Last night was the first big weather event of the 2013 severe storm season. It was pretty typical stuff. There were heavy rains, strong winds, damaging hail, hook echoes, flash floods and an occasional tornado. That being said, the night was also strange and unfamiliar. We had David Payne yelling over Gary England on Channel 9, witnessed Damon Lane have a mild panic attack on Channel 5, and watched some hotshot young storm chaser on Channel 4 drive around in a car that was stolen from the set of the A-Team (more on him later today).
Yes, last night we got a first look at our new local severe weather teams. If you remember correctly, David Payne and Jim Gardner left Channel 4 and jumped ship to Channel 9, Rick Mitchell fled Channel 5 for Dallas and was replaced by Damon Lane, and, as we learned yesterday, Mike Morgan hired some guy named Reed Timmer to be his new bionic storm chaser.
The most anticipated debut was that of the new Channel 9 Dream Team. They had Gary England and Michael Armstrong in studio, Jim Gardner in the air, and David Payne and Val Caster chasing storms with Gentners in hand. Their wall cloud to wall cloud coverage of the storm can be summarized by this clip.
Watch the clip again and look at the expression on Armstrong's face. I think you can see flaming hailstones in his eyes. The coverage really was that bad, and was like that for most of the night. To say that Channel 9 had too many cooks in the kitchen would be an understatement. It was like watching a group of people have an argument on a reality show; there were lots of screamers, not enough listeners and you really wanted to change the channel.