All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Seth Doane is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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We’ve been working to put together a piece each week for our ongoing series “Other America.” We’d already shot a story for this week when the floods hit, but my senior producer, Katie Boyle, suggested that we go to look for a story from the flood zone.

In “Other America,” we’ve been telling the stories of hard-working Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. We’ve been seeing that a number of factors can throw someone into financial hardship. Sometimes it is the high cost of groceries and gasoline – or it can be unexpected medical costs that tip the balance. We thought that this week we should tell the stories of folks who’ve been thrown off their game by natural disaster.

My producer Linda Karas (who has been working with me on these stories) and I set out in search of a compelling story. Linda is great. She’s been at CBS News for some time and she has a good eye for a story. We talked with a number of agencies offering assistance to people in the flood areas around Iowa but ultimately, it was the executive director of the Northeast Iowa Food Bank who put us in touch with Bruce Recker and Gina Rebitz in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Bruce and Gina were sleeping at a Red Cross shelter along with Gina’s two daughters. Their story is heartbreaking. They’ve been dealt a tough blow by Mother Nature not just once … but twice.

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Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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Last year I covered a series of floods through Arkansas and Missouri, this summer, it seems the waters are slower and more devastating as they wind their way down the Midwest and into the Mississippi. Though it might sound grotesque, watching this slow process is a bit like watching a snake consume its prey. Just as you can watch the snake's meal grind slowly down its body, you can see the bulging waters of these rivers slide downstream.

My colleagues Dean Reynolds and Cynthia Bowers had been reporting on the floods long before my new producer Brandon Baur and I drove over from our coverage of teenage girls murdered in Oklahoma and the tornadic devastation in Chapman, Kansas, but there was plenty to cover for all of us.

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This morning, an e-mail from CBS News correspondent Dean Reynolds, who's in Iowa covering the severe flooding there, appeared in the in-boxes of a few senior producers and editors of the CBS Evening News.

It's an eye-opening note of few words, but it made a big impact here in the newsroom. We thought we'd let you read it firsthand, so you can see what Dean has been through in the past 24 hours.

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From: Reynolds, Dean
Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 8:24 AM
Subject: Today

It has been a very rough night. Rained thru the early hours. Thunderstorms and torrential downpours ongoing now. So hard you can barely see. Ground is drowning in rain. Levees in cedar rapids may be breached when the cedar river crests this evening, which will create a Ninth Ward-style disaster. It's already at record height.

Driving through downtown the pictures are reminiscent of katrina and rita. No exaggeration.

Situation elsewhere similar. Aging infrastructure a concern.

Mississippi River barges halted. Locks closed. Too dangerous.

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Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas. Over the past week, he's been trekking around the Midwest and South covering flooding. Here, he chronicles his experiences off camera.

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When we headed out last Wednesday, my freelance producer Steve Narisi and I thought we were headed to the aftermath of a rain event. Five days, four rivers and about 2,000 miles of driving later, I'm finally back at my desk letting my waterlogged thoughts air out a bit.

Rivertowns and River People

When you live in a flood plain, the theoretical, the practical and the actual all collide. The beautiful view of a babbling brook outside your window can turn into a nightmare when the flood waters begin to rise. Some of the people we met describe waters rising in a matter of hours, leaving them little time to pack up and exit everything they'd worked so hard to build.

When you see volunteers scrambling to sandbag their small town centers and their neighbor's homes from impending waters, there is a level of civic pride that just doesn't seem present in big cities. Everyone pitches in. Kids, their parents and their grandparents, pour in from surrounding towns, and put in the long, back-breaking hours necessary to fortify the homes of strangers or businesses.

My coastal friends may be callous enough to think this type of disaster is just inevitable and people should never live in these places — and while in theory that maybe correct, it is hard to tell someone who has three or four generations of history on this land that they should move.

When you get into very rural areas, and you find river people — and I mean a very small and select group who choose to live on the isolation of a river — you realize that they are a different lot. Some are ardent anti-government individualists who are living as far "off the grid" as possible, others have insulated and isolated themselves with their extended families and live off the rivers for everything, and these aren't people who respond well to being told when it is time to leave their property.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: Read on to see all of Hari's video pieces and hear about the "not-so-glamorous bits."

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Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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Kingfisher, Oklahoma is not used to the type of storm damage they're seeing. This is Tornado Alley, not Hurricane Lane. Meteorologists will tell you what a fluke it is that a tropical storm didn't just lose steam but gained a second wind 500 miles inland, four days after it made landfall.

The governor here has declared a state of emergency in 24 counties, perhaps the first step in receiving federal disaster aid. The magnitude or rarity of the weather yesterday will be small consolation to the families of the six dead due to the flash floods. Small consolation to the dozens of families who've had all their possessions caked with rust-colored mud as the flood waters recede.

Folks like David Rasmussen and his wife Jeri are likely going to leave. They've managed to grab all their pets -- dogs, cats, birds and a hamster -- and are salavaging what they can, but the water came up high enough to destory just about everything.

At least they're lucky enough to be able to get to their home today. Rhonda Gailbranch has to wait inch by inch as the water retreats. She moved here just a couple of months ago, was staying in a trailer on her yard while she remodeled her place. She's heard from rescue workers that there was more than five feet of water in her home when they passed by.

The waters are receding, and the sunshine baking the state is probably helping evaporate a bit off, but it'll be days, if not weeks, before life returns completely to normal.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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"Turn around, don’t drown" is a phrase you hear quite a bit on the local Texas television stations, and if you’re new here (I moved here in March) you wonder what they’re talking about.

But as you talk to local fire chiefs-- I spoke to one from Garland last week and another one in Haltom City today --and you watch the local news which shows you one live pictures every night of one car or another trying to cross a creek during a flash flood and you understand why there has to be a public campaign about trying to tell people not to drive into high water.

Why do they drive into high water?

Maybe it is a totally honest mistake. It looked like a four-inch puddle, and they didn’t know there was a sink hole in that puddle that could swallow their car. Maybe they were on their cell phone, weren’t paying attention to how much harder it was getting to drive through the water and then realized that water was coming in through their windows. Perhaps they just had a big monster 4x4 vehicle and the dealer at the showroom didn’t explain the physics when showing them where to find their rear defrost button. Maybe they already knew that a foot of swift-moving water could lift them, and their big truck downstream and were just the gambling type.

What is rather frustrating for these firefighters is rescuing people who chose to go around barricades, for a joyride, perhaps a rubberneck; to see the damaged areas. While the rescuers are helping these clowns, there is a strong chance that someone who really didn’t choose to be in that position, who might need help as well, has to wait that much longer.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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Water, water...everywhere, and nowhere at once.

Yesterday, I was in the town of Marble Falls, Texas- the place where the rain bomb exploded. You might have heard the numbers: 19.5 inches in a single night- to put that in perspective, that is about eight months of rain in less than eight hours. Needless to say, there are very few drainage infrastructures that could possibly deal with that sort of a torrent, and certain roadways and bridges in this town of 7,000+ were shredded by the force of surging creeks and overflowing tributaries.

Another casualty was the water system. The force of the flowing water was so strong, that as it peeled back asphalt like carpet, and carved and gouged its way down, it also unearthed and snapped some of the water mains and damaged the intake system which may take several days to fix. One of the firefighters we spoke to said that he couldn't fill a glass of water with what was coming out of a nearby hydrant.

The entire town is under a boil restriction, and there are very few places that water is running on tap, and even those water towers are expected to be depleted within the next couple of days. We all know that water is one of the most precious commodities on earth, but not until you drive by business after business and realize that there can be no dishes washed at a restaurant, no coffee boiled at a starbucks or even toilet flushed at a gas station that it sinks in.

What happens to the people that work at these businesses which are shut down? Will their employers continue to pay for non-work when the businesses are closed? What happens to insuring a steady water supply for emergency services? How far will the fire department have to truck water in, and will it be enough to fight a house or structure fire if need be? What happens to hotels- will they have to buy supplies and have their own reservoirs? Its one thing to have restrictions on watering your lawn or washing your car, its another to have to think about where you're going to get your drinking water and how much it is going to cost.

As several parts of the United States face drought conditions, and as concerns over climate change have people thinking big picture and long term about possible shortages of water as certain regions get more dry, come to Marble Falls, Texas, to see a microcosmic immediate snapshot of what happens when water is everywhere -- and nowhere -- at once.

From Texas, Hari Sreenivasan has a First Look at the damage from rising floodwaters, one of the stories on tonight's Evening News.

Just click the monitor for more.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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The numbers don’t lie. Yes, you’ve seen lots of stories about rain in Texas and Oklahoma, but that’s because it has been a usually wet year. Here in Texas we are already at three times the normal rainfall for June, and in Oklahoma, they’ve already had more rain this year than all of 2006. While the numbers might be nice abstractions for meteorologists, the flash floods that come with these downpours have been deadly.

In the past week seven Texans have lost their lives to high waters. Last night, a 13-year-old boy was no match for the suburban Dallas creek he was stuck in. Rescuers found him clinging to a concrete beam underneath a bridge. They sent him rope, but he slipped out of it and was carried more than a mile downstream. Police jumped in after him but to no avail. It took a couple of hours in the darkness for a helicopter to spot him, near one of the areas where rescuers had set up a place to catch him. The rescuers performed CPR all the way to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

It looks so relatively tame, a few inches, perhaps a foot of water. Think about it this way- a little over a foot of flowing water is enough to lift a small car, add a few inches to that and you can lift a truck. So if this young boy was standing in a creek that was swollen to a foot and a half or two feet of flowing water- the force that can move a truck is likely stronger than the most able bodied 13-year-old.

Most of the rescues we see on TV aren’t from the middle of creeks, its usually people who choose to ignore warnings on closed roadways, or miscalculate the depth of water and try to drive through. Use your head, heck, use your GPS if you have one, and find another way around a flooded road, and don’t let your kids play near any running body of water after a rainstorm.

From Missouri, Cynthia Bowers has a first look at the extensive flooding that has hit the midwest this week. That and more will be the focus of tonight's Evening News.

Click the monitor to watch.