TV Storm Surge and the Demanding Life of a \'Statesman\' Editor

Tag : TV Blanket

With a storm of biblical proportions barreling toward AustinWednesday night, the National Weather Service triggered the emergency alert system to warn TV viewers of loomingdanger. Flee to your closets! Toss a blanket over your head! Turnoff Real World , and focus, dumbass! All those screeching "tests of the emergencybroadcasting system" in the middle of the night were paying off.The EAS was on the job, the lifeline of communication betweenauthorities and the populace in the most dangerous of times,established for just this type of emergency.
Except, when the EAS broke into programming on Wednes­daynight, some Time Warner Cable subscribers were told to tune to Channel 44 to find an audio feedwith information deemed crucial by the federal system.Unfortunately, when they tuned to Channel 44, they found nothingbut snow and dead air, which may not have been helpful for AuntieEm and the gang deciding whether or not to head to the applecellar.
As it turns out, several months ago Time Warner moved the localweather channel from Channel 44 to the "digital tier" on Channel355, which is available only to customers with a cable box.Customers who plug the cable directly into a TV were supposed to betold to go to News 8, the local cable news channel.
Time Warner is responsible for generating the text crawl, not theNational Weather Service. "Once we put out the warning ... it's notup to us how it is displayed," said Paul Yura, warning coordinationmeteorologist for the National Weather Ser­vice's area office.Time Warner spokesman Roger Heaney said the problem was a"technical glitch" that affected some customers without digitalboxes, and it has been corrected. He suggested it may have beenlocalized to a neighborhood, but viewers in both East and WestAustin saw the same message.
Heaney also said the cable company didn't receive a single callabout the wrong message, which may say something about interest inthe emergency alert system. The only complaints, he said, were thatthe announcements were "too loud."
The storm, described by some as one of the worst in 20 years, was agift from the Dark Lord for local TV news operations, which were inthe midst of the key May sweeps period.
As the night progressed and the reported size of the hail grew fromquarters and golf balls to the size of ripe grapefruits, thestations dumped network programming and went to full weathercoverage, eager to show off their weather toys. For NBC affiliate KXAN , that meant leaving one of the final episodes of Law & Order . "When you're in a tornado warning, there is no issue," said KXANGeneral Manager Eric Lassberg. The only station not in full stormcoverage at 9pm was CBS affiliate KEYE , which apparently deemed CSI: New York more important than reports of winds powerful enough to uproottrees. (KEYE managers didn't return calls seeking comment.)