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When Flight 1549 went down in the Hudson River, images and video of the plane floating, surrounded by ferries and rescue boats, abouded. But video of the actual ditching and the plane's actions before any emergency response arrived? It was rarely seen. Now, one of our Investigative Team producers, Pat Milton, has obtained newly released surveillance camera video captured from a Con Edison facility on Manhattan's West Side, which has a view of the Hudson river. You can watch it below:



Also, in exclusive video obtained by CBS News, a security camera from the Intrepid Air Sea and Space Museum in the Hudson River captured the moment flight 1549 touched down.

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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