Hey, I called my aunt in West Fargo and then tweeted about what she told me! That qualifies me as a journalist.

The interesting comparison would be to check media staffing levels in '09 vs. 1997, just to see what's been lost. During that flood, WCCO's Gunga Don reported from the scene almost every night, in Abercrombie hip boots and waders, choppering in and out from a safe haven in Fergus falls. Big time coverage, with all the big names, and casts of dozens. I think the Strib even parked a hi-tech trailer somewhere on the soggy prairie. All-out coverage, baby. Mad Bill Alkofer, rest his soul, and I spent week after week up to our keisters in ice water for the old Pioneer Press, including time working out of motels without electricity or toilets (I dropped my room key in the hotel porta-potty) and eating kippered herring out of cans. I can't vouch for Alkofer, but I didn't try to kiss anybody for weeks. My personal flood expense account passed $12K. And that was real money back then. So hats off to the Flood Heroes of '09. But as for the all-around MSM performance in this flood, compared to the blitz of '97?
Maybe not so much.

Well, Nick, I wasn't here for the '97 floods. Admired the coverage from afar, though. Well done.

As for the coverage of the near flood in Fargo/Moorhead and the collective heroics to largely fend it off, I was a contributor to the coverage for the past week working the same 16-hour days a lot of people were. The journalists I observed up there all appeared to be working every pretty damn hard to cover this story.

I'd simply point out that the two stories aren't really equivalent events. Thematically similar in that involved the rising waters of the same river system, certainly, but thanks to some good exigent planning on the fly and the tireless efforts of volunteer labor, wide-spread flooding was largely averted, which is/was the main story in Fargo. The F/M metro area was not inundated by 2009's record flows of the Red in the way Grand Forks and East Grand Forks were.

Paradoxically, those herculean efforts may work against their local and state officials efforts to garner the same level of federal funding to better protect their communities with more comprehensive flood mitigation strategies. That's a story to be followed.

It's still early in the flood season. A second lower crest is expected in Fargo/Moorhead, and then there are still the rains and general cruelty of April that T.S. Eliot wrote about waiting in the wings. So the folks up there will have to live with that constant low-grade tension for quite awhile yet before they can stand down. There'll still be a yawning pit big enough for the late Evil Knievel to jump in front of Discovery High School that supplied clay for ad hoc dikes. Those contingency dikes of clingy clay and mud will still loom over neighborhoods and the 500,000 deteriorating sandbags and the rest of the mess will be taken away with less dispatch and drama than they were placed. That hellacious clean up and restoration job will have to be done without the adrenaline-fueled drama as a backdrop, which will likely not garner national media attention.

So, while the story's not over, I'd say those of you back here and around the country reading, listening and watching along were kept pretty well appraised of what was happening up there by an equally hard working bunch of sleep-deprived, mud-spattered and freezing journalists as your heroic cadre in 1997.