HUNKERED DOWN.... IN THE WEE SMALL HOURS
BY DAN MILLER
(posted September 17, 2004 at wsmv.com)
Ivan was the deadliest hurricane to hit the U.S. in 5 years.... and one of the most destructive ever.
But even with all the destruction, it could have been so much worse.
We'd been hearing ominous predictions that a direct hit on New Orleans could have killed thousands.
We obviously concern ourselves with the flooded homes and streets, the downed trees and torn roofs...... but, at the end of the day, the only toll that truly matters is the human toll.
We cannot stop these storms.... we cannot stop much of the destruction.... but we have made remarkable progress in protecting and alerting people.
A century ago, in September of 1900, a giant hurricane moved westward across the Gulf of Mexico.
There was no satellite imagery, no radar, no reconnaissance flights to check the eye of the storm or the intensity of the winds.
The people of Galveston, Texas had no way of knowing what was coming. 8,000 of them died.
An unnamed hurricane that crossed Florida in 1928 killed more than 1,800 people.
But nowadays, we can virtually watch the storms as they move in. We get accurately predict where they'll go, and what needs to be done. That's the true blessing of modern technology.
I stayed up late, into the wee small hours of Thursday morning, anxious to see where Ivan would make landfall, and with how much fury.
All of the cable news channels did an impressive job, with live reporters and meteorologists on the scene, feeding back pictures from the Gulf coast. I was able to follow the progress of the storm minute by minute.
Frankly, I was surprised that not one of Nashville's over-the-air broadcast stations.... not one of us.... offered live pictures from the Gulf coast as the storm made landfall around 2 AM.
I had to go to cable to get that.
If any of the 'broadcast stations' had shown the live coverage of the landfall as it happened, I feel certain every late night viewer in this area, not hooked to cable or satellite, would have been tuned to that channel.
I hope we all learned a lesson. I know we did here at Channel 4.
We should have broadcast the superb coverage our cable partner MSNBC was offering as the storm made landfall in the middle of the night.
Now, I must admit it was a bit unsettling to watch those reporters standing there live in 80 MPH winds. I kept thinking a giant 2x4 might come flying through the air any minute, or that someone would simply blow away.
And, for whatever it's worth, I looked up the phrase "hunker down" in the dictionary..... and it's not there! I don't know where it came from, but it has seemingly become indispensable in describing what people need to do when a big storm approaches.
_______________________________