Iowa Under Water: News directors share reactions and responses to the flooding

By John (JJ) Murray

John (JJ) Murray
News Director
KIMT-TV
Mason City, IA
Geez, where to start. The flooding caught us off guard. The Mason City market saw the first flooding on Sunday morning June 8th. We had severe thunderstorms the night before, but we never saw the heavy rainfall coming overnight. I got a call about 8:30am that the water on the Winnebago River had breached a levee and emergency management was evacuating several areas of Mason City.

First of all, it was a weekend and many people like myself were out of town, plus we had people on vacation. I was in Minneapolis at the time. We got whoever was in town into the station ASAP. Our weekday anchor/executive producer and our morning anchor coordinated live TV coverage and we called in our only two producers and reporters who were in town. We did live cut-ins at the top and bottom of the hour, had a crawl running 24 hours a day and produced a special for 5:30pm—we don’t normally have an early show on Sunday evenings.

Instead of driving back and not being able to help for several hours, I dedicated the next 14 hours to updating our web and coordinating crews from my home in the Twin Cities. We do not have a web person and I knew we needed to get all the information we could out to people ASAP, whether it was on the air or on-line. I had the station forward me emails, I checked weather and disaster websites to get up-to-the-minute new information.

Besides mason City, we had flooding in Charles City, Greene, Belmond and several other areas within a 100 mile radius of our station. It was a huge area to cover with a staff that only has 4 reporters. We relied heavily on providing information, instead of liveshots shots. We got video and reports in as often as we could, but with such a small staff, we decided to focus on delivering information to people to get them out of harms way, tell them where to go for shelter, what to do with no city water, etc.

The city had no running water for the next 5 days. People who had water from other towns bought in 5 gallon buckets so we could have water for toilets. We bought food for the staff from out of town restaurants that still had water.

We could not get any help from our affiliates in Cedar Rapids or Des Moines because the flood waters were all headed their way. We couldn’t get any help from corporate because the closest station is about 12 hours away and the worst for us would be over by the time they got here. We have 21 people in our newsroom. Only 18 were available since others were out of state. We managed to do all of our live cut-ins, plus morning, Midday, 4,5,6 & 10 without any help from outside the station. We never missed a show.

If there is anything else, I’ll write more when I can.

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