Front page news

Tuesday is a busy day at the paper. It is the day that we finish writing and actually layout our pages. Yesterday I felt a little behind on sports articles when the tones sounded for a structure fire.

When the first fire units arrived on the scene (in the next town), they reported fire completely throughout a poultry house. At that point, I checked with my editor and he said to go. As I hit the road, the chief called for water tankers from our town and another town.

I got to the scene before two or three of the six fire rigs. The firefighters all know me, so I had unhindered access for photos. I got more than 100 frames before everything died down.

Since the fire was so current, my editor had me write up a short article to go with one of the strong images I came back with. It made the front page--the first fire to make our front page in months. It wouldn't have made the front page if it weren't for the strong visual.

Poultry barns do burn rather often. They are long, built with wood frames and nothing keeps fire from racing through them. It's a big blow to the farmer, too. This did upwards of $200,000 of damage. 22,000 two-week-old chickens perished, but they belong to the poultry company, not the farmer.

I would post a link to the story and the photo, but they're not up on our website yet.

FWIW, the firefighter in the photo on the far right up above is from BJ. He was on Public Safety while he was there. His name is Michael Moore (no relation to Darla, though). He married a girl whose name escapes me. She was on lawn crew and she worked at BJUP in editorial, I think. He's a firefighter for the town of Shenandoah now. We ran into them when we were first visiting churches, but this was the first emergency scene we've "worked" together.

Posted by JRC at July 28, 2004 10:54 PM | TrackBack