News Cut

News Cut: March 31, 2009 Archive

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Five at 8: 3/31/09

Posted at 8:11 AM on March 31, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (1 Comments)

While Bob takes a well-deserved day off after covering the flood in Moorhead -- if you haven't read the Saving Riverview Circle series, please do -- Steve Mullis and I will be house-sitting here at News Cut today.

  • A quick flood update... well, it's snowing now. A lot. Perhaps the linguists among us can help with a cogitation I tooted about yesterday: What's the portmanteau for blizzard + flood?

  • LIFE has partnered with Getty Images to put together a massive, time-sucking image library at life.com. Apparently there are 7 million images on the site now, which, if viewed at a rate of one per second during your work day (excluding holidays), you'd finally get to your TPS reports around March 5th, 2010. It will be an interesting complement/competitor to Boston.com's well-edited Big Picture.

  • Laura Yuen has been writing fantastic stories about the disappearance of young Somali men from Minneapolis. (U.S. officials fear the men were recruited to join a terrorist group in Somalia.) Yuen's latest story about relatives of the men using their ties to their homeland in their search for the young men is no exception.

    If you're not familiar with the story, consider this primer on the group known as Al-Shabaab.

  • The U.K. is apparently in a tizzy over Google Street View, the mapping function that allows you to get a glimpse of life as it was when the Street View car and its 360-degree, panoramic camera drives past. This 'outrage' seems a little odd coming from the country with the most surveillance cameras per capita in the world.

    The Brits have been having fun with it though, spotting a(n allegedly) cheating husband, UFOs and (allegedly) rocker Liam Gallagher.

  • OK, the weather outside is reminding me where I live -- Fargo -- so I have to pass on a couple of flood links. The NY Times has a story that asks whether Fargo-Moorhead will 'lose' by winning the flood fight.

    In other words, since the DIY levees are holding, the opportunity to have the feds pick up the tab for a massive flood abatement project is gone. After the catastrophe in 1997, Grand Forks now has flood protection that in some cases is nearly 6 feet higher than the '97 crest.

    Also worth reading: profiles of Fargo Mayor Dennis Walaker from the Fargo Forum and MPR's Stephanie Hemphill.

    (1 Comments)

    • What are the social sites you use during disasters?

    Posted at 2:04 PM on March 31, 2009 by Julia Schrenkler (6 Comments)

    The Red River Flooding of 2009 isn't the first crisis that had people using social media from the front lines. As new communication tools keep disaster victims in touch with each other, the rest of us are also lurking and observing.

    It changes the nature of news coverage and it changes the way others tune into the crisis. News organizations like WCCO and The Star Tribune - and including our own newsroom - included a Twitter feed of updates that relate to the Red River flood. For the Twitter user, this extends the instant publication and for the reader this is an instant report.

    No matter what the crisis, does it matter to the individual as long as friends, family, and even FEMA (@femainfocus) might be following the Tweets and Facebook updates? Or that media producers review video and photo sites? This sort of "crowdstalking" is another way for the media to discover and define their own coverage.

    Today The American Public Health Association is holding a social media and crisis communication roundtable. I'm hoping to get a recap or a link to their aggregated content around the topic, but haven't heard back from them yet. So far I'm eavesdropping on the updates via the session's Twitter tag, #risk20.

    All this messaging and updating across multiple sites makes me wonder what your online tool of choice is during a disaster. What works for you online...and how? If you're not involved in the crisis which tool do you use to get first person reports?

    (6 Comments)

    The Red River from above

    Posted at 5:22 PM on March 31, 2009 by Than Tibbetts (1 Comments)
    Filed under: Disasters, Floods

    NASA's Earth Observatory has released an image of the swollen Red River taken on March 28th when the river was at its record crest of 40.82 feet.

    redfromabove.jpg

    Head over to the Earth Observatory site where they have a 5 MB high-res version of the photo.

    A second image shows you just what would happen if the levees and dikes weren't in place in Fargo-Moorhead. Beyond the city limits, the river is blown out well beyond its banks.

    valleyflooding.jpg

    You really get a sense of how vast and flat the landscape is on either side of the river.

    (1 Comments)
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