How Are We Doing?
IRONWOOD, MI - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - This past weekend, the City of Ironwood faced the biggest crisis this city has seen in many years. The way the community came together during the water break is reminiscent of days pretty much gone by. Back in the day when a neighbor lost his barn to a fire, the entire community got together and helped rebuild it. The citizens of Ironwood, our friends, our families, and our very good neighbors did just that. People came from all over to help. Attempting to list them all would be nearly impossible, attempting to list most of them would be unfair, so let's just accept the fact that we are very fortunate to live in a region of the earth where people still care about one another, where our neighbors are our family. The Superior Chronicle would like to thank everybody that worked so hard to help during Ironwood's water crisis.
Throughout the ordeal, we received many messages, posts, emails and telephone calls. Many of them were to compliment our coverage. Here are some examples...
"Jim, Very nicely done this past weekend on the water main break with all the updates and the nice pictures you took. It was nice to know what was going on with the work and how far we were progressing throughout the day. Thank You." - Ironwood Township Fire Department
"Never heard of you 'til this water emergency situation... got nothing from the Globe on-line (Ha!) the AM Station playing back-to-back polkas, the FM Station (hasn't a clue)... then I went to Google and typed in 'Ironwood Michigan Emergency' and found you there. Now I check four five times a day. Even your ad-copy looks better than the Globe. Bookmarked you... deleted the Globe." - Anonymous
"Excellent reporting. If I had to rely on the Marquette or Daily Globe news, I would think it was still Saturday. God forbid we ever have a horrific disaster. We'd all die! Does anyone know if the Ironwood schools have classes on Monday, because I've been hearing rumors that they will be closed another day. Thank you." - Chris
"I was informed of this site a few days ago, and I must say that I am impressed! Thanks for doing such a great job diligently informing the community about the water situation!" - Liz Erickson
"Jim, very good coverage of our water emergency. Thanks for getting the information out so quick." - Dennis Hewitt
"To whomever is responsible for the water outage reporting in the Superior Chronicle: Nice work! I appreciate the timely information and pictures. This is something the Globe can simply not do even if they chose to do so. This is an excellent resource for our community. The only thing better would be if there were an automatic email list that was triggered when there was an emergency. I could program my email software to sound an audible alarm when I received email from the Superior Chronicle. Again, nice going guys. Thanks." - Michael
The Chronicle would like to thank everybody for their kind words of support. Our photographer Steve Frank went the extra mile to make sure people could see just how bad the situation was. The Emergency crew at the Ironwood Public Safety Department did an outstanding job of releasing information to the area media. The Chronicle would not have been able to keep our readers up-to-date if they hadn't done such an outstanding job letting us know what was going on.
We urge readers to submit their comments. How are we doing? The first step to improving is to know what we are doing wrong. And knowing what we are doing wrong, helps us to understand how to do things right.