Good day

I didn't sleep well last night.

Who could with the blinding lightning and earth shattering thunder? Needless to say, I did not jump out of bed this morning, and I went to work less than energetic.

I moped around the newsroom while I waited for the morning meeting to break, and all I wanted to do as go home. Besides being tired, it's also sweeps. The time of year that we go out of our way to cover the most uninspiring stories. And if I had to do another sex offender story.... I just don't know what I'd do....

All the overnight storms caused flash flooding and washed out several roads in a neighboring community. And I got that story. I wasn't too excited about it at first. We had to find some who had tried to drive through the water and got swept away. And we also had to find a physicist to tell us why cars float. Yeah.

Well, to my surprise, the stars aligned and gave my reporter and I a great story.

Turns out:

There's a wildlife sanctuary just outside town. The creek that runs across their grounds broke it's banks. A couple tiger pens got flooded and three of the kitties had to tread in five feet of water (they're fine). Well, on his way to help clean-up at the sanctuary, Frank (a volunteer) ignored a "road closed" sign and tired to drive across standing water. Instead of floating away, Frank and his Jeep fell into a sinkhole five feet deep. Ah, ha! Our victim! We got great video of the wrecker pulling his truck out of the hole, the rushing water, the broken concrete, and Frank all nervous about his car. He then took us to the sanctuary where we got great video of the flooded lawn, the wet tigers, debris clinging up to five feet from the ground, thick mud, and a small cabin that was picked up and floated 20 feet into a fence.

Oh, could you even ask for more? Well, we got it.

We needed to find a washed out road next. On out way out we missed a turn and encountered exactly that. It wasn't that deep, but the water was rushing across at river speed. SWEET! Great nat sound, great video, my reporter even waded out into it for some teases and a taped intro. And I didn't even have to persuade her to do it.

Oh we had good stuff. But we had to run across town to meet our physicist. He could make or break the story. And once again, we got lucky. He had an experiment set up. He explained it well. And more importantly, his experiment was visual and illustrated the idea perfectly.

Now all we had to do was get it written and edited.

It was close. My reporter wrote it well. I took the scripts and put down all the nats, track and soundbytes. Fifteen seconds over. We whittled away the fat and I tackled the rest of the editing. It was tight, but everything was going well. Until 10 minutes before five the video I needed would not transfer onto the timeline. I ran out of the edit bays and yelled for my reporter to re-digitize my second tape. I jumped to the end and put that together. Five minutes to 5 and the video is back in the system. I fill in the holes, add audio transitions and send it to the Tape operator without watching it.

I jump out of the edit bay and let the booth know my story's in. I see my reporter at her desk and give her the thumbs up. I can see she's stressed. She comes over and we turn up the TV. The anchors toss to her story and neither of us breathes. I was praying for no black holes, no weird audio flubs, no flash frames...

Two minutes later, we both take a deep breathe in. We did it.

So, the short version - tigers treading water, jeep in a sinkhole, road turned river, and a physicist with a demonstration, good writing, tight edit, good story.

It was a good day.