LAST BLOG (I think) Valley City Research Part Two

As I said in my last post, I am doing my research paper on Valley City. Mary Lee Nielson is still the spokesperson. Sandbagging started on Monday, March 23. The originally projected crest of the river was 18.5 feet from the National Weather Service. It got up to around 22 feet at its peak sometime around April 14th. There were about 450 national guardsmen helping fight the flood.

One medium that I found out was being used during the flood that I don't know much about is Twitter. Twitter is a social networking site that uses tweets which are text based posts that use up to 140 characters. They are similar to status updates on Facebook. I found this very high tech considering I don't even use Twitter yet.

It was announced on April 16th that classes for Valley City State University would be held online for the rest of the semester. An..... interesting experience it has been. April 17th Mayor Nielsen urged people to evacuate if they had not done so already while the sewer system that broke down could be repaired. They also ordered non essential businesses to close. On April 22nd they lifted the mandatory closure of nonessential businesses.

Crisis Communication Research Blog 1

The community I have chosen for my research paper is Valley City. I have chosen this because I saw most of what happened first hand. It has affected me, as well as many of you, so I think it would be important to research.

So far some things I have found or noticed is that our mayor, Mary Lee Nielsen, has been the main spokesperson. She has been doing an exceptional job explaining the situation in Valley City and what is being done to solve the problems.

I think one of the most effective channels of communication was the sandbag siren. This was the siren to let people know that they need more people to fill sandbags at the Wintershow building also known as "Sandbag Central." Some other channels of communication were the TV channels 10 and 68. The radio station in town, KQDJ, made announcements whenever something important came up like the water ban. Also, valleycityusa.com had important announcements posted on it. Right now it has in large print "If it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down" which is in reference to the water conserving efforts going on in Valley City at this time as the sewage system is getting fixed.

Along with these channels of communication there were some events on Facebook encouraging students to go and sandbag to save the town. As I was a resident during the flood, I know that word of mouth played a large part in gaining information as a lot of people don't listen or watch the local stations. The VCSU campus sent out emails updating students on information about the flood and how they can help. They also used notifind as you all know to announce that school was being cancelled.

There have been many successful channels of communication in Valley City that may have helped save the city.