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

by Jon Mooallem

Quarantelli seemed fascinated by Davis and eager to understand how, exactly, he and his civilian mountaineers had managed to get so integrally involved. While some authority structures, like Civil Defense, appeared to have floundered after the quake, here was a totally informal group that had stepped in, organically, to pick up the slack. There were also brand-new ad hoc organizations like Disaster Control that had formed on the fly. The effectiveness of these improvised collectives was sharpening into focus for Quarantelli; it would be one of his primary takeaways from his time in Alaska. He would eventually label them “emergent groups,” and he and other sociologists would witness them rising, spontaneously, after countless other natural disasters around the world. Two decades after the earthquake in Alaska, for example, when a devastating quake struck Mexico City, self-organizing teams of civilians calling themselves topos, or “moles,” would search the city’s wreckage for survivors. Two decades after that, in New Orleans, a makeshift flotilla of four hundred civilian boat owners, eventually known as the Cajun Navy, would rescue ten thousand people from the floods after Hurricane Katrina. Then, in the fall of 2017, after another quake in Mexico City, volunteer topos would spontaneously dig in the rubble again, and a new Cajun Navy would rush into Houston after Hurricane Harvey.