There are no words for what I saw tonight.
Edit @ 3:04 p.m., 27Oct10:
I waited to post the photos because I wanted to allow time for the victims' families to be notified. Not that DarkTopo is a mass media outlet or anything, but I don't want to take any chances.
So it's three days later, five people are dead, and I'm still having nightmares. The Citizen-Times reports that the truck that caused the accident is the sole tractor-trailer rig of Globe Carriers, which has "violated federal regulations 21 times in the past 30 months." You can read all about it at those links.
I have seen a lot of horrible things. I've covered wrecks, fires, suicides, and took a nice jail-yard photo of a man convicted of anally raping his own infant child. I have never seen anything like this. It is unique in my experience.
And that's the worst part: As uniquely terrible as it is, the media uses the same tried-and-true descriptions they haul out for every "horrible tragedy." We see the same photos, and the same tear-jerking pieces on local news. Like I said about the last big tragedy I covered, everyone wants to know why it happened, as if there could be a reason good enough to justify it.
I know that media coverage of terrible events is necessary in our society, but what I've discovered in the last few days is that it's never enough. In the same way that photography reduces all of human vision into 256 levels and three channels, the media reduces human experience into soundbytes, column inches, and photos shot from afar.
The best photojournalists will roll up their sleeves and wade into a situation. That's the reason I got out of my car and jumped the guardrail to get these photos--it's what Annie Griffiths or Joel Sartore would do. But by the time I realized what I was looking at, I had no taste for it. So when the state troopers told me to get lost, I did.
My photos are not very good. I could have gotten better ones, given more time and effort, but I realized that no matter what I did, they'd still just be crash photos. Like all the others out there, they can't begin to describe what it was like to stand there, smell the burning oil, and hear the victims moaning.
[GRAPHIC PHOTOS BELOW]
Finally got photos of a dead body. Knew it would happen some day. Sure wish it hadn't.
Posts
4 comments:
oh my goodness you were there... did you go there for reporting purposes or were you stuck in the traffic?
I was driving home in the westbound lane and came upon it maybe a minute after it happened. I've never seen anything like it.
Wow. Just wow.
random comments:
a) scary when the cars no longer look like cars. :(
b) my hunch is the driver fell asleep at the wheel. Any news on that yet? I know this is ranting, but I believe they shouldn't be allowed to drive for 14 hrs straight, and it seems like maybe this company wasn't abiding by many of the federal regulations anyway. :(
c) your photos are much better than the ones on the c-t website.
d) Yes, I agree completely about the paleness or distortion of the media coverage of things, especially "tragedies." It's annoying, how the stories get warped or faded somehow.
Post a Comment