Planning for a hurricane like Idalia started nearly a year ago at the Times
It’s all hands on deck during major news events. Hurricane Idalia was no different. Nearly every journalist in Florida’s largest newsroom pitched in to help deliver the most comprehensive coverage of the storm.
On tampabay.com, a team of Tampa Bay Times reporters and editors produced a “live updates” blog on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday with contributions from around the region. It contained vignettes from the field, consequential developments and important announcements. The blog was humming nearly 24/7 — chock-full of photos, videos and graphics tracking Idalia, its impact and the official response throughout Florida.
On the day of landfall, we cranked up the live updates at 4:30 a.m. and averaged a new dispatch every eight minutes until shortly before midnight.
Max Chesnes filed drone photographs from Horseshoe Beach, showing the devastation in Big Bend. Zachary T. Sampson and Douglas R. Clifford deployed at first light to Steinhatchee — riding into town in the back of a pickup driven by a man who forded the floodwaters before navigating down the coast to chronicle destruction in Cedar Key. Hannah Critchfield and Jennifer Glenfield took you to Shore Acres, where homeowners tried to rescue what they could from flood-ravaged homes. Sam Ogozalek and Ivy Ceballo reported from Tarpon Springs, where residents used push brooms to rid their living rooms of stormwater. Helen Freund and Chris Urso talked to homeowners in Weeki Wachee Gardens as they waded through the wreckage.
Everyone played a part, from filing short scoops off their beats to making sure we were staffed pretty much around the clock. The newsroom produced nearly 50 separate stories on Wednesday and more than 100 live update entries. For many readers, those stories brought the first glimpses of the broader toll. Thursday’s e-Newspaper storm coverage spanned 10 pages.
Taking turns at the helm of the live blog were Bethany Barnes, Christopher Spata, Lauren Peace, Emily L. Mahoney, Tony Marrero, Michaela Mulligan, Gabrielle Calise, Natalie Weber, Rebecca Liebson, Colleen Wright, Jack Prator, Amy Gehrt, Jay Cridlin and Kirby Wilson. They grabbed feeds from other journalists and helped pull threads together for the main news stories that ran on the front pages of the e-Newspaper throughout the week. Each day’s live blog was consistently the most frequently visited story on our homepage.
Chesnes, our environment reporter, was virtually everywhere. With our other two certified drone pilots out, Chesnes pulled double duty. (He’s that rare dude who when he isn’t flying a drone or writing a story, you’ll find scuba diving amid the coral.) Chesnes and Wilson headed to Brooksville on Tuesday so they could be close enough to landfall. In a Holiday Inn Express, they crammed into a room with Sampson and Clifford and two queen beds. The next morning, Wilson and Chesnes were the first two newspaper journalists to enter Horseshoe Beach, driving through 4 feet of storm surge and arriving just before a wave of law enforcement officers closed the town to media and residents. Later Wednesday, Chesnes hustled to St. Petersburg to capture the historic flooding of Shore Acres at sunset. At daybreak Thursday, he was back on the streets finding more stories for the front page. Countless other Times staffers pulled similar shifts.
Events like Idalia underscore the community focus that drives what we do. Ellen Clarke, one of our assistant managing editors, curated local photographs for part of the day Wednesday. A few came from her friend Matt Gowens, who sent photos of surge flooding in the Tanglewood area. A Times reader, who had evacuated, spotted Gowens’ photos on our website and realized her house was in one of the frames. She asked us if it had taken on water. Clarke got Gowens on the phone to get the details and then called the reader back to let her know what we had found. There was some water intrusion, but it could have been worse.
Planning for an event like Hurricane Idalia started literally right around the time Hurricane Ian exited Florida almost a year ago. Our staff did a remarkable job during Ian and won awards for its breaking news coverage. But we always learn something new from these storms. We recognized that we could be better organized. We also knew we could benefit by having improved equipment to transmit photos and stories. So we held mandatory training for all newsroom staffers. And we equipped several reporting teams with state-of-the-art connectivity. That meant that our journalists would be able to file stories and photos in real time rather than abandon an area where they were reporting to go find a signal. During Ian, cellphone towers were knocked offline, forcing our staff on the ground to leave, so they could transmit what they had. For Idalia, our photographers were able to file without issues, even in the rural spots along the Big Bend, because the winds weren’t strong enough to topple cell towers. But having the equipment gave us peace of mind.
“Confidence affects decisions,” said our primary storm-chasing photographer, Clifford, who was among the first to enter the area where Idalia touched down. “We are now in a more confident position, more than ever.”
For Idalia, five two-person “Go Teams” with rented SUVs fanned out from Tampa to the Big Bend. That was a bigger contingent than for Ian.
“We certainly learned a lot of things after Ian last year, and those memories are still pretty fresh, which I think influenced our improved planning and decision-making during Idalia,” said Chris Tisch, who oversees our breaking news team and climate and environment reporters. He serves as our principal planner for coverage during hurricane season.
In preparation for this storm season, Tisch assembled a committee months ago consisting of 28 people from across the newsroom — more than a quarter of the staff.
“I’ve had a number of staffers tell me that this feels like the most prepared we have ever been for a storm,” he said.
The nitty-gritty preparations started more than a week ago — as soon as the first signs of what would become Hurricane Idalia began to emerge off the Yucatán coast. I happened to spot the disturbance forming at windy.com, which tracks various hurricane forecasting models, and alerted Tisch. The European model showed something was brewing. None of the other forecasting models had yet detected it.
“Hurricanes are stressful,” Tisch said. “And it only adds to the stress if you are part of a news reporting operation that’s disorganized. I think if the newsroom feels like we are prepared, it soothes the stress a bit. And I think that was the case this year. Staffers seemed calm and collected, and that makes them better at their jobs.”
The always unflappable Carolyn Fox, our managing editor, orchestrated coverage with quick, decisive action. With both our St. Petersburg and Tampa offices closed, Fox and a team of editors set up a nerve center in an Orlando hotel — safe and equipped with a backup generator.
“The amount of stories, live updates, visuals and social posts we did only happened because our newsroom worked like a well-oiled machine, executing on a game plan we’d had ready by June 1, the start of hurricane season,” Fox said. “It was a total team effort, and no resource was wasted.”
Rural communities north of us were devastated by the storm surge, while most of Tampa Bay was spared. Not everyone around here was so lucky. Michael Van Sickler, our assistant managing editor who oversees the news team, was among the staff who gathered in the Orlando nerve center, along with his family. There, he directed his staff with precision and focus — all while knowing that his own home in Shore Acres was flooding 124 miles away. A neighbor had texted a photo at 7:40 a.m. Wednesday, showing his home inundated. When Van Sickler and his family returned to St. Petersburg on Thursday, they discovered a soggy mess. Several of his co-workers headed over with trucks, boxes and Shop-Vacs to help pull belongings out of the muck.
Like we did during Ian, we delayed delivering the Wednesday printed newspaper. With so many of our subscribers in mandatory evacuation zones and with roads difficult to navigate, our home delivery team made the rounds Thursday to get the paper out. In the meantime, we ramped up our storm coverage in our e-Newspaper, where we saw record readership.
We are grateful to all our readers for understanding. And we are incredibly proud of the newsroom’s response to keep you informed.
As a public service, we made all our hurricane coverage free to readers on tampabay.com, starting Monday and extending until noon on Thursday, when the threat had passed. The traffic to our website showed once again that, in a big storm, readers turned to us and could count on the Times.
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