Forum cartoonist Trygve Olson and the supervisor of the editorial page on June 12 who published a cartoon with a couple sitting on a dunking machine plank with a ball dated (1997, 2002 and 200?) being thrown at the dunking target infers that the couple sitting on a plank under the sign "Welcome to Ada, Minn." are going to get wet. The caption on the bottom of the cartoon indicates that floods strike again in the same place. This cartoon from a regional newspaper, a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper I might add, is in extremely poor taste.
Our Ada residents, businesses and organizations have worked diligently with flood mitigation projects over the past several years. Ada residents do not need to be depicted as a couple of people huddled on a dunking tank plank under a "Welcome to Ada" sign and have The Forum produce this cartoon to be laughing material in your editorial section.
Weather will affect communities adversely all over the world, and many hard working area and regional concerned people responded accordingly. Several hundreds of volunteers, throughout the region, helped save Ada from this flood by filling sandbags, moving and reinforcing spongy dikes, staffing and maintaining pump lines, walking dikes, providing hot food, operating heavy equipment, and delivering necessary supplies and equipment 24-hours-a-day for several days. We are grateful to all who helped Ada win this flood crisis, but we question the cartoon's inference of Ada being a fun dunking machine.
Storms have severely affected virtually all regions of earth, some with very serious and disastrous outcomes. Fargo has also had their share of floods with major dollar amounts spent by federal, state and local governments for flooding mitigations and building renovations. With the region getting 12 inches of rain in less than six hours, Norman County plus many other northwestern Minnesota counties and cities were severely affected, but the spirit of people in Ada will resonate again.
No thanks to The Forum cartoon, we feel that floods are serious and should not be taken lightly in any community.
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Vallenga wrote this piece for the Ada, Minn., Economic Development Authority Committee. Also signing were Darin Ramey, Clarence Weippert, Dan Ness and Doug Marcussen.
