Beyond the Formula   

Fire victims’ harrowing tales can be more compelling than just the facts.

I had been to lots of fires. Just not at my own home.

As a journalist, you get used to being a spectator at disasters, but you never expect one to happen to you. Yet there I was, a baby in one arm and my boots in the other, running sock-footed into the snow as flames burst through windows on the third floor of my apartment building. I felt the familiar adrenaline rush, the sense of urgency--but this was very different. I was not a visitor to this disaster scene. I was a victim.

Being part of the story dramatically changed my outlook on how we journalists report such catastrophes. Never again will I be able to read a cursory account in a newspaper and think the reporter got it right by interviewing the fire chief on the telephone. As a victim, I was disappointed by the indifference of the big metro newspapers in Boston and dismayed that the small local paper didn't do a better job.

Above all, I became acutely aware that there is more to a disaster story than the standard hard-news formula we use so overwhelmingly. That formula--number killed, number injured, number homeless, cause of catastrophe, cost of damage--largely ignores the most important part of any story: people. There were dozens of fascinating stories to be told after that night of fire and ice, but no reporter told even one of them, because none asked the right questions or contacted the right people.

As a longtime journalist, I understand as well as anybody that in the daily rush to meet deadlines, reporters must pick and choose what they write about. A fire that kills no one and causes less than a million dollars in damage can be viewed as a humdrum event. But as I continue to see polls in which readers say we're out of touch, and especially that we pay too much attention to government officials instead of to the problems of average people, I wonder if there is a better way to report such disasters. Based on my experience as a victim, I offer the following five ideas for improving disaster coverage:

• Go beyond the obvious. The metro TV stations featured spectacular footage of the fire, but the two large daily newspapers--the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald--printed nothing. Why, I don't know--probably because they didn't have photos, and the fire happened in the early morning, making it too old a story for the next day's edition. That left only the town's weekly newspaper, the Belmont Citizen-Herald, to tell the story in print. Published on Thursdays, the weekly featured the fire as its lead story the following week, a full six days after the Friday morning blaze. Few disasters happen in my town, but I was surprised the weekly reporter chose a hard-news lead. In particular, she focused on the fact that three smoke detectors in the building had been disconnected, including one in the apartment where the fire started. As one of my journalism students suggested after I showed the article to my class, the story and sidebar could have been headlined "Stupid People Disconnect Smoke Detectors, Cause Fire, Get What They Deserve."

Smoke detectors are important, and the reporter was right to write about the deficiency, except it meant she didn't dig any deeper. A disconnected smoke detector didn't cause the fire, after all. It was caused by an electric baseboard heating unit that ignited a couch. I have lived in a lot of apartments, but this was the only one in which the heating units set things on fire. I myself have a scorched blanket that fell off the back of my couch onto one of those heaters, and I heard similar stories from other tenants. Since it was a common problem in that apartment building, I wonder if that type of heater was defective, and, if so, whether a larger public safety issue was involved.

What's a tenant to do on a chilly night--turn the thermostat up and push all the furniture into the center of the room? But the reporter did not pursue the issue except to print a comment from the fire chief: "Electric baseboard heat gets very hot."

The other public safety issue I felt was worth looking into was that many tenants were slow to leave the building, because they thought it was yet another false alarm. The building's main alarm system had malfunctioned several times before in the middle of the night. Most of my neighbors ignored the false alarms, and some of them almost ignored the real one. It would have been worthwhile to ask what impact, if any, the previous false alarms had in terms of tenant evacuation or fire department response.

• Look for coincidences. Before the fire, a couple upstairs from me was watching the movie "Backdraft." I was reading "Angela's Ashes." When a group of American Red Cross volunteers showed up, one of my former journalism students was among them. These were some of the many coincidences noted by the building's residents as we milled about after the fire. Here are a few more.

The baby I was holding when I ran from the building had been adopted by my neighbor from a Chinese orphanage just months before. I was holding the baby because her mother was frantically gathering adoption papers and photos. A few years before, this neighbor had lost all her cherished mementos when an explosion destroyed another apartment building she lived in. "I can't believe this is happening again," she kept saying.

The baby wasn't the only refugee in the building. Just a few days before, a young man from war-torn Yugoslavia had moved in. Suddenly he had to find a new place to live, again. But the timing of the fire was good luck for the tenant he replaced--a very old woman who had lived on the building's third floor for more than a decade. Blind and increasingly feeble, she had moved to a nursing home just weeks before a fire that could have killed her.

As a reporter, I have always been sensitive to intruding upon disaster victims. But, as a victim, I can say that the fire was all any of us talked about for days afterward, as we repeated our stories to co-workers, family and friends. We could have said a lot to a reporter, if one had talked with us.

• Think visually and concretely. The weekly reporter based most of her story on the elderly couple in whose apartment the fire started. They were injured jumping from their second-story balcony to escape the flames.

But what did the reporter mean when she tossed in a one-word description of the husband as "frail"? Well, it was widely discussed in the building that he was suffering from the wasting effects of kidney disease. A small and thin man, he had become almost skeletal. His wife was tall and robust, and she towered over him; her dynamic presence was emphasized by the colorful, flamboyant dresses she wore with matching hats.

Such details would have added greatly to the word picture the reporter tried to paint of the husband lowering his wife over the side of the building with a sheet, and then jumping to the ground. But instead, the reporter simply used the word "frail" to stand in for all that detail, never explaining what it signified.

I also was fascinated to find out what my neighbors owned, which included two apartments full of expensive musical instruments, including a full-size concert-quality harp. The resulting efforts to save such items from the effects of water damage would have made a good feature story by itself.

• Question authority. I hate to say anything bad about the Red Cross, which put me up in a hotel for two nights, but I was disturbed by the actions of one volunteer. After the fire was out, residents were allowed to re-enter our apartments for essential items, accompanied by firefighters and Red Cross volunteers. One volunteer, obviously quoting from a manual, insisted loudly and aggressively that we not take any medications from our apartments.

I'm diabetic, and I told him I was taking my insulin and syringes, which didn't make him happy. So he went across the hall and bullied an elderly woman who took 65 pills a day because of her recent kidney transplant; her son, who was a medical student, had a heated argument with the volunteer about it.

When I mentioned this bizarrely officious behavior to my former student who was there as a Red Cross volunteer, he explained that nearly everyone on the scene was in training and that some of the newest volunteers were overzealous. It made me wonder how often disaster victims are given dangerous advice by people who don't know what they're doing.

• Follow up. The victims of a disaster feel its consequences long after the rescue workers have gone home. Though my apartment was not significantly damaged, the building was closed by order of the town building inspector. With no family or friends living close by, I had to find a new place right away, which wasn't easy to do. So I lived illegally in the fire-gutted building for nearly two weeks. Not only was I officially homeless, but I was warned that I could be arrested for sleeping in my own bed.

My neighbor with the baby had her own problems. They nearly wound up in a homeless shelter: Many landlords refused to rent to anyone with a young child, because their apartments had not had lead paint removed from walls. Other tenants who planned to go back to the apartment building after it was rebuilt waited many, many months as construction delays kept them in temporary quarters. And none of us was happy that the $750 in emergency relocation aid that we were entitled to from our landlord's insurance took nearly six months to process.

Disasters take a heavy psychological toll on victims. To this day, I double-check to make sure I've turned the coffee pot off when I leave for work, afraid that I will leave it on and cause a fire. Sometimes the fear becomes so overwhelming that I will leave my bus stop and walk back home to check, for a third time, that all the electrical appliances in the house are turned off.

As a reporter looking for a big story, you might think of these as minor details. I thought so, too, until this happened to me.