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

by Jon Mooallem

Quarantelli was unique among the three founders of the Disaster Research Center in that he’d actually done research in disaster zones before. As a graduate student, he had worked at a government institute at the University of Chicago called the National Opinion Research Council, under the mentorship of a scholar named Charles Fritz. Fritz and several colleagues were broadening the council’s mission to examine human behavior in emergencies and disasters when Quarantelli came on board. Two years later, in 1952, they dispatched him on a field trip to White County, Arkansas, after the region was stampeded by a series of large tornados. Two hundred and thirty-one people died, and another eighteen hundred were injured. Quarantelli expected to find mayhem—a breakdown of society. “But the more I interviewed people,” he later explained, “the more I said, ‘Boy, these people handled the situation very well!’ ” After that, Quarantelli struggled to write his master’s thesis. It was supposed to be about panic, but he was having trouble finding any instances of it.