This Is Chance!: The Shaking of an All-American City, a Voice That Held It Together

by Jon Mooallem

Much of the sociologists’ work in Alaska would be incorporated into a landmark report on the disaster, commissioned by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their studies of the earthquake would legitimize both the Disaster Research Center and the very idea of examining the social science of natural disasters. Gradually, an entire field—disaster studies—would blossom around Quarantelli and his colleagues and, as it grew, it would be stunning to recognize how much of what the sociologists had seen in Anchorage turned out to be characteristic of all disasters everywhere: People tended to act rationally, and even selflessly, rushing in to help like the crowds at the Public Safety Building. Mass hysteria was largely mythical, even though some entirely reasonable and effective responses to danger—like running, en masse, as fast as possible from a collapsing building—were easily mistaken for it.