the characters culled from disaster

As a writer, I am absolutely fascinated by the characters I am discovering as I watch the news and read the reports out of the hurricane zone. Who doesn't love the image from CNN of the grizzled old man using a tire as an inner tube and his pulling a vodka bottle up from underneath him?

And from The New Republic (you can read the entire article by clicking here -- don't forget to use bugmenot.com when it asks for a login) comes this paragraph:

As we head out of Beachwood and to our car, we encounter a young man with braces who is wearing bright blue overalls. "Do you have any idea what street this is?" he asks. He tells us he's an insurance adjuster from Oklahoma City and that he can't find the home he's been sent to evaluate. He clutches a piece of paper--a printout of a map from Yahoo.com--and looks in vain for any street signs. We tell him we're not sure where the home he's looking for is but that it's probably gone. He shakes his head. "I know," he says, "but I've got to check." And he walks off into the wreckage.

This is the kind of character that can really make a written work of fiction (or non-fiction, as in the case of this article) stand out. Don't you immediately form a mental picture of this young man, perhaps on his first insurance assignment? And a Yahoo map -- he's internet savvy, he doesn't buy the big atlas or the gas station folding map -- what does this say about him?

It's a great feast of characters.