The hazards of television news

This is the talk of the town in Milwaukee, where a photographer for one of the local television stations accidentally drove her station's news van onto a lake, and it fell through the ice into about five feet of water. Oddly enough, she was assigned to shoot some video for a story on -- the dangers of thin ice! The driver said she thought the narrow lake channel was actually a road. More details, and more photos, at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The cost of replacing the van is expected to be about $250,000. The equipment we use here at MPR is not quite so expensive, thankfully. A few years ago, one of our reporters was out doing a story on water quality or some such topic, and accidentally dropped his digital camera in the water. He fished it out, and I believe it was still functional after it dried.