The devastating weather that hit the Northeast part of the country this summer has shaken Bob Quick’s faith in radio. In this week’s Programming To Win column, Quick recounts his reaction to the major flooding in his town earlier this month and how local radio covered the floods. Did other media do a better job of instantaneous coverage? And how can radio improve in such situations?
Bob Quick
By Bob Quick
I’ve loved radio since I was 10 years old.
Decided to be a DJ at the age of 12 because Dr. Johnny Fever was so cool on WKRP.
Spent thousands of dollars to go to a highly respected college to study RADIO…money I’m still paying back.
Made a nice living in the business for almost 25 years.
But after recent events, I’ve realized radio has even lost me.
Like you, I’m sick of reading about the “death of radio.” While I agree, we’ve never faced a tougher challenge as an industry…I believed that we were strong enough to overcome those challenges.
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 was a wake up call…and the days that followed brought a sobering discovery.
I too have been lost to the “on-demand” nature of media reality in 2011.
I live in a little town in New York on the border of Pennsylvania. No one in their right mind would have thought a tropical storm that originated in the Gulf of Mexico could do so much damage in the Northeast. After all, it was just days before that Hurricane Irene came though and all she did was dampen us. (Don’t tell that to the folks in New Jersey and Connecticut.)
Lee was different. He stalled over Tioga and Broome County in New York and Bradford and Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania. For close to a 24 hour period, Lee dumped rain at a rate of a half an inch an hour in the heaviest hit areas.
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011 was the very first day of school for my little Kindergartner. In fact, Mom and Dad had to go to orientation that day, as well. We all got soaked to the skin just walking to the building from the parking lot. At that point, Lee had been raining hard on the area for about 6 hours.
Afterword, we had lunch, ran some errands and some roads were already closing that afternoon in the “low-lying areas”. That evening we heard that this could be pretty bad. My wife asked, should we move our valuables upstairs from the basement. We agreed, get the stuff up stairs. This area did have a major flood in 2006, before we moved here, but our home didn’t get wet then…we’re almost a half mile from the river.
Two hours later, our basement was cleared out and we were dead tired from the work. It was 11pm and time to call it a night.
We awoke to the sound of silence at midnight…that was the last time we would have power until Monday in the late evening. Five Days…no electricity.
Thursday morning, I woke up early, thinking it would take a little longer to get my son to school and get my day going. I threw on some clothes to go outside and see what we were facing.
The river had us blocked in on all three sides, and was still rising. The mighty Susquehanna River now flowed just over 150 yards from my home. A little more than a football field. My whole neighborhood was stranded in our own homes.
Then we lost running water…that didn’t return until Sunday. Four days…you forget how nice a hot shower feels. And the convenience of flush toilets.
But, luckily we had no flooding in our home. Got a little seepage at the foundation in the finished basement from water running so hard, and so fast, and for so long, off our roof with nowhere to go. But, a damp carpet is a small inconvenience compared to the thousands of folks who lost everything.
I must say, all in all, radio did do a great job covering the disaster. Especially the small, locally owned station in one of the hardest hit areas. They lost their studios to the flood, but were on the air and broadcasting from a makeshift, mobile studio. Live and local, small market radio at its finest.
That’s not to say that the Big “C’s” didn’t do a good job. They did. I personally know folks in both buildings worked really hard under the most stressful of situations.
But, Thursday morning, I’m not so sure I would have been doing anything other than storm coverage. There were some that stuck to format as best they could with their little contests and celebrity news…interrupted by storm news every so often, if you were lucky enough to catch it.
And there’s the rub…
I know there were thousands affected by the flood. There were probably more unaffected. But wouldn’t you think that even the ones unaffected would be hanging on your every word about what was happening…right now, wanting local emergency information?
It’s a worrisome and chaotic time when faced with disaster. And I found myself, the self proclaimed, radio junkie since the age of 10, going to my cell phone for information on the weather, emergency status updates on the mobile web, reading evacuation notices from local emergency management Twitter feeds, looking at pictures of the flooding on facebook. And it never failed me.
I had to have the information delivered to me on-demand, when I wanted it. Not after the next song or next commercial break…RIGHT NOW!
We’ve dropped the ball as an industry, but its not too late. We can do all this. We have websites, Twitter and Facebook accounts and the creative and dynamic people to run it all…including broadcasting on our own airwaves.
We just can’t lose sight of why we have the licenses in the first place…“to serve the public trust.”
Bob Quick, the self-proclaimed radio junkie from the age of 10, is an expert in making your station be the local “go-to” information and entertainment source. You can contact him at 706-358-9103 or at bob@quickradioconsulting.com.
