Former Grad

Natural disaster tests newspaper

By Paula Lavigne-Sullivan
News-editorial graudate, 1998
Reporter at The Times Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.

Sometimes the floor under my desk shakes when the presses run or a large truck rumbles by outside.

But it wasn’t a press and it wasn’t a truck that caused the building to jolt a little before 11 a.m. on the last day of February. I stood up. The shaking got worse and desks began to rattle. The truth that this was an earthquake finally dawned on me when my co-workers, many of them West Coast natives, dashed for the nearest doorway.

As anyone who lives in earthquake county can tell you, it’s the safest place to be when the ground begins to dance. I turned to the window and looked out at the sky. As a native Midwesterner I’ve grown to expect that when Mother Nature comes calling, she drops something down from the clouds.

The sky wasn’t falling, but the ground still was shaking as I staggered to the doorway where our executive editor, another editor and two reporters were steadying themselves.

Then the building rolled like a slow ship and came to a quiet halt. The calm didn’t last.

People scattered, grabbing cell phones, note pads, coats and purses in case we had to leave the building.

I ran to the phone and called the county’s emergency management center. No one there knew anything more than we did at that point, and all we knew was that there had been an earthquake.

It was the beginning of a day that would test our newsroom’s ability to cover a natural disaster that affected our entire circulation area.

We would spend the next several hours combing the area, checking in with emergency officials and coordinating our coverage. We wanted to get the most pressing news on the Web right away while at the same time prepare a full spread of stories for the next day’s paper.

Almost everyone left the building during a brief evacuation to make sure the building was safe and stable. As people started coming back in, reporters began lobbying for assignments.

The quake had ended, but I was still shaking as we gathered at our big conference table and sketched out a rough assignment list.

People volunteered to check on hospitals, schools, military bases, roads, airports, major buildings and, of course, our resident volcano Mount Rainier. A crew of reporters and photographers raced out to search for damage throughout the Puget Sound.

I went to the county’s emergency management center where cops, hospitals, schools and others are supposed to call in to report damage during an emergency.

Oddly enough, the center is in the basement of an 11-story building. It’s great cover from a tornado (which we rarely have) but not so comforting after an earthquake.

Throughout the day I got tips that were coming into the center. I’d often find out first about an evacuation, a cracked bridge or a landslide that closed a highway.

I also heard about 100 stories from John Doe county employee saying: “Wow! I was up on the (fill in the blank) floor, and stuff started coming off the walls, and I looked out the window to see the (fill in name of downtown building) swaying like mad.”

I followed up on a few developments, including an opportunistic prisoner who escaped his police escort in the post quake confusion. And I kept calling in tips.

While I was doing my part, about 40 other reporters were also doing theirs. A few talked to victims of the quake and did the damage tour, visiting everything from mud-covered roads to homes filled with broken china.

Reporters in the field managed to stay connected with the newsroom despite the regional jam of the cellular phone network. I kept in touch by using an office line in the emergency management center.

(And yes, I did manage to sneak a call to my mother in Omaha to let her know I wasn’t buried under a ton of rubble.) Meanwhile, back at the office …

Reporters from all departments got in on the act. Our arts reporter checked whether any of the local displays of glass works by world-renowned Tacoma artist Dale Chihuly had been damaged. (This, I think, was prompted by the fact that the Chihuly chandelier in the newspaper’s own lobby was swaying like a weed in the wind — unbeknownst at the time to the crowd gathered below its pointy shards.)

And a sportswriter relayed how the quake drove the Tacoma Sabercats hockey team members — in their skates — from their arena into a parking lot.

Our schools reporters checked to see how students and teachers reacted to the quake (by diving under their desks, of course) and checked whether classes would be held the next day. Our transportation reporter wrote a comprehensive story about blocked roads and damaged bridges and which were likely to remain closed.

One of the best stories, I thought, was by our environment and natural resource reporter who explained how the quake happened, why it happened, what could happen next and how it could happen again.

A nice touch came from our resident history buff reporter who wrote a short story about quakes from the past and included a timeline of Washington’s quakes.

The beat-driven approach really worked for us. It allowed us to get a lot more in the paper than just a description of the damage and the general reaction of people who felt the quake.

The number and variety of stories amazed me when I came back to the newsroom to file my loot. A reporter and columnist were doing the write-through on the two main stories and, depending on what we had, we were to file bits and piece to them.

Several reporters had their own stories, and for them there was a list of reporters teamed up with a list of editors. And that list corresponded with a list of stories.

Later that afternoon we had another large meeting to talk about stories and set deadlines and suggest any ideas for stories we hadn’t thought of.

We also talked about adding “more information” boxes. (It’s a popular feature at the paper to include separate boxes of information with our stories telling readers where they can get more information, offering tips, phone numbers and so forth.)

For our earthquake coverage, we wanted to make sure we had a box listing school and building closures. We also had a list of safety tips following a quake and a list of places where people could get help to recover from this quake — and prepare for the next.

And we had pizza — in the newsroom. At The News Tribune, when news breaks you can always count on pizza. Hey, when you’re in the rush of covering a major news event, there’s no time to grab a bite to eat. So a little newsroom buffet is a great way to take a step back, regroup and refuel. (The pizzas are also a nice little sign from the bigs that they know you’re working hard.)

By the time we had all filed (and eaten) we had another meeting. This one was to prepare for the next day and decide who was going to pursue follow-up stories.

I left about 8:30 p.m., and almost everything had been turned in at that point. We can thank Mother Nature for issuing her earthquake release early in the morning, but I know that our organization also played a role in everyone’s making deadline.

Our earthquake coverage continued daily for the next several days as more damage estimates came in and federal officials arrived to examine the area. Earthquake news will likely get headlines for the rest of the year as we get updates on repairs and other news associated with the quake.

That is, of course, until Mount Rainier explodes.

And for that, they’d better order extra cheese.