The deadliest tornado outbreak in decades unfolded live on local television stations Wednesday across much of the Deep South — and, remarkably, some of the tornado touchdowns were shown live, as well.
Television meteorologists in Alabama, for instance, were able to show a powerful tornado approaching Tuscaloosa and Birmingham not just on Doppler radar, as most are accustomed to, but through live television cameras trained on the horizon. James Spann, a veteran of the ABC affiliate there, WBMA, was awestruck by the sight. And many of his viewers were, too.
In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Spann said that he thought that having live video of tornadoes — sometimes shot at close range by volunteer storm chasers — captured viewers’ attention in a way that radar images and government-issued tornado warnings could not. “If you can show a live tornado with a camera, there’s no doubt that people will react in a more urgent way,” he said.
After the storm, hundreds of viewers wrote on Mr. Spann’s Facebook page, where he has 55,000 connections, to thank him for the hours of nonstop live coverage. One woman wrote, “I have no doubt that you saved too many lives to count.”
Live video of tornado touchdowns is a relatively new phenomenon, one that has been made possible by extensive mobile access to the Internet. In Birmingham, WBMA recruits and trains volunteers to follow severe thunderstorms and act as spotters, complete with dashboard cameras linked via the Internet to the station.
When a devastating long-track tornado took apart neighborhoods in Tuscaloosa, there were at least five such volunteers in the field, Mr. Spann said. “They’re just like an extension of what we do,” he said.
The earliest live video of the tornado, he said, came from a volunteer about 30 miles southwest of Tuscaloosa, so viewers in more populated areas had ample warning about what was coming. But, he noted with sadness, “The truth is, even if you did everything you were supposed to do, unless you were in an underground bunker, you weren’t going to survive.”
The storm chasers in cars were supplemented on Wednesday by cameras, again linked up via the Internet, on top of buildings in cities and towns across central Alabama. Other stations in Birmingham that did not have access to WBMA’s cameras relied on traffic cameras and other sources of video.
Mark Prater, the chief meteorologist for WIAT, the CBS affiliate there, at one point stared at his monitor, apparently stunned, as the possibly mile-wide tornado passed in the distance of one traffic camera. He looked up and said, “It’s on the ground, and there’s just nothing we can do to stop it.”
Local stations in Atlanta and other television markets large and small interrupted programming for hours to cover the outbreak of tornadoes, as did the Weather Channel. But the major television networks seemed caught off guard, in part because many anchors and resources were in place in London for the royal wedding there.
On Friday, the networks struggled to strike a balance between the two stories.
Brian Williams, the anchor of “NBC Nightly News,” worriedly eyed a radar image of Tuscaloosa as he left New York for London on Wednesday evening. When he landed there seven hours later, “I saw the death toll. 83 and climbing,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “Before long, it was posted at 172.”
Mr. Williams wound up only spending three hours in London. He returned to the airport, flew back to New York and made plans to fly to Alabama after his newscast Thursday evening.
“For now, for us, for this story, one of us had to go back and lead a separate coverage team — as the death toll grows,” Mr. Williams wrote.
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