Using Twitter to follow North Dakota floods

As the Red River rises in North Dakota, Eastern Iowans are watching closely.

Cedar Rapids has tried to learn lessons in flood recovery and flood control from Grand Forks, N.D., which was devastated by 1997 flooding. Now Fargo and Grand Forks are facing the worst floods up there since 1997.

You can keep tabs on the flooding through a variety of Twitter feeds, hashtags and other searches:

• I have found four feeds that give Red River flood levels at different places: @fargofloodstage, @redriveratfargo, @egffloodstage and @redinwinnipeg. If you know of more, please tell me. By the way, we have set up @CedarRiverCR, which I hope we don’t need to use.
• You can search for various hashtags. Looks like #Flood09 is the most active, but #fargoflood, #redriver, #flood and #ndfloods have some traffic, too.  When you follow a breaking news story using hashtags, you need to recognize the spontaneous nature of hashtags and check for a few before traffic coalesces around a single one.
• Don’t rely on hashtags. Search for terms such as “Red River” (use quotation marks, so you get only tweets with the words adjacent to each other), Fargo, Grand Forks and flood. This tweet from @ksassi, a Fargo professor, would give me an eyewitness to talk to if I was reporting this story: watched the chunks of ice in the red river taking down huge trees, listened to big booms and crashes–dramatic! (She has several other strong tweets about the flooding.)
• With a quick Google search (twitpic fargo flood), I found this sandbagging photo by @therealjosh. (Of course, Twitter isn’t the only social network you should search for photos. Check Flickr, too.)

If you’re a journalist covering this or any other breaking story, remember to use this important tool.

Of course, being there in person is an important reporting technique, too. Watch The Gazette and GazetteOnline for more coverage of the flooding in North Dakota. We’re sending Adam Belz and Jonathan Woods to Fargo and Grand Forks to cover the flooding and see how well flood protection worked in Grand Forks.