It’s all about the wind

Now that the power is back on and damage reports have come in to Kate Central, I am deliriously happy to report that no NCBR staffers or freelancers sustained any severe damage from Thursday’s tornado  that ripped through Weld County at 165 mph on its way to southeastern Wyoming.

There were some very scary moments for some of us who happened to be on the road as windows were blowing out of the State Farm building in Greeley and power poles were falling all around; calling the daycare center and not getting an answer; watching through a living room window as another funnel cloud tried to form down the street; racing out of a meeting to find home and family safe and intact but the other side of the street demolished. That only one person died, 13 went to hospitals, and a total of 102 houses are uninhabitable is all about the file marked Miracles.

As we usually do in these parts, the surrounding community has already sent plenty of volunteers and donations of money and supplies to begin the cleanup effort even before parts of the devastated area were deemed safe to enter. The shelter at The Ranch was shut down Friday after only one family made use of it Thursday night.

The disaster brought the way we stay informed in emergencies to the forefront. In our Fort Collins office, we were all logged on to different Web sites — the daily newspapers and Denver TV stations, the National Weather Service radar loop —  tuned to various radio stations, received regular updates from CDOT and Weld County government via e-mail, and got eyewitness accounts via cellphone. We saw the professional footage of the massive cloud from U.S. Highway 34 and the home video of giant hailstones pelting down on the now massively divoted Pelican Lakes Golf Course online; we could follow the Friday press conference as it was streamed live.

The level and quality of the coverage by the various news outlets also shows why, even in cyberspace, it’s still all about the editorial function. While the Greeley Tribune seemed to get a handle on the story pretty quickly with solid, traditional reporting, the Fort Collins Coloradoan took full advantage of its spiffy new Web site to throw up unedited releases from the sheriff’s office that weren’t  replaced when new information became available. It quickly became obvious that while there was plenty of raw information being gathered, no one in the newsroom was taking the time to tell the story in a coherent fashion.

I kept going back to the Rocky Mountain News site, which was using a very old model — dispatches to the rewrite desk — in a very new way to create what was in essence a live blog. By time-stamping each update, and referring back to previous reports when they needed to be updated, as well as linking to other sources from the main story, the Rocky kept it clean, accurate, timely and useful. They could do that in part because the online desk takes up half the newsroom in Denver and looks like the bridge of the starship Enterprise, with about the same number of crewmembers gathering and editing feeds from all over. It’s all about available resources.

Now we move from exciting as-it-happens coverage to the mundane part of rebuilding houses and lives. Insurance agents were on the scene by Thursday afternoon setting the claims process in motion. Just one company — State Farm —  expects claims to top $52 million, and so far the recovery effort has cost the state and local jurisdictions $1.2 million.

But wait! Here comes FEMA, with its bureaucratic conga line that may or may not result in federal assistance to homeowners who save their receipts from Home Depot. Gov. Bill Ritter declared a state disaster to activate the National Guard on Thursday and asked for federal assistance on Saturday, calling it “a safety net to help people begin the recovery process.”

Let’s hope that works better than in New Orleans where folks are still waiting for funds from the feds to begin rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

If we all chunk in a portion of our economic stimulus checks, could we call it federal aid and just git ‘er done?

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