After getting up at 1am to start my typical shift handling TRIAD weather for the early morning shift Friday, I had been assigned to cover the mid-day shift for Charlotte after I finished up with my Greensboro obligations. You will read more about "why" in just a moment...
I knew Jeff Crum would be in shortly after noon as he had been assigned the double-duty of evenings for both Charlotte and TRIAD from 5pm Friday onward (again, more on "why" in a moment). He called Monte Montello to be on stand-by for TRIAD, given the severe threats nearby. Monte wisely came on in to the station, knowing it's better to be at the studio just in case weather quickly turns for the worse. Good thing he did, too...
I pored over copious model information and data discussions through 1130a, feeling the severe threat would stay south enough. The tapes I had cut were clear in the threat for thunder and 'adjusting' tornado watch boxes just to our south...but close to 1p Charlotte was added to the tornado watch box. Jeff Crum scrambled to get on with the new information, and though storms were well down in South Carolina, they were moving NE at 32-38 knots, with rotation in some cells.
late afternoon storm line; pink is old tornado warning, red is T-storm (click on any picture to enlarge it)Now for the "why". I should fill you in that when News 14 started up the TRIAD operations this past November, to tie in with News 14 Raleigh and News 14 Charlotte, the intentions were well-meaning: in short, to tie in news and weather coverage around the Carolinas exclusively for Time-Warner customers.
News operations ain't cheap. New news operations require mass capital. Money is tight for almost all companies, so no surprise there. Raleigh launched with 4 full-time meteorologists. Charlotte launched with 4 full-time meteorologists (I was one of them). Greensboro/TRIAD launched with...just 2 full-time meteorologists.
We do weather 6 times an hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Necessarily we do a mix of live and taped shows, going live when the weather becomes threatening and only going to tape once the threat is clearly gone. Just what we do...makes for some looooong days and hard work, but it is satisfying. "Weather On The Ones" is the flagship for News 14, hands down.
What's not satisfying, and downright infuriating, is our 'management's decision' to understaff the TRIAD weather office and have all 10 of us News 14 meteorologists play a sort of roulette to fill in the 'open' mid-day and evening shifts as they occur...that means we all do some sort of extra work almost every week; we either are responsible for covering two markets at once, or pulling back to back shifts, first in one market and then in another. It became especially tough this past fall with Tara Lane out on 3-month maternity leave, with Matthew East out 3 weeks simultaneously on paternity leave, not to mention someone's day off or sick days...we had to go far above and beyond the call of duty over a long haul for no compensation whatsoever, no extra pay, no time off. Believe it or not, no Christmas gift or bonus, and not even a Christmas card...nada, zip, zilch.
Had TRIAD been properly staffed weather-wise, we would have had some relief. We were also aware that if severe weather hit, our Achille's Heel would be exposed as we would lack sufficient manpower to do the job like we once did it. We have been asked consistently to do more for less, and with less support from the top. The saving grace? They're ain't one weak link in our team of News 14 meteorologists: all are competent, smart, hard-working, and excellent at what each does.
Coming full circle, while we got critical information on the air, it was somewhat compromised and a bit delayed simply by this overlapping of gaps, and tied in with this new super-duper auto-ad-inserting droid Jeff Crum calls THE ROCK (click link for his write-up on it). When there were new tornado warnings in the market, 3 times Jeff could NOT immediately go "live" on-air because...get this...we were in a commercial break. Nope, can't cut in on 'em. Nope, can't run a weather crawl across the bottom over 'em. Nope, even with a life threatening event at hand, viewers and meteorologists had to hear about sure-fire systems to lose weight and where we can get the best deal on a used car. Pathetic, plain and simple. Some things need to change. Let's hope they do. Soon.
Back to the storms...some good news at home is that it looks like I've rounded the bend in getting my computer system up and going...still have myriad software programs I have to reload for my video/audio recording, photography editing, and weather analysis stuff...and I had JUST reloaded my Gibson Ridge Level 3 radar and was able to save some radar grabs from yesterday afternoon. The nature of the cells were that once a tornado warning was issued, the storms quickly dissipated within 10 minutes or so, only to reboil somewhere else in the line. Here is the warning and cell in Gaston County, just west of Charlotte:
And here is the same time-grab, reframed a little, showing the Relative Velocity I reading from the storm...the red-green showing winds going in opposite direction from the radar beam, and the bright red circle approximate to the radar-indicated funnel...
The National Weather Service in Greenville-Spartanburg will be assessing any damages from yesterday...just thought you might like seeing some things I see, and also better understand how we do our best to keep you covered in the wacky world of weather at News 14, even with a few cards stacked against us...
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