Re: WTAG coverage of Fire

[Donna Halper <dlh@donnahalper.com>]

it was written--
>   I could see the fire from my home base, and
>turned them on to see what they had.  In a word nothing...An Icecats game.
>About 9:00 PM, I called WTAG and asked the guy running the board why WTAG
>had no coverage.  He seemed completely unaware of the fire and even more so
>unconcerned, even after I told him it looked like at least 2 firefighters
>were dead and others were missing.  His reply "I just work here".

Stations I have worked at have an emergency procedure-- as in, who do we 
call if the station suddenly is off the air, or if the president suddenly 
resigns, or the world suddenly ends.  I still remember one night when I was 
consulting what was then WCLB (country) in Boston.  I was working on the 
music late in the evening, and the bells on our AP machine went crazy-- 
Reggie Lewis had just collapsed.  I got the story off the wire, ran it in 
to the jock, and we decided that even though we were a music station, many 
of our listeners love sports, and Reggie was a very popular player.  We put 
in a call to the PD, and we ran the story as a bulletin.  Sometimes, common 
sense is what is needed... perhaps at WTAG they no longer have an emergency 
procedure, or they never told their board ops what to do in an emergency?