Tuesday, March 07, 2017

Looking for news from Seymour ....


Like many others, I'd guess, I've been scouring the web this morning for news from Seymour, a town of 700 or so and our neighbor down in southeast Wayne County, hit by a tornado about 8 p.m. Monday.

Lucas County was on the northern edge of this system and, so far as I know, didn't suffer from it. But tornado warnings, strong winds, lightning and heavy rain enlivened the evening down in Wayne; and the path of damage apparently spread east from Seymour across southern Appanoose County, too.

Although there apparently were no injuries, several homes in Seymour reportedly were damaged and the school took a major hit. Seymour is among a diminishing number of the smallest K-12 school districts in Iowa, struggling anyway to survive; damage to its well-maintained physical plant, not good news at all.

Seymour, mediawise, is kind of out there in the middle of nowhere, midway between the Des Moines and Kirksville, Missouri, markets --- overlooked except when major emergencies occurr. WHO-TV was the first in the Des Moines market to come up with a credible report. I'm sure there will be more reports as the day progresses. Next to nothing from the newspaper Iowa once depended upon.

Facebook, not surprisingly, has proved to be the best source of preliminary information, both from "friends" and the public posts of strangers. You do have to toss out the most dire reports and the most optimistic, landing somewhere in the middle, when dealing with Facebook, however.

Now I've got to get back to obsessively looking for news .... And wishing our friends and neighbors there well.

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