By: Mark Fitzgerald By mid-September, Waverly Newspapers ? which includes the weekly Bremer County Independent and the Waverly Democrat ? was still working out of temporary digs, its downtown editorial offices still uninhabitable after stewing in two feet of water from the flood that besieged Iowa in June. But at least the staff of six is no longer working out of Editor Anelia Dimitrova's living room.
For more than three weeks, Dimitrova's cozy house in nearby Cedar Falls was the Waverly Newspapers newsroom. The papers never missed a publication day, though the only equipment they had at first was the editor's personal laptop.
After the flood crested, two reporters were able to wade into the papers' offices and rescue some additional computers. The reporters ? all but one of them in their first job on a newspaper ? figured out how to network the machines. "We also learned how to work in much closer quarters," Dimitrova says with considerable understatement. Among the unpleasant conditions forced by the flood: No toilet flushing, please.
"The first night was the toughest, not knowing if we could pull this off," the editor recalls. There was also the matter of telling her husband a newsroom was moving in. "I made the decision on the fly, he didn't know," she says. "But how could I not do it?"
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