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The moment it hit I knew I wanted and needed to go out to St. Louis to cover it. Since this was the first time I was going to cover a tornado, I didn't know exactly what to expect. At first I thought I actually thought the entire process of finding a story might be easy, but the stories emotionally draining. Well, I was right on the second part, wrong on the first.
My trip started off late and I didn't get down to St. Louis and working on my story until 2 p.m. Considering I had a 2.5 hr long trip back to Columbia to get my package done for the 9 p.m. show I had to work quickly. I started looking for the towns hit by the tornado, but oddly enough it was much harder than I anticipated. I decided to head to a nearby community center where Red Cross had set up a shelter to see if they could help. I spoke with the shelter manager who talked with me about what they were doing,
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After having them show me where in the shelter they were sleeping now, I headed out to their community. I ran into a few workers doing estimations on homes and spoke with them about how long rebuilding the place would take. About a year they told me.
I continued on to look for the more devastated areas. Time was running thin and I began to worry since I hadn't even seen much tornado damage yet, except along the highway. Finally I saw a group of police cars, along with some black SUV's driving into a neighborhood. I followed them deep into the subdivision and found out this is where most of the damage took place. I talked with workers, the church providing food and water to those still in their homes, and I talked with residents who shared their stories.
Since our station had already covered the aspect of what people thought when the tornado hit (and it was a day and a half after the tornado hit), I decided to focus it on how the town was coming together to help each other out. Overall it was a very touching experience and I hope someday I'll be able to go back and see the small town of Berkeley (as well as the rest of the St. Louis area) rebuilt.
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