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Flood a small town and suddenly everyone wants to see what's happening; or how Phil Zimmerly lost his 15 minutes of fame

Phil Zimmerly lost his 15 minutes of fame to a swollen Riley Creek

Flood a small town and suddenly everyone wants to see what's happening. The Feb. 28 flood set one-day viewing records for The Icon.

While The Icon has averaged between 500 to 600 viewers per day on Feb. 28 The Icon had 3,472 individual viewers. That topped the previous record when a deer walked into a downtown Bluffton bar.

On Nov. 6, 2010, The Icon had 1,477 viewers watch the deer crash through Luke's Bar and Grill window. We thought that was impressive.

Back to Feb. 28: the average viewing time on The Icon was 6 minutes 32 seconds. The average viewer time on one of our "500 to 600 views per day" is 3 minutes 7 seconds.

In Ohio alone, the Icon had views from 129 cities. Across the U.S. viewers watched our flood coverage in every state except Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi Alaska and Vermont. The only thing we can conclude is that something really important occurred in those states yesterday.

Concerning our video coverage, the Bluffton University flood video has had 738 viewers, Vance-Jefferson street flood video 578 views, and Triplett Drive video 512 views. One of The Icon's videos is being aired on Toledo's channel 13 television station.

The photos of the flood coverage - thank you Icon viewers on the "other side" of town" who sent photos - has had over 1,000 views.

Now we turn to Phil Zimmerly, whose 15 minutes of fame was shattered by the flood coverage. We took this artistic photo of Phil during Saturday's chili contest judging at the library.

It was our pre-flood home page feature photo. We had planned to post it all day Monday, but you know the old saying: when it floods it pours. So, poor Phil was bumped. In fairness to Bluffton's Mr. Coffee, here's Phil's photo.

Tell him you saw his photo on The Icon. We're trying to impress our advertisers with the power of the computer screen.

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