As you may know, dear reader, I am from Boulder, CO, and I am going through the disaster from our “Hundred Year Flood.”  My road has been barricaded for the past 5 days.  If I leave, I can’t get back to my house.  My house is currently flooding and we have a wet vac (lent by a friend) and a little Bissell steam carpet cleaner going almost non-stop to keep up with it.  Our food supply keeps going down, and we have no warm water except for what we boil on the stove.

I am thankful for electricity or we probably would have been evacuated.  There is something “romantic” about defending your home, yet it is also extremely exhausting.  I believe I burn my full day’s worth of calories during the day, and I am eating light.  Another benefit, yes, you might lose some weight, but I wouldn’t recommend this type of diet.

I have been thinking though, why haven’t they sent a van through with supplies to the people that are attempting to bail out their houses?  They know that we might need supplies.  They are blocking off the road to try to keep the traffic down to fix the road. The latest is it won’t be open until Wednesday, and they will issue a $1,000 fine if you try to bike/hike out.  Strict safety might be over killing the need for food.

As far as I know, they have sent through the cable and phone services, why not services for supplies?  It makes me feel like our area is not as important as others since we may not be as desperate.  Shouldn’t everyone that is going through hardship though be taken care of?  It would be as easy as setting up a van where friends and family could bring supplies with our address and have the one van deliver an area at a time.

Of course this had me thinking in terms of audience development.  What if your audience was flooded?  Would you ignore one section of the audience in favor for another?  Are you forgetting about a segment of your audience that you haven’t thought about in a while? Are you serving all of your audiences?  You never know who you might be leaving in the lurch.

-Shoshana