Friday, December 01, 2006

Breaking: Tornado hits Mountaintop, TL sleeps

The TL reaffirms its place at the kiddie table by ignoring the alleged tornado that blew in all the windows at the Mr. Z's, blew off the roof at the Crestwood High School gym, and closed Route 309. As of 11 p.m., The CV has an OK story and one (1) photo. The TL didn't have dick. The Times-Tribune had some shitty brief slugged "County EMA not expecting flooding."

WNEP did the best on the broadcast Web sites, with a (small) slide show of viewer-submitted photos, some video from Mr. Z's and an OK story. WBRE (come on, Agent Andy!) had nothing. WYOU had nothing. Come on, fellows! THE WEATHER CHANNEL is leading with "tornado in Luzerne, Pa." and NEPAites across the land are going to your Web sites. Right now. Fuckin' amateurs.

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not sure what you are talking about. I saw a breaking news item on the TL Web site about the tornado at 7 p.m. while all the chaos was still going on. The Web site also had stuff today. How does that put them at the kiddie table?

NEPAmedia said...

They came around with one story and two photos on the Web site this morning, a middling effort. As for the brief last night, it was hard to find, seven grafs long, and clearly a phoner. The newsaper should do better.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, just like you posted an announcement of Lyndall Stout's wedding six months after it happened. Those highly respected bloggers should do better.....;-)

Anonymous said...

An excerpt from an AP report:
In Luzerne County, the storm cut power to Mountain Top and ripped the roof of at least one house. Windows of Mr. Z's Food Mart on Route 309 in Mountain Top were blown out and ceiling tiles ripped off, leaving about a half-dozen people with minor injuries, fire officials said.
``The windows were shaking and they just exploded. Everybody was screaming,'' said cashier Breanne Ralston, 17, who ducked under the register for cover. She said she saw a manager with blood all over his face from flying glass.
Chief Pete Kohl of the Mountain Top Hose Co. said four air handlers on the roof were toppled over and a portion of the roof was torn off.
Resident Carol Lada, 46, along with her husband and two teenage children, took refuge under their basement stairs.
``We were terrified,'' she said. ``It was like that freight train that they say you hear. That's what it sounded like.''

Anonymous said...

If you were a real journalist, you would be careful about throwing the word tornado around. There was no determination that the storm was a tornado as of Saturday.

Anonymous said...

i beleive i read "alleged tornado"

and as far as WNEP and the other two "kiddie stations" as i like to call em, deosn't surprise me. thats what it's like when you are mismanaged top to bottom. that, and when i went to put my directtv on 28/22 to see if they had anything, the signal was lost! and it's still lost to this hour, a day later! technical difficulties...

Anonymous said...

Friday night's online storm coverage shows why the local papers haven't lately looked at a calendar and realized it's the 21st century. Local newsrooms operate with skeleton crews Friday through Sunday nights -- most likely each paper had one reporter and one photog on duty (and the photog was probably covering sports). More importantly, local papers continue to think only about gathering news to put on the printed page. Posting quality coverage on the net is nearly impossible for a news organization that does not staff an online journalist and/or editor for the entire news cycle. When all hell breaks loose, no reader is going to wait 14 hours for the paper to be thrown at their front door.

Anonymous said...

Where was Moses when the lights went out? IN THE DARK!

Maybe I missed something while I was missing something--but from here in Scranton, on cable and over the air, it looked to me as if ALL the stations that have towers on Penobscot Mountain were dark for extended periods--all but WNEP.

Sounds like a power outage--not mismanagement, 1:33PM (unless God is punishing Nexstar on general principles).

Come to think of it, if WNEP was the only one on the air, maybe they've got emergency power up there, and maybe that speaks to effective planning. That's be a news story, but we'll never know. The papers don't cover broadcasting as a business, only as gossip.

Talk about in the dark and powerless.

Anonymous said...

I don't give a fuck.

Anonymous said...

I heard a reference to "F-2 tornado" on one of the local "newscasts" tonight. Hey, show me the proof? Or, more likely, this is just puffery designed to make gullible viewers think that one station's weather gurus are more on the ball than the competitor's. Bunk. I say again, show us the proof for this statement. Then I'll pull the word "puffery."

Anonymous said...

"I say again, show us the proof for this statement. Then I'll pull the word 'puffery.'"

9:21 PM


Uh, does an official designation by the National Weather Service count?

How do I know? I read it in the papers (usually a totally unreliable source, but the NWS guy was quoted by name).

How 'bout you shove that "puffery" crack up your ass?

Anonymous said...

"Dave Nicosia, warning coordinator meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Binghamton, N.Y., said the tornado reached a F2 at its peak near Mr. Z’s, where the winds reached 120 mph. The rest of the tornado was an F1, reaching winds of 70 to 90 mph."
--Times Leader, 12/03

Anonymous said...

9:21 PM had it asbsolutely right! There was NO tornado. It was all a publicity stunt cooked up by the TV stations.

And it was expensive! Know how much money it cost to topple all those trees? And what do you think it cost the set designers to blow out all the windows at Mr. Z's? And a lot of bribe money had to go to Crestwood school officials to allow the TV stations to tear off big chunks of the roof.

Want to try guessing how much was spent to bring in union actors to play tearful residents to clean up the pretend mess?

A major piece of puffery, alright.

Anonymous said...

WNEP has generators on Penobscot and at the station. The generator on the mountain kicked over when PPL went down, providing sufficient power for a signal and tower lights.

WBRE has a generator on Penobsoct, BUT, it malfunctioned and was unable to make the switch. Initially, some thought it was out of gas... draw your own conclusions on that one. WBRE does not have a generator in downtown Wilkes-Barre. If power is cut to that area, WBRE will be screwed- again.

WYOU--- nothing.

Apparently WNEP has a fool-proof plan... generators on both ends, rake in ALL viewers from WBRE and WYOU's blunders.

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