It has been two weeks since tornadoes raced across South Carolina. The preliminary assessment is in March 15, 2008 Severe Weather Outbreak Summary and the recovery has begun. However, it will be remembered as an outbreak in which no one was killed.

I do not know how much the severe weather coverage contributed to the fact that no one was killed. This is particularly interesting in that two of the most powerful tornadoes that day occurred in the Midlands. Yet, two people were killed in Georgia that afternoon due to tornadoes.

It proved to be a watershed event for those of us at News19 WLTX. The planning for our coverage began on the Wednesday before the event. The word from the Storm Prediction Center (SPC) in Norman, Oklahoma was that there would be a slight risk of severe weather on that Saturday. The risk level remained slight until early Saturday morning. However, it was apparent that SPC was concerned about the upcoming situation.

A tornado outbreak began on Thursday evening as tornadoes raced across Oklahoma, Arkansas, and northern Louisiana. SPC made the following comment that day: WITH DEW POINTS RISING INTO THE 60S MODEST INSTABILITY AND SHEAR WILL SUPPORT THE THREAT OF ISOLATED SUPERCELLS. BY EARLY EVENING GREATEST SEVERE THREAT WILL SHIFT INTO THE CAROLINAS… The following day SPC made this comment about Saturday: SHEAR AND LIFT WILL SUPPORT SCATTERED SEVERE STORMS ALONG AND JUST SOUTH OF THE WARM FRONT WITH ISOLATED SUPERCELLS AND BOW ECHOES LIKELY DURING THE AFTERNOON. THIS ZONE FROM NEAR ATLANTA GA EWD TO NEAR MYRTLE BEACH SC SHOULD HAVE THE GREATEST COMBINATION OF SHEAR AND INSTABILITY AND THIS SHOULD SUPPORT A THREAT FOR LARGE HAIL AND WIND DAMAGE WITH THE MORE INTENSE CELLS…THE GREATEST TORNADO THREAT SHOULD EXIST WITH LONGER-LIVED SUPERCELLS THAT TRACK EWD ALONG THE WARM FRONT.

Thus, the key for us was where the warm front going to be Saturday afternoon. This could not be predicted with great accuracy until that day. However, I assumed it would be somewhere in the Midlands and planned accordingly. I became increasingly concerned Friday night when a tornado struck downtown Atlanta. I was watching it unfold on radar and this was well ahead of the main weather system. I figured that if the atmosphere was that unstable far ahead of the system it could be quite unstable by Saturday afternoon.

That turned out to be the case. The Storm Prediction Center upgraded our risk of severe weather to moderate shortly after midnight Friday night. I hit the sack after updating the information on our website. Severe weather was already moving across northern Georgia when I awoke early Saturday morning. The latest statement from SPC included: TSTMS IN THIS ENVIRONMENT WILL BE CAPABLE OF GENERATING STRONG TORNADOES AND VERY LARGE HAIL. SOME CELLS MAY REMAIN ANCHORED ALONG PIEDMONT BOUNDARY AND COULD TRACK FOR SOME DISTANCE ACROSS PARTS OF GA/SC...AND PERHAPS EVEN INTO NC THROUGH THE EVENING.

Therefore, the stage was set for what was to be a very busy afternoon. The first Tornado Watch was issued just after 11 a.m. It covered a large area from Birmingham, AL to Bishopville, SC. There were no storms that were imminent so I updated our website from home and arrived in the weather center about 12:20 p.m.

My first task was to evaluate the situation and decide what was needed and when. I spoke with our news director and suggested that we call people. The rest of the weather staff was in place with their assignments, by 2:45 p.m. The first cut-in to programming occurred about five minutes later. The coverage was intermittent until about 4:10 p.m. This is when we started continuous coverage which continued until 8 p.m. when the severe weather moved out of the Midlands.

There were a number of things that went right on that Saturday afternoon in March. First, the local office of the National Weather Service did a superb job of relaying severe weather information to us. For WLTX, it was the first time we broadcast simultaneously on 3 platforms at once (Channel 19, WeatherNow, and wltx.com). The weather equipment preformed flawlessly through the entire event. Finally, the text alerts never missed a beat and all of the warnings were issued and received by the customer automatically within one minute of the warning being issued.

A number of things have happened since that day to make us better prepared for the next time. Text Alerts, a free service of WLTX, has been improved and now includes Aiken County. The Trueview Doppler Radar has just received a major upgrade to the software giving us new capabilities we did not have on that Saturday. In fact, all of the weather computers received a major upgrade this past week.

New plans are in the works to cover severe weather in the future, but it is nice to know that the plans that were made worked to perfection. However, no matter what plans we make ultimately your safety is in your hands. There is no excuse for not knowing about dangerous weather situations like March 15, in this computer age. Information is frequently updated at wltx.com.