Above all, the blackout affected rhythms of communication and social interaction. The New York Telephone Company reported an all-time record of calls; it operated a full service with the help of diesel generators. Between 5 and 6 p.m., local calls shot up by 800 per cent. Interestingly, hardly anyone called the police, the electric company or the telephone operator. Most calls were to relatives other than household members (NORC 1966: ch. 4). And, instead of turning for information to City Hall or formal organizations, people turned to local ‘public affairs’ leaders in the neighbourhood, mainly men with higher income and education and links to voluntary organizations. The blackout, according to NORC researchers, demonstrated how disasters generated their own ‘nascent emergency system’ as the ‘social bases of the social system … spring to life’ (NORC 1966: 31, 37)
How a democratic society copes with disasters that immobilize formal social and political structures was a defining question for research in the 1960s. Studies since have broadly agreed that disasters do not tend to produce panic or normless anarchy (Scanlon 2001). Some researchers have gone so far as to postulate a timeless model of rational human behaviour: ‘The modern citizen responds to disasters in the same fashion as his ancestor.’ Citizens do not panic, they act as rationally today as they did when they had to protect themselves against harsh winters, failing crops or infectious disease without the help of modern technologies and medicine (Helsloot and Ruitenberg 2004: 98).
The problem with this view is simple. It fails to take into account that what is rational behaviour is shaped by the context in which people act, and this in turn varies, itself the result of social norms, institutions and the technological systems with which they are connected. Many disasters have sparked altruism. Two million volunteers flocked to Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake. In fact, too much altruism can set off more disruption: in 1999, when an earthquake hit the Turkish city of Golcuk, volunteers produced a 32-kilometre-long traffic jam obstacle for rescue vehicles. But disasters can also create an opening for bottled-up social conflict, resulting in open violence and looting. Vulnerability and the social resources for coping with disruption are unevenly distributed. The Chicago heatwave of 1995, which killed 700 people, for instance, hit elderly and poor African-Americans disproportionally hard, because of run-down buildings and infrastructure combined with isolation bred by crime and commercial decline; the Latino Little Village, by contrast, was a busy social and commercial district that facilitated inclusion (Klinenberg 2002: 91).
Disruption is Normal
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