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

by Jon Mooallem

This was also true in Anchorage. Many Alaskans discovered a peculiar joy in the immediate aftermath of the disaster, as they fed and sheltered neighbors, or huddled around a shared radio. There was camaraderie and altruism flowering everywhere. When, for example, the Alcantra family, who ran Alaska’s largest egg farm, on the outskirts of the city, discovered that the earthquake had spooked their hens out of laying, they invited the whole town to come and take home six or eight chickens apiece—meat with which to keep themselves fed through the emergency. The family claimed to have thirty thousand chickens when they started. “And a week later,” Patricia Alcantra would later explain, “the chickens are gone.”

This is a great example !