The old lady couldn’t stop them, and nobody wanted to abandon their own carts to help her. This created a panic among the shoppers who had gotten through the store first, that they would end up with nothing. People started ramming their way through the lines. The cashiers just stood there, scared. The manager tried to stop us, blocking the exit with his body, but people kept hitting him with their carts to force him out of the way. I was one of the people who did it. Me, God help me, who’d never hurt so much as a fly! There were broken bottles, puddles of fruit juice, smashed granola bars smeared on the floor, cans rolling around everywhere under our wheels. Outside, the cops were so overwhelmed with people still trying to get into the store that they didn’t try to stop us either.
    Inside the store, a gun went off. I started running again. People were reaching into my cart and grabbing odd items one at a time. It was like a toll I had to pay all the way to my car.
    They only got a few items. I never ran so fast in my life. I was like one possessed.
    That is the story of how the store got looted top to bottom. Every single item got cleaned out, and after the first few customers, nobody paid a dime, and I heard later that some people got hurt in there until the riot police showed up.
    I also heard one of the two poor cops I saw at the door ended up in a coma. I have prayed frequently for him and his poor family. He could have stayed home with his family. Instead, he ended up at a grocery store trying to serve his community, and now he will sleep forever, as good as dead.
    When I got home, I started shaking and couldn’t stop for a long time, just sitting there in my car, shaking all over. I didn’t feel like I had won a battle anymore. I felt ashamed, not just for myself, but for all of us. We had honestly behaved more like wild animals instead of civilized people in a modern country. It was not a good day for the human race. The world needs to hear about this so it doesn’t happen again.
    It wasn’t my fault, though. I am sorry for my part in what happened, but I had gone into that store with cash in hand to make honest purchases of necessities that my family needed to survive. It was not my intention to become a criminal, a looter.
    But everybody was doing it.

Ottawa riot police prepare to enter a supermarket that is being looted during the Second Panic of November 29-December 14. Looters had to be met directly with force, as tear gas could not be used in food stores, as it spoiled the invaluable foodstuffs inside. In many cases, police allowed looters to take what they could carry as long as they followed orders to disperse.(58)