Thanks to the Mining Families of West Virginia

[foxfeet]

Posted: Friday, April 23, 2010 12:24 PM

By Shawna Thomas, NBC News
I spent more than a week in the hills of West Virginia covering the mining disaster. I’m not really capable of expressing the sadness of the tragedy, however I can express my thanks to the community.

The location of the all-hours press conferences was a small elementary school named Marsh Fork Elementary that sits at the base of a coal process silo that is also owned by Massey Energy. It’s about two miles from the entrance to the Upper Big Branch Mine. The school was on spring break that week, but that didn’t stop the interim principal, Shelly Prince, teachers and other members of the community from coming in and helping.

NBC and other news organizations turned the library and various classrooms into our personal workspaces. For at least 25 miles in each direction, there was no cell phone service. So the first night, the school let us take turns using their few phone lines to communicate with our desks in New York, D.C. and Atlanta. We also took it upon ourselves to unplug the school’s desktop computers and plug their internet cables into a slew of beat up laptops.

The way the media took over that school, cameras set up in the cafeteria at the ready for the next presser, journalists huddled over laptops trying to get the latest updates to the rest of the world, is kind of par for the course. In breaking news situations, it’s what we do. We turn any location into a de facto newsroom. What wasn’t normal was what happened when everyone realized we were going to be covering this story for quite some time. People started arriving with food and water.

Full article: http://fieldnotes.msnbc.msn.com/