Hurricane Dolly

As long as the electricity is still on, I thought I'd write a little about the hurricane. So far, it hasn't been any worse than a typical springtime storm. But the television tells us that it will soon get more exciting. I've been watching three channels for hurricane news: KRGV Channel 5, The Weather Channel, and CNN. Channel 23 is feeding NBC programming. KRGV and KGBT have interrupted network prograqmming and have gone to continuous storm coverage. On to the reviews:

KRGV: Tim Smith, the Dean of Valley Wearthermen, is a calm, professional presence reassuring everyone that they will get through this. He leads a team of much younger and less-experienced meterologists and reporters. KRGV, like all the national stations, puts reporters outside in rain slickers and makes them talk while being rained on and blown about like rag dolls.

One reporter, stationed at Port Mansfield, appears to be nervous and at a loss for words, which is bad because when you're on camera in front of a bay in a hurricane, words are about all you have left. I felt bad for him because I couldn't have done any better, but his evident discomfort and tripping over his own tongue got to be too much for me to watch, so I changed to The Weather Channel (TWC).

TWC: The absolute leaders in weather programming. What ESPN is to sports, TWC is to weather. They have polished their art to such a high state that they can repeat the same information ten times an hour, and make it endlessly interesting every time. By interesting I mean the same way statistics are interesting to a fantasy football player. There has to be a bit of fanaticism on the viewer's part to keep tuned to TWC for hours on end.

TWC has stationed reporters in Brownsville and the Island. The broadcast is high definition and it really makes a difference. Jim Cantore, the guy stationed on the Island, is a meteorologist and it shows in his reporting. He notices things that others do not. For instance, last hour he talked about how the ocean seemed to be retreating, but that he had seen this kind of thing before and it had something to do with the water gathering offshore before coming in as a storm surge.

However, although Cantore's standing on a sand dune in a full rain slicker, you can see some guy behind him at water's edge, apparently unfazed by the severity of the storm Jim is trying to convey. Jim closes out the segment, saying he's going to try to get these guys off the beach. Reporting the storm and saving lives, what more can you ask for in television programming?

TWC has more graphics and animations to present information than anyone. I didn't know, for instance, that the winds aloft at 5,000 feet were much faster than the winds at the surface and that this difference in wind speeds caused tornadoes to form.

CNN: Ed Lavandera is reporting live from the rain in Brownsville and he really seems unhappy standing outside. He's focusing more on the story about the potential failure of the river levees, gesturing with his left hand that this is the Rio Grande River right here! I couldn't guess where he was standing, but I wondered if he was south of where the border wall is going to be erected.

Lavandera is trying to get The Big Story, like a Katrina levee-failure kind of story. That is something he won't be getting. He doesn't appear to have the easy confidence of Jim Cantore, and when he started talking about local conditions, he began citing a string of facts that had just been reported on KRGV. I wondered if he was just repeating what KRGV was reporting.

CNN is just not measuring up to TWC's standard, and they don't have the local depth of reporting that KRGV has. They are just here in case all heck breaks loose. KRGV is doing what they do, which is report on their own area. CNN cut away from the hurricane reporting to cover other news because the hurricane is just one story in the day for them. TWC says we're here because, hey, it's weather, baby, and we love weather in all its forms.

Recommendations: TWC for maximum weather geekiness. KRGV for Tim Smith and live reports from all over the area.