Catastrophe Coverage

Wherever they rose, last week's swollen yellow rivers made news (see p. 17). At the same time, they played hob with news-gathering organizations by filling presses with mud, wrecking power lines, deranging communication. Total damage to newspaper properties soared above $10,000,000.

Of newspapers in the flood's path, Pittsburgh's were hardest hit. When telegraphic facilities failed, Hearstmen on the Sun-Telegraph managed to get a long distance connection with the New York American, had Arthur Brisbane's column "Today" dictated over the wire. In it Mr. Brisbane announced that "Johnstown, Pa. has its second important flood," went on to wonder "whether engineers could not have arranged to let the second flood run around the city instead of through it."

Though telephones held out, power failure soon drove all three Pittsburgh papers out of town. To the Washington, Pa. Observer & Reporter scurried the Scripps-Howard Press, ran off 125,000 copies of an eight-page flood extra. Paul Block's Post-Gazette borrowed the office of the Newcastle News, got out enough papers for 70,000 of its 204,139 readers, then slogged on to the larger plant of the Youngstown, Ohio Vindicator. The Sun-Telegraph hurried a crew 30 miles to publish on the presses of the Greensburg Tribune & Review.

At Wilkes-Barre, the Record was printed by candlelight, its presses hooked to an emergency circuit. The Dansville, N. Y. Breeze failed to blow for the first time in 52 years. And at Hartford, Conn., the Courant, one of the oldest U. S. newspapers, was forced to lift its venerable skirts above the mud of the Connecticut River and skedaddle to the plant of the New Britain Herald.

Oldest U. S. broadcasting station was off the air for an hour when failure of power silenced Pittsburgh's KDKA. Other broadcasters took what the flood brought them with varying degrees of enterprise. National Broadcasting Company sent out engineers and announcers to look at acres of dun-colored water, broadcast what they saw. Columbia Broadcasting System relayed the flood descriptions of local stations.

In Washington occurred the newsgathering stunt of the week. National Broadcasting Company announcers took a microphone to the top of the Washington Monument, invited visitors to broadcast their opinions of the swollen Potomac below, solemnly maintained it was purely by chance that two Negro hymn singers showed up, sang Deep River.

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