1972 Flood Memories Going Online

By Jomay Steen, Rapid City Journal staff | Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Weary and worried people turned to the medium of the familiar for help on June 9, 1972.

Robb DeWall, a Rapid City native and broadcast newsman, said that's why, even decades later, people remembered his role that horrendous night and in the days that followed the flood.

"Because they knew our voices. Because they knew our faces on television. Because we had always been there, we had a calming effect to some degree. It was steadying," he told the Rapid City Journal in  1992. "Something was the same in a world that was suddenly upside-down."

DeWall was working for KOTA radio and television when he was covering the state's worst disaster, which claimed 238 lives. He reported on events unfolding during the flood's first 13 hours as the voice for the area's Emergency Broadcast System. Because of that work, he became part of the flood story.

He died in January 2006. His estate that year donated his collection of flood photographs, films, correspondence and broadcast interviews as the first contribution to the flood archives being preserved by the Rapid City Public Library, The Journey Museum and Minnelusa Historical Society.

After two years, a broadcast journalist's and others' oral history of Rapid City's most devastating natural disaster have been recorded, archived, digitized and entered into the social networks and state-of-the-art technology on the Internet.

It is all part of the public library's continuing work to share relevant to its users, according to Greta Chapman, director.

"It's where libraries need to be going," she said.

Chapman said there was no expense beyond the time the library staff spent customizing the content for technology systems and servers.

Now, DeWall's 1972 flood stories are being retold to a larger and different audience tuned to an increasingly familiar medium: Wiki or Wikipedia. Recollections of 18 other survivors and more than 120 images have been added so far to the library's digital library dedicated to the flood.

Officials said the collaborative effort is a way of commemorating the victims and the response to the disaster. The Web site's design also allows everyday users to add their contributions, expanding the oral history project.

"The staff has done an amazing job," Chapman said.

The library will continue to collect oral history, "which will prove to be as dynamic as what has already been collected," she said.

"We want to prevent the loss of our history. We see the library as assuming the leadership role in the digitization of our community history," she said.

Library outreach director John Pappas said the goal is to preserve the first-hand experiences through recorded interviews. Having that historical information will "enable younger generations to access it in a manner familiar to them."

For information on archiving the city's history, call Chapman at 394-4171.