The flooding of the Iowa River has occupied much of my mind and time this week and will continue to do so through much of next. I have not had much time to write about it, though I have been taking photographs and uploading them to my Flickr page. If you have any questions about anything you see, please ask. But what follows are basically notes that I want to elaborate upon later:

1. The Press-Citizen‘s coverage has been atrocious: a) The paper has been blind to the effects of the river on the poor. One of the first-hit neighborhoods was the Baculis and Thatcher mobile home parks, which are south of the city. Here’s Brian Morelli’s lone impact story on the evacuation of the neighborhoods. (Compare: as of tonight, a Google search of the paper’s website returns 39 stories—not all of them stories about the flood or stories at all—that mention “baculis”; mention of “normandy drive,” a middle-class neighborhood which was evacuated at the same time as the mobile home park returns 158 stories.) b) Likewise, there has been a lot of shallow coverage of people’s experiences of the flood, such as this story of a frustrated bride, but very little to trace how men and women are being forced to alter their lives. (The focus on Normandy Drive has yielded some of these.) Why hasn’t the paper stationed a reporter or photographer at an emergency shelter for a few days on end to interview evacuees and find out who they are and how they cope? Why hasn’t the paper pulled volunteers off the sandbagging lines and asked them to describe why they work as hard as they do? Why hasn’t the paper sent a reporter to ride with a dumptruck driver to see what she sees and discover what she thinks as she drives across town delivering sand all over the city? c) The paper’s photographers must be blind, because as many places as they’ve been and as many things as they’ve done to follow stories, they haven’t gotten but three decent shots, and not one of those is a portrait.
2. Mark Penn had his “soccer moms,” and it’s a phrase that I’ve been tossing around pejoratively all day today, but my (and K’s) particular experience today was with a “triathlon mom” who was as controlling as anyone I’ve met in some time.
3. In disaster volunteering, one must guard against developing the moral arithmetic of comparing one’s own virtue to another’s. Buff, shirtless, college-aged men drinking beer and playing cornhole < oblivious waifs dressed-to-the-9s < able-bodied siteseers < elderly and crippled siteseers < governors and senators surveying the damage < tireless city workers earning overtime < volunteers for private property < volunteers for public property < victims. It might be different or more or less nuanced for others.

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