As part of Roll Call’s 70th anniversary, we’ve asked several notable alumni to reflect on their time working for the paper. We’ll run these columns throughout the summer.

In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon on the last day of May, the newsroom went dark.

Back in 2011, Roll Call was still very much a print-focused operation. We published, I think, 3 or 4 days a week when Congress was in session and delivered bundles of papers to the Capitol complex each morning. The middle of a Tuesday afternoon was also the middle of our print production cycle.

The power outage in a several block area around our new-ish office location at 77 K St. was nothing short of catastrophic.

Fourteen years ago, none of us had really given a lot of thought to remote work.

EVERYTHING was location based, and much of our work was stored on servers in the building that were now without power.

EVERYTHING in our office was now useless.

So all of a sudden on a Tuesday afternoon, we could not access any of the material that had been filed and edited, any of the stories that had been laid out, nor any of the templates we needed to design the rest of the paper. And we had no way to process new copy being filed by our reporters on Capitol Hill.

I don’t think I have ever been prouder of a newsroom than I was of Roll Call that day.

We did what the best newsrooms do well: We improvised.

Led by our production team Katie Smith, Blake Whitney and Sara Bondioli, everybody in the newsroom picked up something and we ran down the block to the Hall of States building where somebody had rented a conference room.

We plugged in laptops and printers and a coffee pot and got to work rebuilding a newspaper. My recollection (I could be wrong about this) is that a few weeks earlier we had produced a “joke issue” for a longtime staff member’s departure, and someone on the production team had saved that issue on their laptop. That became the new template for Wednesday’s paper.

When we discovered that some of the stories that had already been edited were lost, somebody hiked back up to the office (no elevators, remember) and pulled printed copies out of the recycling bins so we could begin retyping them. Everybody on staff pitched in, rewriting stories from their notes, re-editing stories that had already been laid out, retyping pages that had been lost and generally rebuilding a newspaper from scratch around a bunch of conference room tables half a mile from our office.

I do not remember how late we got that paper to the printer that night. But what I do remember is this: Wednesday morning that paper showed up in the usual bundles on Capitol Hill and nobody would ever have known that the copy in their hands had emerged from literal darkness.

We spent the rest of the week working out of that M*A*S*H unit newsroom, putting out a paper every day like clockwork.

That was the Roll Call I will always cherish. It was a scrappy, devoted team that refused to yield to power ― or to the lack of it.

Singer was an editor and reporter at Roll Call from 2007-2012, and assembled the newsroom’s “Team Wasta” investigations unit. He is now senior editor, Equity, Justice and Investigations, at GBH News in Boston.