Le Déluge

The below-ground window-well that led to the flooding of WTVR's basement newsroom is now grated and surrounded by a high retaining wall. (2010 photo)

During the time I was news director, I could expect at least one call at home each night from the WTVR newsroom. Usually the calls had to do with news coverage -- a request for advice on how to play a story, a need for overtime authorization, or a squabble about airtime between the news and sports anchors.

Sometimes it was breaking news. I was called in one night to manage our coverage of a small riot at a housing project that pitted police against residents and had possible racial overtones. Another night, I directed our coverage all night from the scene of a massive gasoline fire sparked by lightning at the Little Oil Company tank farm along Interstate 95. It took 19 hours to put out the fire, with help from the Air Force and the Navy. We were there with a full staff, and we fed the network with our film of that disaster.

I even got called out one night when a guy climbed the 800-foot tower behind the station. The cops talked him down when he was about halfway up, and we aired film at 11.

But there was one call that sticks in my mind: "Don, can you come in to the newsroom? We're being flooded." In those days, the news department had its offices and film lab in the basement, where the enormous record library for WMBG radio had once been.

The flood was serious and dangerous. Just after dark, rain started falling like a cow pissing on a flat rock, as my Grandpa used to say. The storm sewer at the southwest corner of Broad and Tilden streets was first overloaded, then blocked by debris. Water rose over the curb and onto the sidewalk. With no place left to go, it flowed into a window-well below ground level on the east side of the station's building. From there, it flowed into the basement.

When I got the call from Ken Srpan, the 11 p.m. anchor, it was about 9 o'clock. Water was rising in the photography lab and covering the lime green carpet in the newsroom. The office was controlled chaos, as reporters and anchors typed their stories with their legs tucked up under them to keep their feet out of the water. Engineers were running up and down the stairs as they manhandled the technical equipment bringing CBS programming into the station, which was intermittently losing its network signal -- during prime time.

In the photo lab, the film processor -- which was on a 6-inch concrete platform -- was churning out film. Ignoring the fact that they were surrounded by electrical equipment in a flooding basement, the photographers were editing and viewing film while standing on drink crates with their pantslegs rolled up to their knees.

The water rose to about six inches, and then the fire department arrived. Firemen snaked hoses from the alley behind the building, through the main news studio, through the finance office and down the back stairs to the basement, where they began to pump out the water as the deluge was ending.

As the 11 o'clock newscast grew closer, we realized we'd still have firemen and hoses in the studio at airtime. But that would be okay. The storm and the flood at the station would be our lead story, "so we'll just turn the cameras around and show the firemen at work," I said to the technical director.

Despite the dangers in the film lab, the frenzy in the newsroom and the firemen in the studio, the lab crew edited and cut the film, the reporters and anchors wrote the stories, and we were pulling a good broadcast together.

But the phones continued to ring all over the building. Viewers were righteously indignant: their favorite prime-time shows had been interrupted all evening as the engineers struggled to fix the problem with the network lines in the basement. Callers complained long and loudly.

Ken Srpan, now in his jacket and makeup -- with his pants still rolled up to his knees -- was ready to head upstairs to the studio. Ken was usually unflappable, but with 5 minutes to go before airtime, he'd had about enough of the constant interruptions from viewers with complaints. Nonetheless, he was too much of a newsman to walk away from a ringing telephone. I heard only his end of the conversation.

His eyes rolled as he listened politely to another viewer go on and on about how she was never going to watch Channel 6 ever again. Then he said, politely and seriously, "I can help you with that, ma'am. Just give me the serial number from the back of your TV set and I'll make sure we disconnect your signal at this end."