Love. Local. Latebreaking.: Book 1 in the newsroom romance series

by H. Laurence Lareau

  Neither one of them paid much attention to the weather news that snow had been falling all winter in record amounts to the north of Iowa.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Des Moines, Iowa

  Sunday, April 20

  “What in the hell do you mean the water is off?” News Director Jerry Schultz shrilled into Karli’s iPhone through his earpiece’s tin-can-sounding bluetooth. It was 5:30 a.m., Karli had been working since midnight to report the city’s sudden water crisis.

  “I mean it’s already shut off, Jerry,” Karli responded. “Apparently the early warm spell this spring melted a lot of the snow to the north. And of course it’s been raining here and up north pretty much non-stop for a few weeks now. All that water came down here, so the Raccoon River flooded.”

  “The Raccoon always floods. So what?” Karli could hear the panicky raspiness of Jerry’s voice. He was driving back, two days early and probably well in excess of the speed limit, from a meeting in Omaha.

  “Jerry, it flooded a lot. So did the Des Moines River. A lot. And suddenly. It came down here overnight and it’s not going away because there’s a lot more behind it. The downtown bridges aren’t safe to cross because the river is nearly at street level, pushing right up against them. But the worst part is that the water purification plant flooded and the motors that drive everything are under water. They’re ruined and couldn’t work even if they weren’t under water. That means there is no municipal water service in Des Moines.”

  “What about the rest of Polk County?” Jerry asked. “Do other cities get their water from Des Moines?”

  “Nope. The other municipalities have their own waterworks. But that’s still 200,000 people.”

  “Nearly 210,000 in the city, Karli. Do you have what you need for interviews?”

  “Jake and I just shot one with the water plant manager, who was not very happy,” Karli said. “They won’t let us into the plant because it’s ‘too dangerous.’” Karli made the air-quotes around that last bit plainly audible. “We have nightside video of the bridges and some early-morning exteriors of the water plant and other general flooding stuff. We’re going to meet a live truck at Nollen Plaza in a couple minutes to send the video back and see if we can get Joe Sixpack to give us some reaction.”

  Karli heard an empty pause as Jerry collected his thoughts. “Have Holly and Vince checked in yet?” he finally asked.

  “Of course, Jerry. The A team is in and on the job. Holly is lining up stuff with the governor’s and mayor’s offices, and Vince is on police and fire. Bailey is downtown with the truck’s mast up and locked in, and just gave the anchor desk to Stu after about five solid hours. Drink some coffee and visit a restroom while you have access to water and get in to the shop.”

  “You’re telling me the bathrooms don’t work, either? Why not?”

  “This isn’t like a boil order, Jerry,” Karli said, climbing into the news car next to Jake, who nodded that he was ready to roll. “The water isn’t unsafe. There isn’t any water at all. Turn on the faucet and nothing comes out. Flush the toilet and the tank doesn’t refill. We stopped at some student apartments with a swimming pool and got some video of kids using buckets of water from the complex’s swimming pool to flush their toilets.”

  Jake pulled away from the parking spot and pointed the car downtown.

  “Holy shit.” There was a long pause. “This really is big. Stay on the air, Karli. Make sure we stay on the air with this and that we have everyone in and on the job. I’m getting off at Jordan Creek for a pit stop, so I’ll be in the newsroom within half an hour at the most. I’ll bring in bottled water for the newsroom. And I’ll be on the phone with them between now and then.”

  Karli recapped the conversation as Jake raced through the City’s quiet streets to the where live truck’s raised mast indicated they were headed. Several hundred feet from the truck, Bailey Barber stood, immaculately made up and coiffed as always, microphone in hand and facing a camera. As they got out of the car, Jake began handing an earpiece and microphone to Karli.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Bailey doesn’t have anything but what she can see. You need to get on there now and tell the story. I’ll hook up the audio and let you know when you can use your own mic; till then, talk into Bailey’s.”

  “What about the interviews? I need the interview with that stiff from the water plant to roll at some point,” Karli said.

  “Karli, you have the story that nobody else has. We were the only ones who went to the plant; the other stations don’t have that. You need to tell the story. I’ll get the video back for someone to cut. Just get on camera.

  We have a lot of time to fill, and you have more story to fill it with than anyone else.”

  She nodded, pulled out her phone to check her notes while Jake guided her to Bailey’s side. She saw Bailey’s eyes flick over and recognize her, and Jake must have seen the glance, too, as he raised his palm toward her to prevent her from bringing Karli in too quickly. “Look at me,” he whispered, so Bailey’s mic wouldn’t pick up the sound. Karli looked up to find Jake’s fingers running quickly through her hair and brushing something quickly off her cheek. Her skin tingled at his warm touch, and his eyes grounded her. “You look like the complete authority on everything.” He nodded his head toward Bailey, lowered his palm, and made a huge gesture that Bailey couldn’t miss seeing.

  Effortlessly, Bailey thanked the new weekend weathercaster—who appeared on the portable television propped up on the ground beneath the camera, a very young woman who had only joined the newsroom a couple of weeks earlier—and waited for the studio to switch from the set to the camera in front of her. “Joining me here in front of the silent fountain at Nollen Plaza is Karli Lewis, who has been working this story all night. Karli, what’s the latest?” She extended her microphone toward Karli, who took care to keep her face angled as much as possible toward the camera even though she was addressing and standing right next to Bailey.

  “We have learned why the water has stopped flowing, Bailey. I just left the Des Moines water treatment plant a few minutes ago, where I learned that the electric pumps that power the plant have been submerged under the Raccoon’s flood waters.

  Water treatment has stopped completely, so there is no water to pump through the city’s pipes.”

  Karli began to explain the reasons for the flooding and what the next steps in restoring water service would be, and Jake sprinted for the live truck, where he jumped in, threw one of the dozens of switches, twisted one of many knobs, plugged a coiled cable into one of dozens of ports, and sprinted back toward Karli and Bailey with the cable paying out behind him all the way. As he drew close to them, Jake crept low and out of the camera’s shot to plug the cable’s other end into Karli’s microphone. She immediately raised it to her face, giving Bailey and her arm a chance to rest.

  As soon as the camera had zoomed in from the two-shot to a head-and-shoulders of Karli, Bailey stepped away and bent to listen carefully to the directions coming over her hidden earpiece. Jake hadn’t stayed still for a moment, racing back to grab his camera and tripod. He carried them quickly to take up a position near the live camera, then he repeated the route to string a heavy cable from the truck to connect his camera as another video source. At the same time he played out the camera’s cable with one arm, he strung an electrical cable next to it with the other.

  Karli wrapped up her initial ad lib report and tossed back to Stu on the set. She glanced off camera for a moment and saw Jake running up with two bar stool-height director’s chairs. He set the seats carefully just outside the camera’s shot, angled toward each other and with the plaza’s silent fountain exactly between them. Bailey climbed into one and arranged herself carefully.

  As Karli and Stu talked about access to water, Jake smoothly set up and powered on a pair of lights mounted high on their stands to bring the talent in the chairs out from the background and flatter their features with properly angled shadows.


  As he framed up a head-and-shoulders shot of Bailey, Jake heard his favorite director, Chuck, through his own earpiece: “Nod if that’s you, Jake.” He tilted his camera up and down quickly. “Awesome work, my friend.” And then, to his technical director, “Stand by to take Jake’s camera with Bailey on a one-shot...and take.”

  Bailey was effortlessly picking up on Karli’s reporting, filling in with facts that could be helpful to viewers. “The Des Moines city officials have said that they will be placing kaibos throughout town, grouped so as to give the most people easy access. And I should point out here for non-native Iowans that ‘kaibo’ is a local term for a port-a-potty. It sounds like they’re being trucked in from sources near and far to make sure people have access to sanitary facilities.”

  During this, Karli had climbed up onto the chair next to Bailey, and Jake had used the other camera to frame the two of them, with the waterless fountain that was in many ways the heart of downtown Des Moines in the background. Hearing her opening, Karli stepped in to follow up on Bailey. “Of course, you aren’t required to use a kaibo. The sanitary sewer system is still working. In fact, photographer Jake Gibson and I stopped at a student apartment complex near the Drake campus today and found residents there taking buckets of water from the complex’s swimming pool and using that water to flush the toilets in their apartments.”

  And so it went, with reports coming in from every live source the station could manage to rig, with video streaming back for editing and playback from the station’s control room. All the newsroom personnel came in and pitched in, and the coverage went essentially around the clock (with taped replays from midnight to 5:00 a.m.).

  Karli and Jake were together covering every new bit of the story they could find. They shot little kids saluting the Iowa National Guard troops arriving in town with a convoy of tankers to give out clean, drinkable water. They followed and interviewed volunteers identifying and helping the elderly and infirm. They ignored the barricades to interview and shoot the engineers and tradesmen working around the clock to restore the waterworks to operation. They shadowed the firefighters forcing everyone to leave the downtown areas because there was no water to fight fires in the high-rises. They sat and captured patrons at the restaurants trying to stay in business with bottled water, plastic cutlery, and paper plates.

  They worked themselves into exhaustion every day, reporting live, shooting interviews and editing the stories, helping out with other crews, for up to 18 hours. Then they’d run to a hotel in West Des Moines, where there was water for drinking and showering. Clean, they would make tired love, collapse into urgent sleep, then rise to do it all over again. This cycle repeated every day for ten days.

  The consultant, John Bielfeldt, had flown into town as soon as he heard the water was off, and he had worked just as many hours as the rest of the news team throughout the long days of covering the floods and the water shortage. He harped every day, to every crew, the importance of making each story inspirational: Understandable, Memorable, and Emotional. “Where’s the footage showing me that person’s emotion!” he’d cry. Or “What’s memorable about that shot of the drinking fountain just sitting there? They always just sit there. Make it memorable—shoot someone starting toward it and then remembering it won’t work!”

  On the 11th day, they started the day at the Des Moines Register’s temporary offices—even the newspaper had been evacuated from downtown Des Moines—downstairs in their hotel. The newspaper crew was a frustrated bunch. They, too, had been working themselves to death covering the floods, but their presses had been shut down by the evacuation. They were sending their very few pages to a busy press in a nearby town, but they were strictly limited in the number of pages they could print, so many good stories were being spiked. Still, when talking to one of the reporters off-camera and after Jake had turned off the camera, the rumor came up that the waterworks would be up and running again the next day.

  Karli and Jake ran to the news car. While Jake headed onto I-235 to head downtown to the waterworks, Karli phoned the newsroom. “We’re headed to the waterworks, Holly,” Jake heard her say. “We hear they’re getting close.”

  They pulled in to park as near the plant as they could and left the car at a brisk, adrenalized walk. As they crossed the mountain of sand bags that kept the river’s waters away from the building, Jake shouldered his camera, his fingers playing without thought over switches to turn the camera on, set the white balance, snap in the filter for interior lighting, adjust the gain, and select audio sources.

  Karli tried the door, found it locked, and knocked. Jake pressed the ‘record’ button and watched through the viewfinder as the door cracked open towards Karli and a timid man’s face peered out. “Media isn’t allowed...” he began, as Karli gave the door a sudden yank. The man, who had apparently been leaning on the door, stumbled forward enough for Karli to slip in behind him. Feeling the man’s weight dropping against his hip, Jake gave a slight twist and bump to help the man to a face-first landing at the entrance. Then he followed Karli quickly into the dim building, readying the switch that turned on the brilliant light atop his camera.

  As Karli wound her way to the room where the waterworks’ pumps sat, they heard the escalating shrill of an electric motor powering up to speed. They also heard the urgent, breathy whisper of the man who had ‘let them in’ telling them to stop and turn around and understand that they just couldn’t go there. Disregarding the man’s earnest entreaties, Karli opened the door to the machine room. Jake snapped on the light and steadied his camera to take in the group of satisfied looking men and women who stood at a massive control panel that looked to have come straight out of a radioactive sea monster movie. Karli turned to take the microphone and neatly coiled cable that Jake held out to her, and they marched toward the group. Drawing near, she shouted above the increasing din of the machines, “How long until your testing is done and you start pumping water to the City again?”

  A man gestured brusquely to an operator closer to the panel. Immediately after the operator reached to manipulate the controls, the thundering sound of the pumping machine began to die down in pitch and volume.

  “Young lady, you have no right to be in here!” the man began.

  “I’m Karli Lewis,” she replied, “from Three NewsFirst.” She nodded her head toward the camera that was hard to see under its bright light. “The citizens of Des Moines want to know how you’re coming on restoring the water. And that machine sounded impressive just now. Is the waterworks ready?”

  The man sighed and plucked the hard hat off his head to scratch at the thinning hair underneath. “Miss, we don’t want to create any false hopes. Just because you heard a machine doesn’t mean anything. We’ve told you we’re installing replacement pumps now that we have the building pumped out, but I can’t tell you any more than that we’re testing them now.”

  “How long do you expect the testing to take?”

  “You can’t take a hint, can you?” the man asked, exasperation suffusing every syllable.

  “Sir, the pump is connected to power. Is it also connected to the water purification system?”

  The man turned to walk away from Karli and gestured to the group of hard hats clustered near the control panel. “Somebody get them out of here!”

  Undeterred, Karli marched right after him, Jake tracking smoothly along with her. “How long until we can flush our toilets again?” she asked his retreating back. “How long till we can shower in our own bathrooms? Or do laundry? Or drink water that we haven’t had to haul from Army trucks?”

  The chief engineer kept walking, right through the pump room and through a door that he conspicuously locked behind him. Jake caught it all on camera.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Three NewsFirst Newsroom

  Des Moines, Iowa

  Tuesday, April 22

  Live on the news set, Bailey Barber was holding up the morning edition of the Des Moines Register. “There’s a hea
dline that captures what we all thought late yesterday afternoon when the water started flowing again.”

  Chuck was driving the show in the control room with the calm thoroughness that contrasted so sharply with his manner at any other time. Camera two, Bailey heard in her earpiece, tighten up on that headline. Good, two. Standby to take two. And take it. The image going out over the air changed to an extreme close-up of the newspaper’s front page above the fold. In huge letters, the headline proclaimed: AND ON DAY TWELVE, WE FLUSHED.

  Karli and Jake’s Sunday story had caught more or less everyone’s attention, and the complete approval of consultant Bielfeldt. In its wake, elected officials fell all over themselves to proclaim their earnest intentions to conduct government affairs in a transparent manner and with full respect for the public’s right to know.

  That, at least, was their public response. In less conspicuous ways, the news staff suspected, the elected officials redoubled the pressure they were putting on the waterworks engineers to get the water running again immediately. The officials managed to generate pressure in the water lines within 24 hours of the story’s broadcast.

  The city flushed, showered, drank and rejoiced in the glory of fresh, clean, flowing water.

  On the set, Art’s patrician face looked directly into the camera and his stentorian voice rumbled in response to Bailey’s recitation of the headline: “The loss and restoration of water service to the City of Des Moines reminds us that, now and ever since ancient times, civilization is buoyed by water—ready and universal access to clean, safe water.”

  The camera cut back to Bailey, who turned the full energy of her green eyes and perfectly made up face to the camera. “With the resumption of water service to the City’s nearly quarter-million residents, Three NewsFirst will be returning to its regular broadcast schedule. We will continue to bring you the latest developments during our usual news schedule, and of course we will interrupt regular programming for breaking news. But we are now returning to that regular programming after more than eleven straight days of live news reporting on the water crisis in Des Moines. Thank you for watching. Art and I will be back at noon with all the latest news.”