Another Brick in the Eyewall
The flurry of newsroom activity Friday afternoon and into the evening grew in proportion to strengthening storm outside as Hurricane Rita ground her way ashore. Reporters, photographers and editors worked frantically to be a live news organization through our web site: www.beaumontenterprise.com.
What all we did is a blur now, but we had a plan.
We had a reporter stationed to ride it out with the command center folks in a nearby building, home to the energy company, Entergy. We had a reporter at the Port of Beaumont aboard the USS Cape Vincent, this mammoth ship used to transport, among other things, heavy military equipment to Iraq. This ship is one of the world's largest. They had moved all the emergency crews and their equipment over there. We had a reporter with the Orange County emergency folks, who were hunkered down north of the county, which was supposed go under water.We had a reporter about 45 miles to the north.We had folks set up a news desk at the Houston Chronicle to act as an auxiliary newsroom in case we got cut off. We had folks all the way up as far north as Tyler, still reporting on the exodus struggles.We had a reporter and a photographer on the east side of where the storm was expected to hit. We hoped all this planning and preparation would result in news getting out and onto our web site.
Watching Hurricane Rita gain intensity was interesting. The breeze grew stiff and constant by noon. Bands of rain and wind moved through, followed by relative calm and then an even stronger band. Finally, there was sustained wind of tropical-storm force but not much rain. An alarming forecast said the storm could park over us, like Tropical Storm Allison did in 2001, dumping a fantastic amount of rain and causing catastrophic flooding throughout Southeast Texas. Mercifully, the storm ultimately picked up speed and moved on through.
Whoever designed our building made it perfect for hurricane watching. We stood at the garage mouth, only feet away from the action, and watched Rita gradually unveil her awesome might.
There are some funny things to note about our storm preparation at the newspaper.
They waited until the last minute to order portable toilets, knowing water service likely would be cut off. But the toilets never came, because the suppliers fled.
Some Enterprise employees set out on a recon mission for portable toilets. Yes, we decided to steal toilets, from construction sites or wherever. We did the can suppliers a favor. Any untethered john outside likely would fly away and dump crap all over the place. We managed to grab two of them and set them up near the pressroom of our building. We probably saved some poor property owner from coming home to find a poop-encrusted Port O Can sticking out of his pretty bay window.
Meanwhile, newsroom skylights became a concern a day earlier, but apparently they couldn't be boarded up, so to protect them, maintenance workers used duct tape to anchor paper-thin plastic sheets, like Glad Wrap or something, over them. Within hours - a full day before the storm - a gentle breeze had blown it all away.
Downstairs, I noticed that they'd taped the executive office windows. However, they put the tape on the outside. Did they really think the tape would hold up under the predicted 150 mph wind gusts and 20 inches of blinding rain for more than 16 hours?
During the afternoon on storm day, some twinky representing Chili's, Johnny Carino's and other restaurants whose names I didn't catch called and said we needed to get into the paper how their employees could get assistance. I told her to post it on her web site. I don't think the 20-something Chili's waitresses, waiters and cooks are among our most loyal subscribers.
The Red Cross e-mailed a news release bragging about the great shelters set up in sprinkle-whipped Houston. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department sent an urgent, all-caps news release declaring that a bunch of state parks would be closed until further notice. Yeah, all anyone could think about right then was getting out there into the great outdoors.
It started to drizzle about 5 p.m., with not-very-scary tropical storm winds blowing. An hour later, a slight lashing began. I moved all my food, clothes and sleeping stuff to some guy's office downstairs. The office has it's own thermostat and a fan, so I thought I was set.
Then the storm really started lashing. It was amusing to see all the thrill-seeking journalists from CNN, the AP and whatnot, wearing their khaki Oshkosh storm-assault outfits with 10,000 pockets. They hung out at garage entrance, waiting for the storm to grow worse before they headed out to take some dramatic footage/photos.
By then, our coverage had turned nto a bit of a logistical nightmare. Lots of confusion and out-of-pocket reports.
The storm grew exponentially from there. The power company warned of outages around 6:30 p.m. Our adrenaline was pumping. People grew edgy, and conversations among us grew tense.
Then came a small morale booster, sent out by the New York Times News Service over the national wire:
It was 9:29 p.m. when hurricane-force winds reached downtown Beaumont, and it was nothing like I'd ever seen, and I was in Houston in 1983 when Hurricane Alicia, a Category 3 storm, blasted through. Rita went to town like a mighty firehose - with seven hours to go before the storm's peak. In the newsroom, the windows appeared to be breathing, so we ran away to another floor.
An hour later, however, the outside media hanging out in our building still seemed unimpressed. There were all kinds of TV folks doing wobbly legged standups out in a nearby parking lot.
That didn't last long.
But the aforementioned devastated Glad Bag skylight protection ultimately met an entertaining fate. A big-ass chunk of it, like 30 feet long, got wrapped around a street light across the street from the garage mouth and was madly flapping in the wind. A nearby streetlight provided nice lighting for the TV crews, who were all filming it to illustrate wind ferocity. The TV crews continued live broadcasts, including FOX News from our parking lot. Some dope from the Dallas Morning News rode around on a bicycle.
At about 11:30 p.m., we lost landline telephones and Internet access, so we used cell phones to dictate stories to our desk at the Chronicle, where they could update our web site. An hour or so later, it was clear the storm was about to be here. I wanted to catch the eyewall come through, so I crawled under a downstairs desk and tried to sleep, but a barking dog in a nearby room kept me from doing so. Lots of employees brought pets up to work. It was cute, but it later became an irritating hassle. One cat disappeared, and we've heard it meowing several times since then, trapped somewhere inside the building.
At 1:30 p.m., the power died, so I gave up on sleeping, grabbed a couple of beers out of my cooler and went down to the garage mouth to watch the apocalypse roll in.
Work for the day was over.
What all we did is a blur now, but we had a plan.
We had a reporter stationed to ride it out with the command center folks in a nearby building, home to the energy company, Entergy. We had a reporter at the Port of Beaumont aboard the USS Cape Vincent, this mammoth ship used to transport, among other things, heavy military equipment to Iraq. This ship is one of the world's largest. They had moved all the emergency crews and their equipment over there. We had a reporter with the Orange County emergency folks, who were hunkered down north of the county, which was supposed go under water.We had a reporter about 45 miles to the north.We had folks set up a news desk at the Houston Chronicle to act as an auxiliary newsroom in case we got cut off. We had folks all the way up as far north as Tyler, still reporting on the exodus struggles.We had a reporter and a photographer on the east side of where the storm was expected to hit. We hoped all this planning and preparation would result in news getting out and onto our web site.
Watching Hurricane Rita gain intensity was interesting. The breeze grew stiff and constant by noon. Bands of rain and wind moved through, followed by relative calm and then an even stronger band. Finally, there was sustained wind of tropical-storm force but not much rain. An alarming forecast said the storm could park over us, like Tropical Storm Allison did in 2001, dumping a fantastic amount of rain and causing catastrophic flooding throughout Southeast Texas. Mercifully, the storm ultimately picked up speed and moved on through.
Whoever designed our building made it perfect for hurricane watching. We stood at the garage mouth, only feet away from the action, and watched Rita gradually unveil her awesome might.
There are some funny things to note about our storm preparation at the newspaper.
They waited until the last minute to order portable toilets, knowing water service likely would be cut off. But the toilets never came, because the suppliers fled.
Some Enterprise employees set out on a recon mission for portable toilets. Yes, we decided to steal toilets, from construction sites or wherever. We did the can suppliers a favor. Any untethered john outside likely would fly away and dump crap all over the place. We managed to grab two of them and set them up near the pressroom of our building. We probably saved some poor property owner from coming home to find a poop-encrusted Port O Can sticking out of his pretty bay window.
Meanwhile, newsroom skylights became a concern a day earlier, but apparently they couldn't be boarded up, so to protect them, maintenance workers used duct tape to anchor paper-thin plastic sheets, like Glad Wrap or something, over them. Within hours - a full day before the storm - a gentle breeze had blown it all away.
Downstairs, I noticed that they'd taped the executive office windows. However, they put the tape on the outside. Did they really think the tape would hold up under the predicted 150 mph wind gusts and 20 inches of blinding rain for more than 16 hours?
During the afternoon on storm day, some twinky representing Chili's, Johnny Carino's and other restaurants whose names I didn't catch called and said we needed to get into the paper how their employees could get assistance. I told her to post it on her web site. I don't think the 20-something Chili's waitresses, waiters and cooks are among our most loyal subscribers.
The Red Cross e-mailed a news release bragging about the great shelters set up in sprinkle-whipped Houston. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department sent an urgent, all-caps news release declaring that a bunch of state parks would be closed until further notice. Yeah, all anyone could think about right then was getting out there into the great outdoors.
It started to drizzle about 5 p.m., with not-very-scary tropical storm winds blowing. An hour later, a slight lashing began. I moved all my food, clothes and sleeping stuff to some guy's office downstairs. The office has it's own thermostat and a fan, so I thought I was set.
Then the storm really started lashing. It was amusing to see all the thrill-seeking journalists from CNN, the AP and whatnot, wearing their khaki Oshkosh storm-assault outfits with 10,000 pockets. They hung out at garage entrance, waiting for the storm to grow worse before they headed out to take some dramatic footage/photos.
By then, our coverage had turned nto a bit of a logistical nightmare. Lots of confusion and out-of-pocket reports.
The storm grew exponentially from there. The power company warned of outages around 6:30 p.m. Our adrenaline was pumping. People grew edgy, and conversations among us grew tense.
Then came a small morale booster, sent out by the New York Times News Service over the national wire:
BC-RITA-PARTNERS-ADVISORY-NYT Editors, we
commend to your attention storm coverage from NewYork Times News Service partner
news organizations, includingHearst Newspapers and Cox News Service, but
especially articlesfrom The Houston Chronicle and The Beaumont Enterprise, two
Hearstpapers in the path of Hurricane Rita. Their unique
perspectives lend an authenticity to storm stories that cannot be matched.
It was 9:29 p.m. when hurricane-force winds reached downtown Beaumont, and it was nothing like I'd ever seen, and I was in Houston in 1983 when Hurricane Alicia, a Category 3 storm, blasted through. Rita went to town like a mighty firehose - with seven hours to go before the storm's peak. In the newsroom, the windows appeared to be breathing, so we ran away to another floor.
An hour later, however, the outside media hanging out in our building still seemed unimpressed. There were all kinds of TV folks doing wobbly legged standups out in a nearby parking lot.
That didn't last long.
But the aforementioned devastated Glad Bag skylight protection ultimately met an entertaining fate. A big-ass chunk of it, like 30 feet long, got wrapped around a street light across the street from the garage mouth and was madly flapping in the wind. A nearby streetlight provided nice lighting for the TV crews, who were all filming it to illustrate wind ferocity. The TV crews continued live broadcasts, including FOX News from our parking lot. Some dope from the Dallas Morning News rode around on a bicycle.
At about 11:30 p.m., we lost landline telephones and Internet access, so we used cell phones to dictate stories to our desk at the Chronicle, where they could update our web site. An hour or so later, it was clear the storm was about to be here. I wanted to catch the eyewall come through, so I crawled under a downstairs desk and tried to sleep, but a barking dog in a nearby room kept me from doing so. Lots of employees brought pets up to work. It was cute, but it later became an irritating hassle. One cat disappeared, and we've heard it meowing several times since then, trapped somewhere inside the building.
At 1:30 p.m., the power died, so I gave up on sleeping, grabbed a couple of beers out of my cooler and went down to the garage mouth to watch the apocalypse roll in.
Work for the day was over.
posted by Brian Pearson at 2:50 PM
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