Chile Quake Coverage 1

When a catastrophe occurs, the company we work for sends an “assessment team” into the area before any other work is done there. This team makes contacts, surveys needs and determines resources. Once they’ve made their observations, they can form a plan for effectively responding to the disaster.

Our media team – our photographer, our videographer and I – shadowed the assessment team as it went through Chile’s earthquake-devastated area.

We traveled over cracked and buckled roads, slept on church floors and experienced strong aftershocks. We also saw much more damaged and collapsed buildings than we saw in Santiago. In some places, people were living in tents.

A journalistic challenge of the coverage was trying to gather information from the assessment team as they gathered information from others. They were very focused on their purpose – as they should be – and moved very quickly from one contact to another. The team would then sort of fill us in with a summary as we were leaving each location. Unfortunately, getting a good story requires spending time in one place, going deep into the story, and gathering direct quotes – things that were hard to come by as we moved swiftly from one place to another.

But, the assessment team learned how our company could be most helpful, and we were still able to get some stories.