Weather, (not) Stories

Now and again, we are witness to ideas whose very nature changes the way we live, such as the Weather Channel (TWC), launched in 1982. This novel cable station proposed to do nothing more than keep us apprised of the weather, 24/7.



Well, like all good ideas, all it takes is a few years to foul the thing up. That has happened with TWC. It seems as though most weather is mundane stuff, and doesn’t keep the viewers tuned in as much as the execs there would like.



So what’s a company to do, to make sure someone is watching when the commercials are aired? Almost from its infancy. TWC was known as airing considerably more commercials than the average channel, traditional or cable. But if no one is tuned in… .



So, sometime back, when TWC was stilled owned by Landmark Communications, shows such as “Weather Stories” or “When Weather Changed History” began to air in place of dull weather forecasts. Later, when a group that included NBC purchased TWC, movies with weather-related motifs were thrown up on Saturdays as well.



Okay, at first this was no problem because of what TWC calls “Locals on the Eights”. This meant that at set times, ending in an 8, you could tune in for a look at local weather. Except that “Weather Stories” became an exception to that rule. But you could still get a forecast at the top or bottom of the hour. That is, until NBC, et al, took charge.



NBC has taken the idea of airing commercials to another level at TWC. Now, it has axed those “Locals on the Eights” during its “special programs”, and has shortened them so that the info is bare bones, to say the least. And it seems that when you most want some idea of what is going on with local weather, that is when you’ll find Jim Cantore relating the history of a hurricane or tornado or cold spell, etc.



That is what took place on Saturday, the day of that disastrous flash flooding, perhaps the worst in Pike Co.’s history. That evening, when the rain began to come down in earnest, I repeatedly turned to TWC to find “Weather Stories” on. And the show’s commercials took the place of “Local on the Eights”.



Outside, the rain was as heavy as I have ever seen, and I was worried, and despite repeated efforts, I could glean no information beyond that info that was contained in the crawl, in red, that warned of a flash-flood warning for central Pike Co.



I now know that I wasn’t the only one who needed vital information that wasn’t being transmitted. From the few stories that I have heard from survivors of the floods, they literally had no warning of what would take place. Some had just enough time to scramble to safety before their homes were washed away, while others, plucked from the roofs of their houses, lacked even that little amount of time that adequate warning would have given them.



I’ll grant that certain severe weather situations can take everyone by surprise, but when local weather could potentially turn that deadly that quickly, something at TWC needs to give. Then, it’d be nice to see real-time forecasts instead of “Weather Stories”?