Disaster-Zone Dispatch: Trying To Get Back On Their Feet
(CBS)
Read her Evening News report here.When reporting from a disaster zone, it’s often far too easy to reduce a entire event to a series of sterile numbers – the number of people killed, the dollar amount of damage done and precisely how long it will take for things to get back to normal.
China is home to one-fifth of the world’s population, so there’s an even stronger temptation for reporters here to allow huge numbers to dominate a major story: Sichuan’s earthquake left 80,000 dead, more than 8,000 missing and about 5 million homeless. Even people living near the quake’s epicenter had a hard time grasping the scale of what had happened.
So sometimes, it can help to focus on just a few individuals affected by a disaster. For more than two weeks in May, I worked with the tireless CBS News crew to highlight every angle of the Sichuan earthquake for our viewers back home. We met dozens of people throughout this chaotic period, but one stands out in my memory ...
