She gets very confused when people are asking her to take on more responsibility and make decisions about what to broadcast. She doesn't see herself as that important. When the radio does get back up and running, she really sees her job as pretty simple, just report some information and then find the people in charge, the mayor or the city manager, and let them use my little radio in my car to get information out to the city. Right after the quake Genie is basically driving around Anchorage and seeing all this damage and trying to collect all this information. What else did you learn from the people you were looking at in this about dealing with catastrophe? Obviously kind of blindsided me, but it's the same kind of message, with a lot of the same challenges. I was talking with them, like maybe when my book comes out next year we could do some kind of partnership. They've obviously just focused on earthquakes for most of what they're doing. And there's this group here called Bainbridge Preparers, and their mission is just to make sure that people are prepared for emergencies, really stress that these things can happen. Instead, when publishing the book, here's a pandemic. I was thinking that if I was somebody living on the West Coast, writing this book, my anxiety would be about the big one hitting. You don't quite know how things are going to end and you can't trust your own assumptions about it. That's been very scary and that has not served me as well right now, having internalized this idea that you don't know what's going to happen, that anything that feels stable isn't necessarily stable. The other thing that's been not helpful at all, just having spent years really trying to internalize the sensation of such a powerful, such a long earthquake. I think it's very easy to be fearful and distrustful of other people when there's a big disruption like this. You dwell on the exceptions and not the rule. So going into an emergency like this with the expectation that people are going to rise to meet it-rather than the opposite expectation, that we're all going to fall apart-has been really stabilizing for me. So for 50-something years they've been documenting the same stuff in disasters all over the world. In fact, the sociologists have gone on-there's a whole field that does this now that pretty much started in Anchorage. It's what I just described, people being very levelheaded and helpful. And they think they're going to study how society is falling apart, but it's actually the opposite. There are some sociologists that show up in Anchorage the day after the quake and start studying what's happening. They find ways to help and they're very resourceful. But mostly a big part of the book is about this idea that ordinary people really can handle these situations surprisingly well. But it's been really interesting now that people are reading the book and they're telling me how they're processing the world-it feels more credible somehow that it's an independent person who didn't know anything about this until they read this book. It’s interesting because I was trying to talk about this the other day and I sort of realized in the middle-I've been spending so much time thinking about this that of course I'm going to think about everything through the lens of the book, whether it's a pandemic or not. After working on this for six years, has it been helping you process what's going on at the moment? That set me off because I felt that if I could find those tapes, it'd be pretty incredible. In a little tiny introduction to the report she mentioned that she was a radio broadcaster that'd spent 59 hours after the quake working to get messages throughout Anchorage and that her family had recorded a lot of those broadcasts. And she put all this in a 200-page report. From there I found Genie's character almost right away, because she had spent months after the quake interviewing people all around Alaska, just trying to capture what those four and a half minutes of the earthquake felt like for them. I didn't really do anything about it until about 2014, and as soon as I started Googling around, I realized it had been struck by the tsunami because of this earthquake. I'd been interested in writing about this town in California that'd been struck by a tsunami.
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