SNIPPETS: Catastrophe brings together people who care

If you live here long enough, you’re going to have a tornado story. It’s just like if you know someone from California, they’ll tell you about an earthquake – depending on which part of the state they’re from.  

The first tornado story I covered happened on April 24, 2010. 

Check the date at the top of today’s paper, and you’ll see why I’m feeling a little nostalgic.  

Can you be nostalgic about a tornado? Bear with me, you’ll see what I mean. 

Around 10:30 p.m., an EF 3 tornado touched down in downtown Albertville.  I got a phone call shortly after. Then I went to bed. 

The tornado was long gone, and you can’t really see anything in the dark. 

I was working my second job out of college. I didn’t even have a personalized email address. At the time, The Reporter divided their newsrooms into about four different beats. The writers covering those beats were given email addresses that didn’t have their names attached to them; it was simply their beat. Mine was just “county.”  

It was a broad subject. The trick is to avoid any specificity because then you can get more out of that staff-writer spot.  

You might be thinking, but if they just made the email someone’s name, then that’s about as broad as you can get. Yeah, they eventually figured that out, but I digress. 

I rolled into work the next day around 7 a.m. with a camera slung over my shoulder and a reporter’s pad in my back pocket. I probably had a voice recorder, too. I’ve always been fond of them.  

Then I started walking toward where I saw the most damage, stopping to take the occasional photo.  

It didn’t take long for me to run into someone I knew. That’s one of the things about community journalism: all the stuff that happens – the good, bad and ugly – it happens to people you know.  

Most of the time, it’s not just that you know the subject of the story, but you know their kids, their parents, or their grandkids or grandparents, depending on their age.  

It can get awfully messy, but I think that’s what pulls me back to it every time I try to get away from it.  

It’s really easy for me not to care – and I’m intentionally leaving off anything that would qualify that statement.  

And, since I’ve never shied away from belaboring a point, it’s not that it’s really easy for me not to care about certain things. I mean it in totality. It’s really easy for me not to care. But one thing I learned – eventually – is that I need to.  

When you have those close associations and relationships that you get from real community journalism, it’s really hard not to.  

So, there I was… caring.  

I was caring so much that at one point, I climbed to the top of one of the school’s roofs and took amazing photos of all the damage. At least I’m sure they would’ve been amazing if I hadn’t forgotten how to take a photo. I overexposed all of them into nice blank, bright white exposures.  

While I’m on the subject, there was a lot of video shot of the damage, too. I don’t come across much of it anymore, but I’ll still run across some of those photos out in the wild. 

Do you want to know the biggest mistake I made covering that first tornado? 

The paper did a great job of showing everyone the damage. It did a great job of getting information about where to get assistance. And it did a great job of telling stories about how catastrophic events can bring people together. 

But I did a poor job of showing people caring about other people. After breezing through the headlines today, I’m not the only one.