Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Noon Deadline
Thursday
August 12, 2004
At this point my trip to Nashville is still on... though throughout today it has been an off-again, on-again deal. The reason? Hurricane Charley is projected to be a Category 3 storm, and they're going to close the airport tomorrow at noon. My flight to Nashville is scheduled to depart at 11:35 AM. Talk about catching the last flight out of town... I had already planned this trip before the storm danger made itself known, and while I don't live in an evacuation zone, an estimated 800,000 people in the area do. This storm is no joke. They're saying it's the biggest hurricane threat to Tampa since the big one that hit in the 1920s.
The upside on not being in an evacuation zone is that, if for some reason they have to shut down the airport early tomorrow and I get stuck here, I won't be stranded. There's always room at the Guinness Hotel when you are the proprietor.
Watching the media coverage of all of this has been quite interesting. It's made me glad that I'm out of the TV news biz -- I know how physically and mentally taxing it can be to be involved in the production of longform, continous breaking news coverage like what is going on right now. When Tropical Storm Gabrielle hit Sarasota in 2001 (the week of 9/11), I know that was a bear, and that was nothing compared with this mammoth storm.
The local coverage has been good from what I've seen. They've gone all-in as far as the stations covering up programming (including Big Brother 5 tonight on WTSP -- arrrgh!), but with the severity of this situation, it is the right thing to do.
There were two tropical storms that we had to deal with this week: Bonnie (which has petered out in the gulf) and the big one, Charley. Scott Massey made the observation that Charley should've instead been named Clyde. You know, like Bonnie & Clyde. Apparently Scott is a little more clever than the people who come up with these tropical storm/hurricane names.
I promise to have at least one update tomorrow (electricity pending if I get stuck in Tampa). Let the adventure begin...
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