Morning Pops and all y'all. Going to be cold and rainy all day with the heavy stuff on tap for overnight. What came down at around 2am this morning woke me up with the sound of the downpour on the skylights in the living room. My dogs woke me up growling at the sound. My female thinks rain is the main curse on the land, only surpassed by thunder, that gets #1.
When we lived in OK, she was a wreck in the spring and summer. I thought Dallas had some violent thunderstorms until I was there, Mother Nature in her worst mood. It was 11 years ago at this time of year that the infamous Lone Grove Tornado came through that area leaving 8 dead and devastation like a bomb went off. I saw it that night from the balcony of my apartment as the lightning lit up the entire sky.
Lone Grove was 7 miles from where I lived and we were elevated already but as that lightning lit up like nothing I've ever seen, we saw this EF4 a half a mile wide bearing down on that town and the one thing I remember was my neighbor saying "Oh, Mother of God". It was awe inspiring and terrifying at the same time, I was just transfixed on the wall of that monster. I had always thought of that funnel being small but this was the thing nightmares are made of and thanks to the quick thinking of my, fairly new to radio, afternoon jock, there weren't more deaths and injuries.
His name is Zack and he's a weather nerd and he called me right before 6, his time to get off the air was at 7, and told me a storm watcher that was a friend of his from North Texas had called him and said something really big and nasty was crossing the Red River and headed for us. Radio stations had become notorious for not having live people on the air after 7 since they had allowed consolidation in 1996. Since that had happened, a minimum 60% of the people that worked in radio were gone beginning with night and overnight jocks. It was so bad that the night of one of the worst floods in Fargo, ND history, there was not one person on the air on any radio station to help people. The very reason radio existed, to serve the public, was allowed to be circumvented to save their opportunistic profiteering jerks into more profit.
So, Zack calls me and I realize for the first time, we, make that I as the GM, was unprepared for broadcasting in Tornado Alley and most of these things happen late or well into the evening. I told him to stay as long as the threat was there and have the jock on the rock station stay as well and feed her the info. I mentioned he was new to the position but his quick thinking saved lives and I spoke to two people that proved that. The TV station out of Sherman, TX had a remote crew on the ground and Zack had the station on and was talking to one of the meteorologists and had the bright idea instead of trying to relay the information, he told the meteorologists he was going to just rebroadcast what they were doing and simply held the mic up to the speaker on the TV and the on air crew got word and told people in the area to turn to our station immediately if you are in the area.
Then the power went out in the Lone Grove area and our radio station was all they had but as luck would have it, that was the dominant radio station in the area, and that monster was only minutes from descending on them. They either had to have a weather radio, transistor or get in their vehicles and the word we got the next day was that's exactly what they did and the word passed to the people in the gym at the basketball game to stay put.
The devastation was unbelievable and the Governor surveyed the damage by chopper and said he was amazed that only 8 people had been lost. I got a call the next morning from a listener. They had the TV station on and our station at the same time when the power went out. He ran out to his truck to hear they were directly in it's path and it was on the ground, he ran back in and got his family and dog, ran back out to the truck and took off in the opposite direction. He stopped and drew a breath in and said "we lost everything but we didn't lose each other because of what y'all did". He came by the station later that day with his family to meet Zack. They all hugged him and he was quite overcome, he was only 20 at the time.
There are people that spend their entire lives in radio and never experience the real importance of it. That night, February 10, 2009, that radio station wasn't just the top rated Country station, it was the lifeline for a community. We ended up forming a very good relationship with that TV station, rewired our board to make it easier to rebroadcast because they had the best storm chasers and those cats are a different breed. We had them all on the air as guests and they had some stories to share.
I would say sorry about the length of this but I won't. I spent 25 years managing radio stations and until that night, really didn't understand my job as it applies to the public. Too bad congress and the FCC didn't see it the same way. The FCC did nothing to address the Fargo embarrassment. I did what I could and relayed what had happened that night to as many of my peers as I could and some of my guys in Dallas had no plan either. They were as unprepared as I had been, thinking it was somebody else's responsibility.
thank you, DABZ. I promise NEVER to do that again. Must've had a bit too much...grape juice lol
