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The earthquake struck at 5:36 pm. The ground rolled and shook and crumpled and bucked and didn’t stop for more than four minutes. Its epicenter was about 75 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, and it released so much energy that wave levels rose in Antarctica, on the other side of the planet, almost 24 hours later. Nearby, in Seward, Alaska, oil spilled into the ocean and ignited, so that the post-quake tidal wave engulfed the town in a watery wall of flame. That apocalypse, which struck on March 27, 1964, was the biggest quake ever recorded in the United States, and soon after the ground stopped moving, an Anchorage radio reporter named Genie Chance started talking.
In his new book This Is Chance!, writer Jon Mooallem chronicles how, over the next several days, Genie’s voice essentially held the city together as Chance passed along news and updates, relaying messages about who was safe and who was still missing—broadcasts that got repeated and amplified by ham radio operators down into the lower 48 states. It’s an inspiring portrait of one woman who embraced and mitigated a crisis situation; a beautiful exploration of how people tell stories on the radio, on stage, in books, and generally to each other; and a suddenly very relevant and optimistic description of how humans act when confronted with sudden, world-changing circumstances.
WIRED: Who was Genie Chance?
Jon Mooallem: Genie worked at the Anchorage radio station KENI part-time, and this was in an era when, if you were a woman in broadcasting, at least in Alaska, you were expected to have a women’s show where you would talk about fashion or homemaking. But Genie, when she got the job at KENI, pushed herself and pushed the station and kind of muscled her way into a roving reporter gig. She would start the day at the police station, running down all the crime stories from overnight, and then drive around Anchorage and the greater Anchorage area. She had a little VHF unit in her car so she could do live reports. She was really just covering the life of a city, every day.
When the earthquake happened, where was she?
She was driving with her son into town to run an errand before all the stores closed for the Easter weekend. And she immediately had this instinct that she should be covering this, so when the shaking stopped, she just proceeded to drive around town. First to the police station and on from there, as she heard or saw more stories developing. She was just trying to collect as much information as she could so that when the station came back on she’d be able to give a report, because there was no one else really in the field at that time.
In the book, you talk about how she really has to think about calibrating reporting the facts (but not some of the really horrific things that she saw in the immediate aftermath), as well as providing assurance and instruction. And she has to filter out misinformation on the fly too. Not malevolent information, but just people hearing something from their cousin’s brother kind of thing.
It took me a while to realize how literally in the dark they were until the sun came up the next morning. People tried to get some kind of comprehensive survey of the damage, but they just really couldn't do it. Sunrise on the second day was really the first moment when everyone could deal with the same set of facts.
And that's, I guess, what makes it very dissimilar from today: It was a physical problem, they couldn't see anything. We’re also obviously struggling today: We're putting obstacles in our own way to having the same set of facts.
And then people started coming down to the radio station.
At the time, it was not a crazy idea to hear people passing messages over the radio. And people who had heard KENI on the radio then just showed up, either at the radio station itself or to Genie’s counter at the police station, where she eventually started broadcasting from.
The first messages that were being passed were distraught people looking for their children, their sister, their neighbors. Or trying to tell other people that they were OK.
Over the next 48 to 72 hours, it just swelled into this enormous collaborative project where you had ham radio operators who were helping to pass messages down to the lower 48. Other ham radio operators within the lower 48 were then passing messages along.
It was this thing that happened invisibly—a network that just emerged.
For me it was very vivid, you could picture these lines spreading and branching. I find something really moving about that and really beautiful.
She’s essentially getting retweeted as people check themselves in safe.
There are so many weird similarities and dissimilarities to things now—they were basically sort of inventing Twitter.
And people showed up to help and organize and be useful in a really calm and contained way, which is often not how we think of disasters unfolding.
I had all these firsthand accounts of individual stories. There was this one Public Works employee who's just like, “Let's get it done,” and he starts organizing volunteers.
Sociologists have names for this phenomenon. It’s called “emergent organizations.” Basically it's this idea that people will form ad hoc groups to address particular problems and organize themselves in these moments of crisis.
There’s another one called “extending groups,” where groups that existed to do one thing are now changing their work or adapting their work to respond to the emergency. So you had a mountain rescue group, which was basically just like a hobbyist club of mountain climber guys who would get together on weekends and practice avalanche training for their own enjoyment. They maybe had one or two real emergency calls a year. Now suddenly they’re adapting their own organization to do search and rescue in an urban environment, just because there's no one else who's qualified to do it or has any sense of how you organize something like this.
Like, who's more qualified to search a few blocks of ruins. Is it a fire department, or is it people who have searched wilderness collapses like landslides?
They didn't find very many people though.
It took days to figure that out. The assumption was that hundreds of people were going to be dead. And it was very disconcerting at first that no one was finding them. But the people who were under the impression that they were first responders were actually second or third responders in a lot of these locations, because people who were there in the moment had already done a lot of hard work to try to get people out.
When you're going through Genie’s boxes at the end, you have this beautiful moment where you write, “Time itself started to seem like a slow-moving natural disaster, imperceptibly shaking everything apart. Maybe nothing in our world is durable or stable. Maybe everything runs on pure chance. [How are we] supposed to live on the surface of such unbearable randomness. What can we hold onto that’s fixed?” Would you embellish on those words today, this week, where we are in the midst of this rapidly evolving coronavirus pandemic?
I mean, if you had any doubt now that that's true … I don't feel like it's a new idea, or it's an idea that takes a lot of explaining at this particular moment, whereas it might have in the book.
We were talking about people stepping up and organizing in the wake of a very acute sudden disaster that everyone kind of feels at once, that no one is not aware of. And what we're looking at now is this sort of invisible unknown thing that hits everyone at all these different times—and it's going to last a very long time. How can we compare those two types of chaotic events?
These are just my observations, but one thing that I've been thinking about is if there's more of a lag in our situation in terms of people's awareness of what helping means.
Like, a few days ago, there was still some idea in New York, at least, that I might be going on a book tour. But I live outside Seattle. I think there, by then, the idea that staying home would be a form of helping was already very front and center for people. Whereas I think in New York, for understandable reasons, it wasn't a matter of policy yet.
And so I think that there's more of a lag, the un-immediacy of this, I guess, and the fact that it's sort of dispersed across a pretty large landmass—almost like the weather. It’s when we’re all communicating from different places that you see some of that dissonance.
And the other thing I think is that the helping in this situation is a lot simpler, but it’s harder to recognize. We are helping right now by being in our house, by taking care of our own kids so that they don't have to be in school. But the nature of the help is a little more indistinct—it’s not a dramatic problem right in front of you for you to solve. And so it's taking us a little bit longer to figure that out and taking us a little bit longer to invent the kind of alternate infrastructure to do that.
Also, I don’t think I really had an appreciation for this even after all the time I spent writing about these people. Years, literally. I don’t think I really recognized that the act of helping in these moments makes you feel better. I think I interpreted it mostly through the lens of altruism and generosity.
But as soon as my book events were canceled, I immediately felt relief, because I knew what my role was now: I’m gonna be half of the person taking care of my kids.
I could just see what my purpose was in that more immediate role, and I had some parameters around it, and I immediately felt less anxious about what was happening in the world. And I imagine that all the people that I'm writing about, from Genie on down, must have felt a similar rightness when they found something to do. That it wasn't just a selflessness. It was also stabilizing for them.
Inside the WIRED newsroom, we've really kicked into gear (from home of course!). There’s just so much coronavirus stuff. And I think part of that is us feeling like, "What can we do, what is our role?" Here is something that we are all trained to do, and we can disseminate the right information in a smart way.
I think that's the thing sociologists like to talk about, how everyone sort of brings their own skill set to these situations. Some people are going to be able to help in certain ways. And some people are gonna be helping in others.
You mention Charles Fritz and how he speculates on the sort of therapeutic effects of disasters and this kind of “civic immune response.”
Have you read Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster? It’s one of the most brilliant things I've ever read, and I owe it a huge debt because, the sociologists, when they walked into the story, I was like, “Oh my god! These are Rebecca's people.”
Fritz is making the argument that these emergencies are really the one place in our modern convoluted lives where we are thrust back into life on such stark terms. That's the most foundational expression of our being, of our humaneness—just to be in those moments when we're dealing with life and those stakes, and we're able to, you know, be with one another.
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