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

by Jon Mooallem

Years later, Enrico Quarantelli would coauthor an article speculating about why the Disaster Research Center was documenting so little conflict in its studies of disaster-stricken communities around the world. In the paper, he compared a town coping with disaster to an audience watching a play. Like good theater, Quarantelli wrote, “disasters do not involve mundane matters but often the very issue of human life itself.” These themes, usually dormant in daily life, suddenly spill out in public for all to see. An unrelenting immediacy sets in: “Worries about the past and future are unrealistic when judged against the realities of the moment.” And distinctions between people fall away, leaving only “human beings responding to one another as human beings…As a consequence, all those who share in the experience are brought together in a very powerful psychological sense, by their common participation in such a dramatic event. To victims, the disaster is ‘our’ disaster.”