Media wave follows flood

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By Rodney Ho and Jeffry Scott

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Usually this time of year, the Atlanta-based Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore is standing wind-whipped on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean reporting on an incoming hurricane. Instead, Monday night, he was in a canoe in Buckhead, pointing out a car up to its roof in the waters of Peachtree Creek.

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Canoe Restaurant employees, Victoria Worthen (left) and Heather Iverson (right) contemplte what clean-up will be like when the waters recede at the Vinings On The River shopping strip Tuesday.

John Spink, John Spink Canoe Restaurant employees, Victoria Worthen (left) and Heather Iverson (right) contemplte what clean-up will be like when the waters recede at the Vinings On The River shopping strip Tuesday.

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“This is surreal, amazing, amazing, especially when you consider this is not a tropical event,” he told viewers.

Cantore said Tuesday that it’s the worst storm he’s covered in Atlanta since the Blizzard of 1993. The only difference between the floods and rain here and in the scores of hurricanes he’s covered over the years is “the rain in hurricanes is sideways. This was straight down.”

Tuesday night he planned to cover the Atlanta storm from Vinings, probably the closest-tohome natural disaster he’s covered in his career. He planned to be at the Chattahoochee River, about 1½ miles from his home.

The surprise flooding also forced local TV stations to improvise a bit Monday as reporters and editors worked 18-hour days to handle the story.

Nobody pre-empted prime-time coverage Monday night, but there were plenty of “cut-ins” and “screen squeezes” to get info to viewers about school closings and traffic problems.

WGCL-TV dumped “People’s Court” at 5 p.m. and the “CBS Evening News” on Monday to focus on the local story. Tuesday morning, the station started at 4:30 to help people decide how to handle their commutes.

“Our game plan was to be on the air as much as we can,” news director Steve Schwaid said. “The challenge [Monday] was the flooding was happening everywhere. Everywhere reporters went, there was a story to tell. That’s a pretty large story to get your hands around.”

Early on, when lightning prevented trucks from sending live satellite feeds, WSB-TV reporters used the Web. Other stations had to go with phone interviews with their reporters. Helicopters weren’t able to do aerial views until later in the afternoon when the rains let up.

No news crews got trapped by rising waters, though Schwaid said there was a close call with one crew in Douglas County. At one point, he said, photographer Everett Bevelle simply set up a camera and did the reporting himself.

“This has been incredibly intense,” said John Gerard, a traffic reporter at WXIA-TV. “There were divers on I-20. Those are words you’d never think you’d ever see together.”