We got up early to and headed to the reporting site. I dropped of Kimberly near the church so she could talk to people. I went up to the mine to check in with our site producer who had been up all night. When I went back to get Kimberly she had spoken to a few family members inside the Sago Baptist Church and was getting some insight into what the families were feeling. At 10am we began our liveshots and she began to describe the emotion inside the church.
Later that afternoon Kimberly started getting information that the mood in the church had started to change from hopefulness to anger. The families wanted answers. It was now approximately 36 hours since the accident.
At around 830pm I was asked to conduct a quick interview with a miner who had worked in that particular mine six months before. “Rich” — he wouldn’t give me his real name at the time but I now know that’s what it actually is — told me that that particular mine was extremely dangerous. He said there was so much water flowing in the rivers in the area that many of the mines were easily saturated making for tough working conditions, “let’s just say it’s a tough place to work,” he said.
Around 9 o’clock a woman from the Red Cross ran up to the cameras at our site where Anderson Cooper was reporting. She told him that the families were being told that they had found a body near the site of the explosion. The woman was pulled away by another Red Cross worker and I followed them to try and get more information and to confirm that what she was saying was true. I didn’t get anywhere. Meanwhile, Anderson went ahead and reported it. I wasn’t so sure about having done that but it turned out to be true when it was confirmed a few minutes later. And thanks to her we broke it.
Kimberly and I continued to report until about 1030pm. We were then cleared to leave.
Sometimes, it’s really hard to figure out when to leave. My body was happy to leave but my mind wasn’t necessarily. However, at some point you have to say enough because you do have to come back the next day and do it all over again. And as terrible fate would have it, we should have stayed.