13-Dates That Live In Infamy

So I'm on the phone with a dispatcher from the Orange County Sheriff's office. I look up at the TV monitor in the newsroom and set out loud, the second tower just collapsed. There was a long pause or the dispatcher didn't say anything, and she said, what did you say? I said, the second twin Tower just fell in New York. Oh my god, she said. I'm jimpolling, and this is my view from the middle. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December seventh, nineteen forty one, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made his famous speech declaring that the date would be one that would live in infamy. Throughout my career in broadcasting, I covered, with varying degrees of details, many major disasters, all of which qualify as dates that live in infamy. I've talked about some of them, or will talk about some of them during this podcast series. These included the time the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over Tampa Bay was hit by a freighter on a foggy morning on May ninth, nineteen eighty and the entire southbound span collapsed into the water, sending thirty five people to their deaths. I talk about January twenty eighth, nineteen eighty six, when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded seventy three seconds after launch from the Kennedy Space Center, killing all seven astronauts on board. Plenty of infamy here to be had by all living and working in the state of Florida. I've covered dozens of hurricanes and tropical storms working for the state radio news network in Florida. Florida News Network, we would go on special coverage alerts whenever one of those things threatened any part of the Florida coastline. Since I was usually also the program director of the local radio station in addition to the network, if the storm were to plow through Orlando, then I had double duty. It also meant that I usually lived at the radio complex for the duration of the storm. My wife and son never saw me during one of those storms, since I was always working and sleeping in my office. I would be the first in my neighborhood to board up the windows of my house because I knew that when the storm got closer, I would have to go into work and stay there for the duration. My wife and son had it all down though they knew how to handle things. On the home front when one of those crazy storms blew through. Among the hurricanes we covered, there were a few standouts. Hurricane Elena in nineteen eighty five. Although not as destructive as some, Elena was notorious in that it danced around the Gulf of Mexico for a couple of days, nearly stationary, keeping hurricane warnings up along the Florida coast the entire time. In two thousand and four, we had three to contend with during the season, Charlie, Francis and Jean as I camped out at the radio complex. During Charlie, we watched from the fourth floor windows as power transformers blew up during the storm, creating what is known as green lightning. Charlie caused an enormous amount of tree damage in central Florida, making roads impassable and knocking down power lines. As a result, those of us at the station were stuck there and those who weren't were stuck wherever they were. We were live on the air on the radio station with continuous coverage of the storm's aftermath, and unlikely people were thrown on the air to fill in when the regular hosts needed a break. One of the guys from the sports station who happened to be camped out there, and I had to take a shift. That was an unlikely pairing, but we did a pretty good job, though. The PD of the news station at the time, this was before I took over, had to do a shift himself, and he was not typically an on air guy, but these were the people hunkered down in the building and couldn't go anywhere. Other staffers couldn't make it into the station because of the road conditions, so we had to make do with whoever was in the building. If the cleaning crew had been there, they probably would have been thrown on the air too. My house was in a tree covered community, and when I finally was able to go home, I had to dodge giant oak trees that had been ripped from the ground to get to my house. The neighborhood looked like a war zone and no one had power. A giant oak on the lawn right in front of my house got ripped from its bed, but luckily toppled the opposite way from my house. My wife and son described how the neighbors came out while the eye of the storm was passing over the area and the winds had temporarily died down with chainsaws and cut up the tree to clear the road. Francis and Jean that season were also camp out events at the broadcast studios, but they weren't as intense as Charlie. In two thousand and five, there was Hurricane Katrina. It was a minimal hurricane for the state of Florida and a nothing burger for us here in Central Florida, but it became a national story that we all covered since once it made landfall in South Florida as a Cat one and crossed the state into the Gulf of Mexico, it intensified into a Category five monsters. It weakened a bit to a Cat three before it hit southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi, but that wasn't much consolation. One thousand, three hundred and ninety two people lost their lives in that storm, mostly due to the flooding in New Orleans, and it caused about one hundred and forty five billion dollars in damage. In twenty seventeen, there was Hurricane Irma, to date, the most powerful hurricane in the Atlantic region, since it was a Category five storm when it hit the Leeward islands. As a matter of fact, this massive storm made a total of seven landfalls, four of which were as a Category five storm, causing devastation over the Northern Caribbean Islands. It was a Cat one storm with top winds of ninety miles an hour when it came through Central Florida in the wee hours of September the eleventh. I remember sitting at my desk in my office on the fourth floor of our radio broadcast center at four a m. And feeling as though it was on a cruise ship, as the building was actually swaying in the wind. That was an extremely scary feeling. I don't think buildings are supposed to I looked out the window into our parking lot at one point and saw the thirty foot high light poles rocking back and forth like they weren't even anchored down. This was just a Category one storm. I can't imagine what it was like to be in the middle of it when it was a Category five in Cuba, when the winds hit one hundred and sixty six miles an hour. But besides the storms, we also had our share of other disasters, not the least of which happened on Sunday morning, June twelfth, twenty sixteen. I had gotten up early to get ready to go into church. From the phone rang it was my morning anchor on the station for which I was program director, WFLA, Orlando, Deborah Roberts. Turn on the TV now, she said, I did to see a video shot of Orange Avenue in the section we referred to as SODO, or south of downtown. The entire area was lousy with police vehicles, all with their lights twirling and flashing turns out. Earlier that morning, twenty nine year old Omar Matin, a man who had pledged his allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq in Syria, had gone into the Pulse nightclub, an establishment frequented mostly by members of the LGBTQ community, and shot and killed forty nine people and injured fifty three others. The team was shot and killed by police after a three hour standoff. After watching for a minute or so, Debra still on the phone with me, He said, you want me to head into the station. I of course said yes, I'll meet you there. I got into my car and made record time driving up the interstate to the radio station. Deb lived closer than I did, so she was there when I got there. We ran into the studio, She got behind the microphone and I ran into the control room. On the air at the time was what we called a broker show, one that a client paid to put on the radio station. It was automated by the computer system that I summarily shut off and hit our breaking news cart. This was an announcement that told the audience we had a news bulletin. Debra, always the professional, started in with the details she had about the Pulse shooting. This time, one of the other newspeople had come into the newsroom and was on the phone to the PD and other authorities. Very quickly we were able to organize live wall to wall coverage of the tragic event. Soon, Deborah's co anchor, but Headinger, arrived and joined her on the air. They stayed in that studio all day long, conducting interviews and disseminating updated information on the shootings. We ran live news conferences from the mayor and city officials, statements from the governor, and even the President of the United States. I was able to step out of the control room and I brought in another board operator to take over so I could better coordinate our coverage efforts. We stayed on the air deep into the afternoon, preempting all the usual broker programming that normally ran on the station on a typical Sunday. I actually kept the coverage on an hour longer than we probably should have, only because going back to regular programming would have meant airing a show called arms Room Radio, a show about guns. I just couldn't bring myself to let that happened, so I kept DEV and Butt on for an extra hour. But before the Pulse tragedy occurred fifteen years earlier, to be exact, was the Granddaddy of all disasters, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City on September eleventh, two thousand and one. About a week or so before the planes flew into the towers of nine to eleven, a small cessna hit a skyscraper in a big city somewhere. I remember walking into our newsroom and seeing it on the TV monitors. It was nothing like the nine to eleven collisions, but it did make headlines. So when the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center on nine to eleven, we all thought, well, here we go again with another small plane crashing into a skyscraper. It wasn't long until we realize that wasn't what had happened at all. I wasn't program director of the radio station at the time. I was just with FNN, so I ran down the hall yelling for the PD and screaming that he needed to put the CBS network on the air right away, that a jetliner had just crashed into the World Trade in New York City. Now it was all hands on decktime. We all hopped on the phones in the newsroom, mainly to see what local authorities were doing security wise, especially when the Pentagon got smashed into with a jet and then Flight ninety three crashed in the fields outside of Pittsburgh. Being an old news guy myself, I jumped into the frakas and called the Orange County Sheriff's dispatch. No one knew what was to be hit next at anything, so we wanted to see what Central Florida law enforcement was up to. I was on the phone with a dispatcher at ten twenty eight am when I looked up at the TV monitor in the newsroom and watched as the North Tower of the World Trade Center came crashing down. I told her that the second tower had just collapsed. There was a long pause on the phone, and she asked me to repeat what I said. I did so, and her response was, oh, my God. Jump ahead a couple of decades now to twenty twenty two, my wife and I made our first ever visit to New York City. We had been to most major cities in the world world, but somehow never made it to New York. Since we were now retired, we decided it was time. So on the list of sites to visit was Ground Zero, the site of the former twin Towers. Now the footprints of the towers are reflecting pools, and surrounding each footprint are bronze plates in which the names of the victims of that day and of the nineteen ninety three World Trade Center bombing are engraved. As I stood there in the middle of dozens of people milling about the memorial, all who appeared to be significantly younger than I, I couldn't help thinking that a good number of those people are either too young to remember the events of that day, are not even born yet when the attacks happened. But as I stared at the names etched in the bronze plaques. I couldn't help but think about those who were simply going to work on a Tuesday when all this happened with no warning. It's scary to think sometimes that anything can happen, A singer composer Don Henley said in a New York Minute. As I stood at the North Tower reflecting pool, I thought back to that day in the newsroom, on the phone with that dispatcher as the North Tower came crashing down at ten twenty eight am September eleventh, two thousand and one, A date etched in my memory like the names on the plaques in front of me, a date that will truly live in infamy. I'm Jimpolling, and that's my view from the Middle. In the next episode, have you ever heard of or experienced an Ivory Tower manager? These are the managers with their heads in the clouds and have no clue what's happening down on planet Earth. A view from the Ivory Tower. Next on my View from the Middle,