sitting on a story

The media get things wrong, we all know that.

Regretfully this idea may be correct.

Where I live, there is a recurring story.

There is a river nearby that floods every once in a while.

The media springs into action when this happens. They jump into their vans and sprint out here from the city, often they end up right at my house, sometimes all at once.

Why my house?

Because I have a part of the river next door, a lake out in front and the flooding just off to the other side. (By the way, my house has never flooded.)

I and some family members have done numerous interviews for TV and the papers and without fail we have been surprised by the results. Why? Because the media had the whole story before they got here, they just needed some comments from the public to put it together.

Lesson: Even though you think you are saying one thing someone can take part of what you said and make it sound like something else.

Fact is the media can't be bothered much anymore with getting things right. That takes time.

They need to air their stories as soon as possible.

What good is the truth when it is the last one to show up?

Anyway when they come out here they point their cameras at the lake and blame it for the flooding.

It is an easy story to believe but it just isn't true.

You see this lake is one of those old man made resevoirs built for the canals back in the 1840's. It just doesn't have much of a watershed. Nevertheless some water can be seen splashing over the spillway when the river is high so the lake must be at fault.

Here is the rub. The part the media doesn't look for.

Since the lake is man made it needed water diverted to it. The state figured out what the height of the water level of the lake would be and then they went up the nearby river until they found a place even higher. The Irish workers started digging with their shovels and after a few miles a series of ditches were cut into the earth and water filled the resevoir.

What this means is that the water coming over the spillway when the river is in flood is always water from that same river!


Here is an ariel view of it. I put this together from Yahoo maps, give them a try. I colored in the river and the creek that feeds the lake. Included some directional arrows too.