AGSTAR Photojournalism

Before I left for the Christmas holiday I covered a couple of events. First as I was closing down the office at almost midnight when a fire broke out at the Oriental Market. Just a few kilometers from the paper. Being the last man out, Why not. I was till in shorts and tennis shoes from covering a couple a football games that afternoon and lo and behold I find myself in a major fire.

In Nicaragua as a photojournalist you can get away with stuff that would be impossible in the states. Access is unrestricted at a fire scenes, since we have two firefighting forces. One is the volunteer force and the other belongs to the ministry of the interior. You get to know most of them on a friendly basis and things are a little relaxed. That day, every time the fire was almost controlled they would both run out of water so it would flare up again. They would have to wait for another tanker truck to start again.

The Oriental market is the largest in Central America and it grows like a cancer in Managua's northern end. The first time I visited it it was the closest I have ever felt to being in the middle ages. It's crisscrossed with inside alleys and locked gates so it's always difficult to put fires out in it. Usually when one starts it takes out a full block, as this one eventually did.

So here I was walking with wet tennis shoes, in shorts, through a major fire scene, with electrical cables down, thinking this is not too smart.

Here are some images from that. Wished I would have had a D3 with its high ISO rating but the D200 did ok.

The red cross guys had to come in with their equipment and crack open locked gates so that the firemen could do their thing. Photo Tomas Stargardter - Copyright LA PRENSA/Tomas Stargardter