Howard County Fire

I love the adrenaline rush of spot news. After starting my day at KOMU anchoring and writing some Today Show cutins at 6:15 and instead of getting in my mid-morning nap because of my over-achieving (love it) producing student, I opted to leave the station at 7 after finding a sub for the ten. Went out to dinner and when I was leaving got a call from a fellow reporter, "What is the fire in Howard County? I can see from my house!"

Sure enough I look up in the sky and you can see an orange glow... clear as day... right along the horizon. Immediately, Justin Redeker and I went off to the fire. I called the newsroom to let them know I was going and to see what they needed.

When we finally got on scene, we found Kyle Seever. Soon after we arrived, Ryan Takeo and Jill Glavan came in the live truck. I've worked with Jill before on the spot news -- you might remember the tornado in Kirskville with our obsessive twittering and tornado touchdown map -- so I knew this was going to be awesome.

Immediately we started setting up the live shot. Ryan and Jill assesed the scene, got the info ready for the hit. I was the direct link to the booth -- once we got the shot set, we called in right away to find out our hit. We were slightly irritating the state troopers because we refused to set the truck up in the first place they told us due to power lines, we were trying to get what we could hit, before and if they made us move after we compromised with us on a place to set the truck.

The Howard County Fireman who was our liasion to their command post was GREAT to work with. He was really open about information and not dancing around questions. If he didn't know he just said it, got us connected to the command center, just was one of the better officials I've worked with.

I've only field produced one time before... it was for an HFR -- I didn't like it as much. This, I LOVED. I loved helping get our station's information ready for air. I wanted to help and be that extra person to get the extra information.

Here's our coverage from KOMU.com -- check out the web extras!