reporters can, but anchors tend to sink in deep water situations.
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30 blocks from any bayou is… the city. Indeed. I’ve never been and I know that.
I hope that anchor has a comfy armchair back in his dry warm dressing room.
Excuse me person of color, before our viewers get too involved with feeling empathy for your situation, could you and please deny that this was all local Democrats’ fault?
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The answer is Antifa!
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I never really worked in flood plain management, but I spent a few years practicing water law (among other things) and the management of moving water is just unfathomably complex, with a bit of a black art in there with the science of it all. There was this one female lawyer in Sacramento, though, in whose brain was contained a solid-state map of the hydrology and business of water of California like she was Thufir Hawat. She’s about the only person I ever met who could answer a question like this on the fly.
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I guess reliable competent journalism is no longer something the corporate media do. Of course, the ratings and audience and money’s in bullshit, so I guess there’s no need for putative journalists to deal with facts. Or even sense.
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It’s much, much easier under East Coast (riparian) water law. But still a black art, really.
Hmm, news reporters and good questions…
I’ve always been a fan of, “And when you saw the tornado bearing down on you, destroying your home, and pulling your child from your arms… What were you feeling?”
Local reporters always have the best questions. Here in the Fargo area (and probably true everywhere) the local news has to take any national story and find somebody in Fargo that was just there. Or has a relative there. Or changed planes at an airport there.
“Tonight at six, we talk to Randy Johnson that was in Houston last Wednesday on his feelings about the hurricane and flooding”
Great, sure Randy has a lot of great thoughts about it.
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I wasn’t, but I did mash two separate thoughts together that would make it seem I did.
I did mean all reporters regardless of station affiliation.
So true. I have a sibling in Houston, and we grew up in a Midwestern community a notch bigger than Fargo.
In the last few days two different newspapers and a TV station have all run stories dedicated to my sibling’s flood experience (which, thankfully, has been pretty tame, although many of our friends in Houston have not been so lucky).
Next, lets ask the grieving family of a police murder victim how to change the training and hiring practices of the cops.
Maybe lets ask a homeless person what kind of market regulation they’d like to see, in order to make it easier for them to buy a house.
If folks don’t have talking points at the tip of their tongue when accosted by reporters, then they have no business complaining about it!
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One of my professors was fond of pointing out how many areas of apparently completely unrelated English law were originally developed to deal with water rights and disputes.
I sometimes read codes of law (yes, I am a very boring person) and it often amuses me how much law is clearly unobserved and unenforced. Where will I find the “three millers of good character” that I need as expert witnesses if my neighbor builds a dam and floods my land?
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Well, yes, we all know that millers are untrustworthy folk - bad characters the lot of 'em!
Where do you require those?
Over here Rylands v. Fletcher would be the starting point:
Link to the actual judgment, just in case you’re that boring 
http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKHL/1868/1.html
In section 1902 of the state legal code, for one example, the “Procedure to condemn materials for building and repair of dams” - which is a legal means of preventing your upstream or downstream neighbor from building a dam out of the wrong sort of stuff - it says “The Court or any Judge thereof shall thereupon by order appoint 5 disinterested freeholders of the county as commissioners, directing them to go upon the premises described in the petition and assess the value of such earth, sand, gravel, stone or other material stated in the petition to be required, and also to determine the damages sustained by the owner thereof by reason of taking the same, and make return thereof under their hands or the hands of a majority of them, which return shall be forthwith filed in the office of the Clerk of the Court in the county wherein the proceedings shall take place.” The “five disinterested freeholders” traditionally include 3 millers, a farmer, and some sort of citified edjimicated fella, all men of good character and reputation. The law dates to the mid 1800s and has changed very little since then.
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