Journalists in Iowa have been providing non-stop coverage of the floods, looking at different angles of the story from one end of the state to the other. They're reporting on flooding at the University of Iowa, where
water has seeped into buildings on campus, on
the levee breach in Des Moines and on
the raw sewage that is reported to have flowed into rivers around Iowa as water plants fail.
Bloggers are doing a great job of covering the floods, too.
IowaFlood.com is the biggest aggregation site I have found. The site pulls together newspaper, TV station and citizen resources. (I often wonder why media companies don't follow suit and string together various media resources rather than leaving it up to the non-journalism world to do.)
LavaRow has a very useful background on how IowaFlood came to be and how it was built using Yahoo!Pipes and Wordpress. Learn how to build your own pipe
by clicking here.
It would be particularly wise for news organizations to remind the public to register with
the Red Cross' Safe and Well system, which allows people to post online updates about where they are and what their situation is during an emergency.
Many newsrooms have enriched their sites with photos from viewers, readers and listeners.
The Des Moines Register's homepage features photo galleries with photos from around the state.
The Register also has a frequently-updated
Twitter page and
Facebook page.
Click on the following links to see how other news organizations in the Des Moines are covering the floods:
WHO-TV KCCI-TV WOI-TV KDSM-TV WHO Radio Here are links to coverage in the Cedar Rapids area:
The (Cedar Rapids) Gazette
KCRG-TV KCRG's Facebook page KGAN-TV KWWL-TV Iowa Public Television has tips on how to talk to children about disasters.
There are more than 7,400
Iowa flood photos on Flickr. Additionally, there are
hundreds of YouTube videos of the floods in Cedar Rapids, as well as
Flickr photos and
Facebook pages specific to flooding in this area.
Here is raw video from the Weather Channel.
Live Cameras Live cameras of the river in downtown Des Moines
Wider shot of Des Moines KGAN's live shot of Cedar Rapids Other live cameras in Iowa