“It could have been worse.” — Sunset Hills mayor Bill Nolan
A state of emergency was declared on New Years Eve by Missouri Governor Jay Nixon after a strong storm rushed across center and eastern Missouri, taking apart chunks of South St. Louis County and killing one person in Rolla. Afterward, emergency crews cleaned up the mess, a few people found new shelter for the night and the local news networks patted themselves on the back and found ways to stay on the air as long as possible. Hours later the little weather map in the corner had long since lost its bright red and yellow colors, but they pressed on, telling everyone how important going to the basement was while showing the same clip of firefighters carrying an old lady over and over again. Also did you know a fence got knocked over? Well. You missed it buddy. Crazy stuff. Oh and you’ve probably never seen a fire truck, but we have! They showed us like 20. News like this is really important.
We watched KSDK’s aftermath coverage so you didn’t have too…and it’s the last time we do something like that again. Horrible. Really horrible.
This was a local news circle jerk like we hadn’t seen in some time. Yes, you have to do storm coverage so that people know what to do, but do you really need to send a reporter to a hotel to check on how many people are checking in because of the storms…and if you really felt that was a good use of manpower, do you really need to report that only one person checked in?! That is pointless information. Wasn’t even worth the time it took to say that! Just show the blown over cars, have a scroller on the bottom for shelter information and then get back to airing Wheel of Fortune or whatever is supposed to be on at 4:30p on a weekday.
Look, serious shit came out of the sky Friday. People are hurting and stuff is broken all over the place, so lengthy news coverage isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but if that’s the case, then make the coverage worthwhile. When you have reporters creeping around hotels to accost people in the chance that one of them is there because they lost their house, while your anchor mumbles about a bar’s fence being broken, it looks like you’re just stalling for time while you rack up the weather bar advertisement money.
Hope everyone is ok though. The only think KSDK would tell me is that the one old lady was saved.