Sutter County goes tubing with flood video

It may be the first time a local government outreach effort has incorporated YouTube.

In an effort to get information out about new flood insurance regulations in as many ways as possible, Sutter County is turning to online media in addition to more traditional forms of communication.

A video slideshow produced by Public Information Officer Chuck Smith has been posted onto both YouTube and a section of appealdemocrat.com where readers can submit their own videos. The 91⁄2-minute video is a montage of pictures from flood events in Sutter County over the past 105 years.

"It's just another way to get the word out in a way that's obviously not traditional," Smith said. "It's just our way of trying to be creative.

"A video is much easier for me to put together than a static display," Smith said.

The video is intended to be part of the county's outreach effort for new flood insurance maps produce by the Federal Emergency Management Agency for areas of the county south of Stewart Road and east of the Sutter Bypass.

With the remapping, 3,673 parcels — 1,789 of them with structures are being mapped into a flood hazard area, Water Resources Chief Dan Peterson said. This means those structures will have mandatory flood insurance if they have a federally-backed mortgage, the insurance will cost more and new buildings in the remapped area will have stricter flood protection standards.

While the 95 photos include flood events such as a 1915 event in Meridian and a 1938 flood in Yuba City, a majority of the photos are of the Yuba City flood on Christmas Eve 1955. That flood, caused when the levee on the Feather River broke near Shanghai Bend, killed 38 people, including Sutter County's undersheriff.

Smith was originally putting together flood photos for a static display for a county booth for last week's Yuba-Sutter Historical Faire and a Sutter-Butte Flood Control Agency outreach consultant.

"I scanned what I thought were the best (photos) and as I was scanning I thought, 'Man, first thing I need to do was a slideshow," he said.

Smith gathered most of his photos from the Community Memorial Museum, and also others from local residents. He called the video's first photo, a shot where the Sutter Buttes is the only thing visible besides flowing water from the flooded Meridian basin in 1997 taken by local resident Ken Calhoun, "kind of the money shot."

"Everybody who sees that stops and says, 'Is that a lake, what is that?'" Smith said.

Since being uploaded to YouTube on July 11, the video has been viewed 333 times. The copy on the Appeal-Democrat site has been viewed 90 times since July 14. Smith would like to upload the video to be viewed on the county's Web site as well, but will wait until improvements to the site's bandwidth are completed.

While he's interested in using different ways to get the message out about new flood maps, Smith doesn't expect video to be the only way. Traditional methods such as sending out letters are still part of the outreach playbook.

"Not everybody has access to a computer, not everybody is comfortable with it," he said. "And in rural areas, not everyone has high-speed (Internet access), so downloading a video isn't practical."

He plans on using video outreach more in the future.

"I would expect to see more video," Smith said. "From Sutter County, at least."

Contact Appeal-Democrat re-porter Robert LaHue at 749-4713 or rlahue@appealdemocrat.com