Local television Sunday was dominated by a single image: radar showing Hurricane Frances slashing the Florida peninsula, from the Georgia border to Key West.
As the day wore on, the Tampa Bay area became the bull's-eye and local news outlets provided full-time coverage.
The morning hours brought plenty of reports of damage on the east coast, including some damage to the reporters themselves. Several stations showed clips of a falling palm tree narrowly missing a Fox News reporter from an east coast affiliate.
A team from WFLA-Ch. 8 had its own narrow miss in Vero Beach. Just after Samara Sodos finished taping a report, a roof peeled off a nearby building and crushed her team's truck.
Between the reports from the storm front, Denis Phillips at WFTS-Ch. 28 and Mike Clay of 24-hour cable news outlet Bay News 9 offered particularly clear explanations of the dynamics of hurricanes, emphasizing why the worst was not over when the eye had passed into the gulf.
WTSP-Ch. 10 aired a history lesson about Hurricane Elena in 1985, an even slower storm that churned offshore for days. Footage of Bayshore Boulevard under several feet of water was interesting, as were shots of a 19-years-younger Dick Fletcher.
As more and more bay area residents lost power, radio became their main source of information. Many local stations switched to simulcasts of what various television stations were presenting, while others offered frequent updates.
News-talk station WFLA-970 AM took a different tack. Led by Jack Harris, it provided news and weather updates and interviews with various officials. The station also took calls from viewers.
WTSP and Bay News 9 aired photos that viewers took with camera phones: cars crushed under trees and one flying mailbox that had taken out a windshield.
Reporting from the beach on the Pinellas County side of the Gandy Bridge, WTSP reporter Virginia Johnson found a couple of guys (she called them "goofballs") who had brought several small children out to see the storm. "This is extremely irresponsible," she shouted into the wind.
WFLA cameraman Dave Kraut found serious bad behavior in Avon Park later in the day, filming a looter trying to plunder a store after the worst of the storm passed. He then called police.
