[ANADOLU] DRONE JOURNALISM AT THE HEART OF PANDEMIC

By Lokman Vural Elibol

It did not take long for the coronavirus emerging in China to reach Europe. With the crisis spreading across Europe, we started to plan what we could do visually when the virus broke out in New York. We were gathering information from our colleagues in Italy about how they work at the pandemic environment, observed the visuals of agencies and those on social media to see what they focused on. I worked in many crisis regions before, but this was different from the others. It was an advantage for me that New York became the center of the pandemic, a region I know of and the city where my home is located. The disadvantage was that I have never worked in the middle of such a disaster before. We literally did not know how to protect ourselves from the virus. Each time when I went out for news gathering doubled my responsibly towards my wife and child after returning home. Most of the time, I could not tell my wife that I was going to a risky region so as not not worry her. The only precaution I could take was to wear a mask and gloves and keep my disinfectant with me at all times. When I came home, I could not approach my wife and son. I could not sleep in the same room with them. The number of cases in New York, where 20 million people live, have started to increase rapidly since the beginning of March. There was panic among the people for getting caught off guard by the virus, as the city left other countries behind and ranked first in the number of cases in a very short time. Long queues in the grocery stores, the despair of health care workers in the hospitals we visited, the patients' getting sick before entering the hospital, trucks turned into morgues in front of the hospital, the parks converted into a mobile hospital, the ambulance traffic on the streets and the situation of the homeless were the first images. There was tragedy in every corner of New York. On April 1, the number of cases exceeded the 215,000 mark and the death toll surged beyond 5,000. The corpses of those who died in front of the hospital due to COVID-19 were loaded into the trucks before our eyes. Mass deaths in the nursing homes and the corpses in funeral cars back-to-back were another tragic scene. The situation was getting worse every day in New York. New York alone surpassed other countries in terms of cases and deaths. It was an advantage to work with a drone at a time when people should not get close with each other in such a city. Shooting from above the sky provided great convenience in reflecting the importance of the situation for a city like New York with long skyscrapers and millions of people are on the run with their daily hurries under normal conditions. The empty street images I took with my drone in Manhattan, New Jersey, were like scenes from horror movies. We were informed on April 14 that dozens of trucks were brought to a stadium in Queens, which were to be converted into morgues. The stadium was tightly guarded by the police. To reflect the seriousness of the situation and to show many trucks there were, I immediately submitted a visual that I took with the drone following a challenging process. On the same day, I found out that the orphans who lost their lives due to COVID-19 were secretly buried on an island in New York which was 15 minutes away from the same location. There was no way to reach the island. This island, which has not been accessible by the public for more than 150 years, was used to bury more than a million bodies not claimed. When the pandemic left no room in NYC morgues, the significance of cemeteries on Hart Island grew rapidly. While taking a photo and video of this island, my drone was taken from me by the New York Police Department and confiscated to be use as an evidence in a court scheduled in mid-August. We were sad and surprised by this situation as the region where this island is located is not a prohibited area for drones and I am a licensed operator registered in the system. The situation I was trying to capture was that people were buried secretly, as if they were a toxic waste in bulk. This was very important, as specially in terms of a valuable news. Of course, the incident related to confiscation of my drone and my being summoned to court did not prevent us from producing news. Again, every morning my photojournalist colleague and I continued to convey the developments in New York. Currently, as the panic environment began to slow down, and the normalization process started, the biggest morale for us was that neither myself or my family and my colleagues was not infected with the virus. We look forward to reporting news on the virus being completely eliminated, the last patient being discharged and celebrations starting. Epidemic; New York State April; New York City; United States Coronavirus; Hoboken; COVID-19