The sociologists would spend a week in Anchorage after the quake, then make five subsequent trips to Alaska over the next eighteen months. They conducted nearly five hundred interviews, assembling a meticulous chronology of the immediate aftermath of the quake and reconstructing many of the same stories from Friday night and Saturday that you’ve already read in this book. Little of that action, they discovered, had unfolded methodically at all; it was all imprecise and instinctual.
