Through Free Media... We WON Coverage

On May 13, tornadoes hit northern Missouri in Adair and Sullivan counties, including the city of Kirksville. I was covering Jennifer Kovaleski's shift that night, and was in full in summer mode, getting ready to check out for the weekend before summer school started Sunday night at 11 p.m. to start producing the morning show. About 30 minutes into my shift, we get a call about the tornadoes in Kirskville and if we were covering them. We typically cover large weather disasters across the state and sent a reporter and photographer to the scene.

Immediately we started twittering about the tornado and that we would have more at 10. People started tweeting us back and our reporter, Jessica Miller, got requests from FOX 4 in Kansas City, the Weather Channel, the AP, along with other stations across the state, to do phone interviews.

One of the things Jill Glavan and I started to do was build a uMapper map to illustrate where these tornadoes were touching down. At first we just highlighted where possible tornadoes had touched down, but once we checked the weather wire, we were able to update our map with information from the National Weather Service and where its trained spotters had seen tornadoes.

By searching the location on uMapper, we were able to pinpoint a location, then add a text balloon which described and distributed our information. The nice thing about uMapper is once we embeded the map into our website, every update we made to the map on uMapper (when we added information) it updated the map that was embedded automatically.

To view our tornado touchdown map, please click here.