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

by Jon Mooallem

By the time Quarantelli finished his doctorate in 1959, he had learned to distrust documents and official narratives of any kind. They possessed a kind of problematic gravity, pulling at people’s memories of an experience and distorting them. After a dramatic event, it didn’t take long for people to begin revising their stories of it, if only subconsciously, to conform to their expectations of how it was supposed to have gone: in retrospect, decisions were always said to have been made methodically and by the appropriate people; smart decisions made by women during an emergency were frequently attributed to men. To piece together the real story, Quarantelli was learning, you had to talk to as many different people as you could, or be there to scrutinize the situation for yourself. At the time of the quake, five years into his career as a sociologist, Quarantelli’s compulsion to notice everything and passively accept nothing already appeared to define him—not just as a social scientist, but as a human being. Years later, near the end of his life, he would begin an oral history interview for the Disaster Research Center by saying, “I was born on November 10, 1924”—and when he added, “For some reason, I remember nothing about the first five years of my life,” he was clearly joking, but also sounded genuinely aggrieved by this lapse in his observational record.