So on this flashback I’m traveling back almost 13 year to the day. The date was January 22, 1999. My husband and I both worked for the Clarksville Leaf Chronicle in Tennessee. We woke up to an early morning phone call from our editor, “Get downtown now there has been a tornado, the town is gone, including the newspaper,”
We soon came face to face with the destructive nature of an F4 tornado that had leveled a good position of Claskville’s downtown and tore the corner off of our office. We marched forward into a long exhausting day reporting and photographing. We set up a temporary shop in a local hotel using borrowed equipment, getting our photos processed at a local camera store. Amazingly even with the destruction of our office we as journalists were still expected to put out a paper and with the help of a neighboring paper’s press and the hard work of many we did. Below are few photos from that day and the days that followed.
Finally a photo of the compassion evident when disaster hits a small town.
