By Jim Heath
Frances. Gaston. Ophelia. Ivan. Ernesto. Hanna. And of course Charley.
These are the names of hurricanes that kept me on the anchor desk in South Carolina for hours and hours. And in the case of Charley, had me quickly evacuate my townhouse on 77th Avenue North in Myrtle Beach, before spending the next six hours live on the air.
There is nothing quite like hurricane coverage for a television station. It’s all hands on deck. And in the case of reporters, it means being out in the elements and risking your own health and safety.
For anchors, it means you can’t get tired. You must always be alert because you’re presenting information to the public that you’re hearing for the first time. And, oh, yeah, there are no bathroom breaks.
Don’t get me wrong. It was a lot more comfortable to be on the desk steering the coverage than actually being out in the elements.
That said, braving the hurricane makes for much better stories as you get older. Looking back, I would have preferred a few reporter hurricane stories to tell now, than the live snow coverage stories I ended up with later in Ohio.
Strong winds are the most dramatic thing to watch during live hurricane coverage. Dan Rather started the trend of reporters hanging on for dear life as a hurricane slammed into shore.
But more dangerous to neighborhoods after a hurricane passes is the flooding. In a slow moving storm that just sits and spits rain for hours, like Frances in 2004, rivers can take days to rise, and then the flood surge can wreak havoc for weeks.
And I don’t know how many times we would warn about rip currents before a hurricane made landfall. “Don’t try to fight them, float parallel to the shore,” we would repeat often. So many didn’t know or listen, and so many drowned as a result.
It also amazed me that after we would spend hours on the air during a hurricane, a few hours after it passed by it would be sunny and calm on the beach. By our 6 pm newscast, the scary scenes of wind and rain seemed like ancient news. But that flood surge was always a much longer story.
A slow moving hurricane, or one that just sits off the coast and spits bands of rain for hours, is typically much worse than a higher category, but fast moving storm.
Hurricane Charley, in 2004, gave South Carolina fits because it hit twice.
After blasting Florida, Charley moved back over the Atlantic and landed at Cape Romain. It then went out to sea, only to hit again at North Myrtle Beach.
Damage was not extensive, although it wiped out a historic clock at the Myrtle Beach Pavilion.
Our excellent reporter Brian Williamsen spent the night, and a good portion of the following day, out in the middle of Charley. His reporting became legendary at our ABC affiliate: