Broadcasting Through Beryl

Sunday morning we woke up to the worst-case scenario for Houstonians: Beryl had turned east overnight and Houston looked likely to take a direct hit. That was the moment we had to decide: do we attempt to broadcast live and take our listeners through the storm, or do we bail out and simulcast one of our TV partners? Without a news property, no one would blame us if we flipped the switch and all stayed home. That's not what we did.

We have five local stations, four English-speaking and one Spanish. One spoken word (sports) and four music properties. As luck would have it, three of our morning shows were on vacation, so to say our available on-air staff was "light" would be putting it mildly. We had one person from each FM station available, and a skeleton crew on sports. Our mission: be a calming and comforting voice during a very scary time for our community. We all arrived at the station carrying blankets, pillows, food, and whatever we thought we needed for who knows how long and started setting up. One of our engineers went back down the freight elevator just as one of the first bands of rain hit the area. The power flickered out, and he got stuck for 45 minutes. We had to call 9-1-1 and HFD came to get him out. The hurricane hadn't even hit, yet I already knew we were in for quite a journey.

We slept at the stations Sunday night. Correction: no one slept. There's something about a hurricane heading your way that keeps you up at night. As I lay on the floor of my office trying to sleep, all I could do was watch with dread as cars barreled down 59 toward downtown, hit water, and flooded out. Even though we had been telling people to get off the roads by 10 pm, Houstonians are known to push it to the edge. We knew Beryl would hit before sun up, so since no one could sleep, by 5 am all stations were live. We were still playing music, and talking some sports, but we were also giving information, sharing how it was going in different neighborhoods. During commercial breaks we were inviting people to join us on Facebook live so they could have someone to talk to, to commiserate with if they were alone, or scared, or both. Our local TV partners, KHOU and Telemundo, were providing us updates to give clarity on where we were in the storm and what to expect next.

Around 9am our building started swaying, as it is meant to do, during high winds. At first I thought I was getting sick. Why was I dizzy and nauseous? Then I realized, we're moving, and this is seasickness. We all had it, except our Chief Engineer who spent a decade in the Navy. The windows started shaking, and we could see nothing but horizontal rain out the windows of the 19th floor. We kept updating our listeners as the number of power outages went from the hundreds to the thousands, to the hundreds of thousands, to over 2.5 million homes. Flooding began. Trees started to fall. The windows in the lobby of our building shattered into a million pieces. Somehow, our studios stayed safe, and our DJs stayed on the air. In the meantime, we were having our own issues, all our tower sites were on generator power, the building power going in and out, and our internet failing constantly. Our team's courage and caring during the last 48 hours have been nothing but amazing to me. Every single one of them had damage of some sort at their own homes, yet here they were, giving all they had to our listeners.

We spent the remainder of the day Monday and all day Tuesday moving to recovery: where to get gas, where to find ice, how to report power outages, and if they couldn't figure out the system, we reported it for them. We were on-air and online asking our listeners: what do you need? How can we help connect you to resources? Helping them to share information with us, and with each other via social media channels.

The thing about radio is that most people don't understand the business we're in. Radio isn't in the playing-of-music business as many think. Radio is in the connection business. We are here to connect our community. It's how radio started, a way to let a community know there was a fire so they could come and help put it out. It's still our mission today, to help put out the "fire" in whatever form it takes. Whether that is a hurricane, a tornado, or some of the more fun connections like cheering on the home team, that's what we do. We are broadcasters, and I'm particularly proud to be one today.