Rebel Food ... Renegade Supplies : Convergence After The World Trade Center Attack

The World Trade Center attack, though constituting an unprecedented disaster, nevertheless generated many of the features seen in other disasters in the U.S. Such features include the convergence of volunteers and donations of supplies, which are welldocumented in the literature. Their appearance typically is problematic, since they both introduce needed resources and present additional management challenges for public officials already occupied with their emergency duties. This paper builds on existing theories of disaster-related collective behavior by examining convergence following the World Trade Center attack. It focuses on the proliferation of volunteers and donated supplies, and identifies a form of convergence not discussed by other researchers: that of supporters or fans. Relying on data gathered in over 750 collective hours of field observations and on documentary sources, the paper argues that the multifaceted aspect of the event—disaster, battlefield, and crime scene—and ambiguity about the extent of any continuing threat complicated the often (but not inevitably) problematic aspects of convergence in the response milieu.