I was warned prior to IRE and NICAR’s CAR Boot Camp that many attendees leave feeling overwhelmed.

And at the end of the five-day class in Minneapolis in early October, I felt … overwhelmed.

But with my employer, The Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, having spent a decent amount of money sending me to the camp, I was not in a position to return home and not produce.

So I got right to work on my first day back. By that Friday I had an 1A story filed, and in the days in between was surprised by how much I had retained of the outstanding instruction by The St. Paul Pioneer Press’ MaryJo Webster and IRE Training Director Jaimi Dowdell.

The story I wanted to tell was how much public money had gone to Iowa communities hit by record-breaking natural disasters this past spring and how that money had been distributed. The state and federal governments had been sending out periodic summaries of how much money had been awarded, but there was no breakdown of where specifically the money had gone.

A quick review: In May, a deadly EF-5 tornado ripped through northern Iowa. In June, rivers across the state, but especially in our coverage area in Eastern Iowa, went over their banks and, in many cases, beyond their record crests. Of Iowa’s 99 counties, 85 have received presidential disaster declarations.

I knew the amount of public money going to disaster relief was at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’d therefore be getting a large amount of data.

Getting the information, of course, was the first step. And the Boot Camp proved useful right away.

On Monday, I called a spokeswoman with one of the state agencies responding to the disasters. I stressed I did not want a summary but rather the raw numbers.

She asked if it would be OK to give me an overall figure and then a more detailed breakdown for Linn and Johnson counties (the two biggest communities in The Gazette’s circulation area). Bolstered by my CAR training, I said that I wanted a statewide breakdown and that I was comfortable dealing with a large amount of data.

I added that, with so much money involved, I assumed the state and federal governments were keeping close tabs on where it was going, so I didn’t think it would be a hard request to fulfill.

It turned out it wasn’t – to some extent. Without an open records request, I was given on Tuesday a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet file with about 10,000 rows. It had columns by entity, project number, dollar amount, size of project and other items. It was, in short, great.

But it covered just one source of funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s public assistance program. There were several other ones, but I was told it was going to take some time to get everything.

Gregg Hennigan covers local government out of the Iowa City office of The Gazette.