(photograph courtesy Channel 3 Videographer Shane Snider)
The house explosion in Eastlake late Wednesday evening was not a drill.
More often than not when you hear so many cities and units responding to a single event, it's a drill.
A perfect example of WHY drills are conducted among mutual aid cities on a regular basis --so they can quickly mobilize when the 'real thing' occurs.
And that's exactly what the Channel 3 Newsroom did Wednesday night --quickly mobilized inside the building as well as outside of the building.
The initial call came over as an explosion, but because crews had not arrived on scene yet, we did not know exactly WHAT had exploded.
Shortly after the initial call, the various Lake County Police Departments started getting inundated with calls from residents asking what happened....as did the Channel 3 News Desk. Viewers were asking if there was another earthquake in Lake County? Had there been an explosion? Was there a serious crash? Just WHAT happened???? So not only were the phones ringing off the hook for school closing iAlerts but now they were really non-stop asking about 'what was going on in Lake County!!'
It's a fragile tower of cards.
Being so late in the night, the plan for the 11pm show was pretty much in place...yet this is what we live for, covering breaking news when it happens. You have to throw your plan out the window and all parties focus on the breaking news at hand.
I immediately sent a camera crew in a truck toward the scene......
And then we huddled for a minute to ascertain the best plan of attack strategy. Producer Dan even confabbed with our News Director, Rita, to get her spin and get her in the loop...
We were down a reporter due to illness and down a camera crew.
But, just because we may be staff-light does not mean we can't win the big story!
Fortunately, we have employees who live out in the affected area. Shortly after the initial incident, one of my videographers, Shane Snider, called in asking what had happened and where.....it was very close to where he lived so he headed out with his camera phone to shoot whatever he could to send back to our webmaster.
He was instrumental in assisting our crews in the field, taking numerous scene pictures, gathering details until our reporter could get on site, assisting my truck operator, nabbing the 2 heroes who pulled the elderly couple out of the burning home, and even doing a phoner with Romona and the heroes during the 11pm news.
After the initial flurry, it all came together.
Sigac folks and the room 1 operator were notified that there would be a live shot and possibly video fed back....
And all crews were given their orders.
The plan came together very well and worked! It all happened so fast, you really don't have time to think or over think too much.
But it does not end at 11:32pm.
Our News Director, knowing we were all busting a move, called our overnight reporter in early to pick up the story.....any overtime has to be approved by the boss anyway, so she led the charge!
I briefed the first overnight producer in on what had happened, what we had and were still efforting in the field, and WHO got what.
The key is communication to make anything a success.
Overall, I think we definitely won this story at 11pm....and when all was said and done, had a very successful day at work.
