On Good Friday in 1964 a 9.2 magnitude earthquake centered 75 miles east of Anchorage. It lasted 4 minutes, which is an incredibly long time for an earthquake. Oil tanks exploded in Seward and set the harbor on fire. A large tsunami came in and wiped out small villages up and down the cost. It was so violent that an island southeast of Anchorage was knocked nearly 70 feet out of it's original position. Water levels jumped as far away as Libya, Israel and Belgium. In downtown Anchorage two whole city blocks dropped 10 feet. So, all of this is to say - this was a very bad earthquake. Please see evidence below.
Enter, Genie Chance.
Genie was a reporter/on air personality for local radio station KNEI - the only woman. When the earthquake hit she was in downtown Anchorage with one of her children, stopped at a stoplight. She thought they had blown a tire because as they were slowing down to stop at the stoplight her car started rocking violently but then she looked around and saw that every other car was also rocking. As soon as the earthquake stopped she sped home, checked on her family, and then almost immediately began broadcasting. A lot of the information at the beginning was just safety tips. Then people started coming in and handing her messages like "My name is John Baker, can you please let my parents know I'm okay?" or "There's a need for electricians at the hospital, anyone who can please gather there". Even though there was a city manager, and several other department heads where Genie was set up at the Public Safety broadcasting she became the de facto organizer. Volunteers poured in looking for ways to help, and since Genie was the only person who knew where people were going and what other people needed. She did this for days. This book focuses on Genie, how she got to KNEI, her time during the earth quake and her life afterward. Her story was not always a happy one, but she did a lot of good for the people of Alaska.
And while the damage was horrific less than 15 people died (though the people who did die were killed in awful sort of ways - being swept out to sea, being crushed by falling debris, being literally swallowed by the earth). And though the damage was horrific the people who studied how disaster affects people were shocked at how the residents clung to each other and helped one another. (The one documented case of looting was by a police officer 🙄🙄🙄🙄)
There was a really interesting quote about trauma and how it affects people in situations like this earthquake. Genie noticed that she was repeating tasks subconsciously in the months after the earthquake "...it was as though she'd come back to remember, to test that the orderliness of the world had truly been restored. Maybe this is how trauma worked. Maybe it didn't knock you back, like an earthquake, but infiltrated and destabilized you slowly, like rot".
There were two things that I didn't like about this book:
1. The author writes himself into the story at the end and refers to himself in third person and it's weird and I didn't like it.
2. The author had this weird habit when he introduced new people in the story. Where he would introduce you to someone and then almost immediately tell you how they died. Like "Wesley Hoffmann was an Anchorage resident who stood at 5 feet 3 inches, worked in an office and refused to wear clothes with patterns for some unknown reason. She was killed in 2028 when she got drunk and tried to fight a walrus". It was a strange choice and it took me out of the story each time he did it.
Overall I really liked this book - if we learned anything this year we know that not all heroes, like Genie, wear capes.
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