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Mobile tornado impacting radio?

D

Doctor_Technical

Reports coming in that a tornado has hit Mobile near Dauphin Street east of I-65. I hope our radio friends over there are OK -- early damage reports are mighty close to where the Cumulus offices are located, plus WZEW is down the road.

Anyone in the Mobile area that can report? Zach are you OK?
 
Nasty pictures of the damage in Mobile on all the local TV stations. The storm destroyed the entire inventory of the Mercedes dealership... over 100 new German cars. I know business owners in the main area of destruction, but I haven't spoken to any of them yet. The residential areas hit appear to be in the hood.

I haven't heard any reports of damage in Baldwin county, so Zach should be just fine. The Pensacola area got lucky, apparently all the radar reported circulation was over water or uninhabited forests and military property. No people reported significant damage or seeing funnel clouds (as of a 10AM report I heard from Emergency Management). I lost some tree limbs, a plastic snow man, and a clothes line to this morning's storm. So Mobile is the only story here. As the locals would say, "they got tore up."
 
I'm OK, aside from being kept up all morning by the weather radio alarm going off constantly. ;) Thank you for thinking of me!

I didn't think to check the radio, but the TV side of things was interesting to watch. I'm from Birmingham originally wherre they've got the Spann man on ABC 33/40, sort of the weatherman's weatherman when it comes to storm coverage, so seeing how the local TV stations handled this tornado was amusing and slightly depressing.

WEAR was the only station doing coverage when the warning first came up, but they went back to regular news programming while the tornado was actually on the ground. They were talking about radio stations removing some Christmas songs with lyrics that might make people think of the Sandy Hook shooting and talking about the Kardashians or some crap during the event.

The first Mobile station I saw with coverage was Local 15, but I really don't like that female meteorologist they have. Her tracking skills were lagging and the information the station passed on was sketchy. I wound up mostly watching WALA since they seemed to actually be the most "with it" as to what was happening, but they too kept tracking storms well after the NWS would cancel warnings, forgetting new ones that impacting areas closer to Mobile.

Alan Sealls actually came in early for WKRG, but they were more interested in showing their silly "tornado warning means a tornado is likely or on the ground" graphic rather than radar analysis. Their news operation had the most pictures and viewer feedback early on, though. OTA, their station is the most dropout prone (despite having 100% signal) so I don't watch them much.

Did any of the local stations actually do any live and local coverage besides Sean Sullivan on 106.5?
 
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