For Journalists & News Outlets

A community-run oversight organization is meant to answer to the people it serves. Save KVEC documents a leadership dispute inside the Keokuk Volunteer Emergency Corps (KVEC) — a volunteer water search-and-rescue and traffic-control outfit that operates on public and donated money and is nominally overseen by the Keokuk Fire Department. Members and residents describe an organization that eliminated its own democratic elections for leadership, is run by a single family and their friends, and has gone quiet in the face of questions — including deleting its public Facebook page rather than answering them.

The original reporting on this story was published and then disappeared. We've preserved it, along with more than a year of public comment from current and former members and Keokuk residents, and an anonymous whistleblower channel for people who aren't ready to put their name on the record. None of that is a substitute for independent reporting — it's a starting point for it.