The singular resilience of Alaskans came up often enough that Daniel Yutzy would be compelled to evaluate it in his final report on the earthquake, completed five years later. “These ‘frontier’ attitudes and analogies,” Yutzy wrote, “were constantly expressed to imply there was a special mystique of emotional resources which Anchorage had that would be absent in other American communities faced with similar problems.” And yet, Yutzy argued, most of what unfolded in Anchorage appeared to be merely typical human behavior, as already observed in other disasters, and as would continue to be
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