For most of the nation last weekend was a typical summer weekend of fun and frolic. Unfortunately for many residents of the Eastern seaboard it was nothing close to typical. Hurricane Irene hit the Eastern Carolina coast and inland communities with all the fury it was rumored to pack. Next Media’s Chris Mann found himself stationed in the heart of one of the worst hurricanes to hit his listening area in half a century, facing some of the most critical community issues of his radio career.
Chris “Hollywood” Mann
Chris “Hollywood” Mann is symbolic of many smaller market programmers…non-stop, hard working, understaffed, beyond multi-tasking, super commitment to his gig and dedicated to serving a community that has grown to love his radio station. Oh, and one other thing…working in a market that may get overlooked by national news coverage when it comes to natural disasters!
Although many of us along the eastern seaboard were inundated with an over-abundance of meteorological reports and updates regarding Hurricane Irene last weekend, projecting worse case scenarios for just about every area in its path, most of the national coverage dwelled on the major metros. Mann comments, “The news media was so fixated on the major cities, which didn’t end up being hit as bad as we were, but in North Carolina, this was the worst hurricane since Hurricane Bonnie of 1954. It was catastrophic in some areas. I don’t know that there was a lot being said about that out there. It was really bad. It hit as a Category II, moved down to a Category I, but lasted a long time and it didn’t downgrade from that at all through the duration. We’re talking about sustained 90 to 100mph winds for twelve hours in many parts of Eastern Carolina. This storm was huge, over 400 miles wide. When we have storms like this most of the severe damage is limited to the coast, but this one reached way inland and affected many communities.”
Given the fact that Chris Mann is a self described “country boy” from a small Virginia town, he thoroughly knew the mindset and culture of his listening constituency and vowed to serve his communities as best as he could given the drastic circumstances.
Mann offers, “The thing that makes WERO/BOB 93 3 so unique is it reaches three very different types of people in our tri-city market of Eastern Carolina with a TSA of 9,000 square miles. Jacksonville is all military families, Greenville is a very progressive college town and New Bern has more of a small town rural feel. Our goal is to understand, serve and know what’s important to the people in these three communities, and every small town and city in between the other three main cities.”
Well, during the weekend of 8/27 there was one common denominator throughout Eastern Carolina…survival. There was also one main objective for Chris Mann…communication. Mann remarks, “Our main goal as we prepared for the hurricane was ensuring that we could broadcast and stay on the air to disseminate emergency information to the public on an ongoing basis. In preparation for that we have two class C’s. WERO/BOB 93 3 is the LP1, lead EAS station, and the station we encourage listeners to tune into when they are leaving the Outer Banks, because by nature it was designed to serve the public interest for times like this. It’s a signal you can hear from Raleigh to the coast. The other class C is our Country station WRNS. Those are our main signals and we try keep them operational at all costs at all times. Part of our plan was to team up hand in hand with our TV News partner, News Channel 12 WCTI. We met with those guys and decided we needed to go wall to wall with them, so that we could report the information that they couldn’t report.”
The experience Chris Mann and some of his fellow employees were about to encounter was destined to leave an indelible impression among all concerned. What follows is a first hand account as related by a very passionate Chris Mann…
“In my entire career this was the most compelling radio I can remember. In preparation for Irene we were told the potential damage to expect would be severe due to the sustained winds and the duration of the storm. The eye was 150 miles wide! We had a plan we devised and executed in preparation for the storm. We had teams assembled at our back-up facility, which is where I was, about 60 miles inland, in the town of Kinston.
We had this back up emergency facility in case we had to shut down at our anchor location in New Bern. The storm hit landfall status and once it hit the coast it really hammered us. The eye came a shore and assaulted our entire listening area of 9,000 square miles. It just ravaged different parts of our metro. There’s going to be some areas in some counties that will be without power for quite awhile. There’s major structural damage to houses and businesses.
At 3pm Friday afternoon we joined our Next Media News partners in all of our clusters of stations with live coverage. As the power continued to go out, (500,000 people lost power from Raleigh to the Coast), our TV affiliate transformed their operation from a visual to more of an auditory radio delivered operation. Eventually they had to evacuate our New Bern studios because of the probability of flooding, so they deferred coverage to us in Kinston where we had a team of four people live on the air and we became the lifeline!
How about that? Low tech terrestrial radio became the lifeline to millions of people in a day that everything is so high tech. These people couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t use their cell phones. They had no other way of getting emergency info except from the radio.
We were wall to wall coverage from 3pm on Friday to 12 noon on Sunday. When we were broadcasting wall to wall we linked all the Next Media stations together as one station. We have 400,000 people in our metro, but our TSA is one million. We felt a responsibility to each and every one of them. We sent most of our air talent home and worked with a skeleton crew. It was me,Tommy Garrett (the PD of our Country station), engineer Al Cannon and our utility guy Ed Hawkins helping out at the Kinston facility.
There was one point when the signal started breaking up and I’m on the air with the Tommy and we had generator power strung together. We had no lights, the ceiling was leaking and here we are doing real radio making sure the mic’s were on. It wasn’t polished, but that’s what made it real and it comforted people because we were experiencing the same things they were and we tried to convey that.
In our New Bern studio we had a team that consisted of GM Larry Weiss, Rock PD Wes Styles, Sales Manager Bob Young and part-timer Helen Harvey. They manned the entire facility. It was these eight people at both facilities who were willing to endure and stay up for two days to ensure that we stayed on the air to keep the communication and information flowing. It’s quite a testament to the teamwork of our crew.
I was proud that our team could provide that critical information. None of us slept for 48 hours. It’s ironic how the TV station values our relationship even more now because typically with this type of coverage your TV partner becomes the lifeline to the community. But we actually became their lifeline because they were off the air for hours. In fact, the only way we were able to get their signal across was by my cell phone. I had my cell phone patched into their audio and we had a microphone down to the speaker of my phone for several hours. That’s the only way hundreds of thousands of people were able to get information from that facility.
In the aftermath it’s all about cleanup, getting power back to people and restoring peoples’ lives. The storm’s affects in Eastern Carolina were a lot more catastrophic than people realize. It did a lot of damage and we’re very fortunate that it wasn’t even worse. With all the national news focus on the major metro markets I don’t know that the country knew how bad this really hit our areas and the devastating consequences. As far as mass damage and adversely affecting peoples’ lives, this was one of the worst experiences ever for many of our communities.
I’ve never been part of something where the emails and Facebook messages we received were so heartfelt from the community thanking us. I’ve also never witnessed radio impacting peoples’ lives to this extent before.
I’ve always thought our main goal is to serve the public’s best interest and above anything else, any radio or programming we can do to help protect the public should be our #1 priority. It was one of the top radio moments of my career as far as emotional impact and touching peoples’ lives. You never want to see people get hurt or see property destruction, but it did trigger a sense of urgency that I rarely have felt before. There’s definitely a tremendous sense of adrenalin and you go into a completely different mode. You go into survival mode, knowing that radio is the last link to rely on. It’s a surreal experience and in the end you realize what you did and can’t believe you just did it.
It was a rewarding experience to see how terrestrial radio is still extremely relevant. When all the new technology goes down there’s nothing there except radio. It proves that in a world that’s so fast paced and high tech heavy that when times get tough the old standbys are still the most important things.”
[eQB Content by Fred Deane]
