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

by Jon Mooallem

There was another reason, too, why the city’s search-and-rescue workers hadn’t kept finding more victims all weekend, like everyone had expected they would. As Genie interviewed more people in Anchorage, it became clear to her that the frenzied rescuers she’d seen digging in the rubble at Penney’s and peeling that woman out of her flattened car weren’t an anomaly. All over town, she wrote, “organized groups consisting of teachers, bankers, lawyers, laborers, bookkeepers—from all occupations and all walks of life—first methodically searched the ruins for survivors and fatalities.” There was the airline employee she’d interviewed on the radio that first night, who described running toward the wreckage of the control tower. On Fourth Avenue, store owners had climbed out of the trenches into which their buildings had fallen, then immediately scurried back in to search for anyone who’d been trapped. People in Turnagain described hauling neighbors out of the debris field with ropes, loading the injured into their cars and driving them to Providence Hospital—effectively picking the area clean hours before Jim Scott descended into the slide for the first time with his mountaineering buddies to hunt for survivors, in the middle of the night. In the end, this diffuse wave of unofficial first responders had reclaimed almost all of the city’s injured and dead before nightfall on Friday night—and most within the first hour after the quake. Everywhere in Anchorage, clusters of ordinary ...