Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes is community page on Facebook, which re-unites individuals with personal items lost during the recent tornadoes that devastated the southern states of Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Georgia, Virginia and Louisiana. Created by Patty Bullion, after hundreds of photographs and documents fell from the sky into her yard, last Wednesday, as the New York Times reports:
One document, lying face down on the wet pavement, was a sonogram, just like those she had saved from her own pregnancies. “I would want that back,” she said.
Ms. Bullion already had her own Facebook page with a few hundred friends, but the chances of any of them knowing the people whose items she had found were slim, she thought. So she created a new page with a title that described precisely what she hoped it would contain: “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes.” She asked her friends to post a link to it on their own pages.
“I feel like I know these people,” Ms. Bullion said. “They could so easily have been us.”
The first of the images that Ms. Bullion had posted was identified a few hours later by the sister of two children shown in a black-and-white photograph. They were from Hackleburg, Ala., the sister wrote in the comments section, a town almost 100 miles away: Ms. Bullion’s husband, a forest ranger, looked it up on a map.
By Friday evening, more than 52,000 people had clicked the “like” button on the page, and more than 600 pictures had been posted: an unopened letter, a death certificate and scores of photographs. Some of the items were unscathed. Some were carefully pieced together by their finder. Some, like mortgage statements and canceled checks, evoked calls to be sure to block out account numbers and personal financial information.
One water-damaged picture of a chubby-cheeked toddler elicited over two dozen comments, its rips and smudges an unavoidable metaphor for what people feared had happened to the child. “This breaks my heart,” wrote one commenter. A digitally restored version someone posted yielded approving comments, almost as though saving the picture could ensure the child’s safety.
If you can help identify any of the people in the pictures, or have photos and documents to post, please check Patty Bullion’s page here.
Previously on DM
Richard Devine’s eerie recordings of tornado tonight in sirens in Atlanta
More lost photographs and documents, after the jump…
