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

by Jon Mooallem

After Sunday night, that heightened quality of the atmosphere in Anchorage began to dwindle. The disaster hadn’t ended; the city still had a slew of fearsome problems ahead of it—How would Anchorage pay for its reconstruction? How much help would the federal government provide? Was the ground even safe to rebuild on?—but those challenges were of a different magnitude, and far less straightforward, than the ones the community had been scrappily surmounting so far. Finding solutions to them—if solutions even existed—would take months, if not years, and involve towers of paperwork, recondite financial calculations, studies by Outside geologists and soil scientists, and protracted squabbling with aloof bureaucracies in Washington. The work would be embittering and exhausting, convoluted and boring; as time wore on, the story of Anchorage’s recovery would sprawl far beyond the satisfying outlines of the drama that had unfolded in the city over the last three days. Before long, Genie would vent about “chasing around at the heels of federal officials that have been traipsing in and out of Anchorage. Each one would have the same type of syrupy, say-nothing public statement to make at planeside when he arrived, then have his picture taken standing in front of the rubble, then talk to some groups and repeat the first statements he’d made to the press, then have a press conference prior to departure and say the same thing.”