As awful as this sounded, the same truth held: information was a form of comfort. Each stunned, eyewitness account on the radio that night appeared to help people in Anchorage find the contours of this sinister abstraction they were living through—and to locate their places in it. For nearly five minutes, the earthquake had overpowered everyone. But now so many stories, like von Imhof’s, described people switching back on and spontaneously helping one another—reclaiming their roles, collectively, as protagonists in the disaster.
