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

by Jon Mooallem

This was all just one man’s rambling hypothesis, he told Quarantelli, but he suspected “there’s something fierce about the egalitarian attitudes of the people in Alaska that allowed them to work together in the disaster…And this idea that you’re grappling with hardship all the time—it minimized the panic.” Quarantelli and his colleagues would hear this theory frequently in Anchorage. The Alaskans were essentially arguing that the conventional wisdom about disasters was correct: they did bring out the worst in people—just not in Alaska, where people were simply kinder, tougher, and better prepared. As Genie would write, “Alaskans have always been an independent breed of people. They have to be. They live in this land at the top of the world knowing the great distances to the continental United States—knowing the proximity to possible dangers from the Soviet Union—knowing that, at any moment, they may find it necessary to fend for themselves and learn to live with the elements of nature—a nature that is always unpredictable and sometimes violent.”