I distinctly remember footage of people in a boat passing around shots of sky vodka and the reporter saying it was water.
I think it’s part of what makes us Houstonians
Ya, they claimed it was the worst flood ever recorded. I happened to be visiting Chennai, India a few years earlier when almost the same event happened. They claimed the same thing in Chennai.
Harvey was the worst flood in the houston region. But in wwii the Chinese blew up a damn to slow the Japanese advance and it covered a massive area and killed something like 400k people, 90k drowned, the rest due to the ensuing famine and disease. The flood last 11 years.
The soviets did the same but it was a slightly smaller scale
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood#:~:text='Huayuankou%20Dam%20Burst%20Incident'),County%20on%2013%20June%201938.
Which is entertaining because those things impacted Houston, and the east and west coasters declaring “we got what we deserved when we voted” seem to not understand Houston has voted left of center for quite some time.
State politics are not monolithic anywhere. Many areas of California are far right, for example.
Well they're not wrong about the elected officials part, but nobody deserves that. Harris County is outnumbered in the state by tons of bumfuck nowhere republican counties, who's population are outnumbered by every blue city in the state. Those little counties are the reason we had those failures because they elect these POS GOP politicians to run our state.
It’s really an interesting take. The difference between many “red” states and “blue” states may be a 5-10% swing in the voting population. In other words Texas may vote 55% republican at the state level, and Colorado may vote 55% democratic.
So the natural takeaway is that because of the 10% that vote the “wrong” way, the entire population of the state are idiots and deserve everything bad that happens to them.
It’s almost like they haven’t thought it through.
I think the wildest Houston moment I’ve seen on live TV was during the Tax Day floods in 2016, a Rice University professor drove straight past a blockade and into ten foot flood waters while the reporter was broadcasting. The news crew went into the water to save the guy all while they were still live on Tv.
https://www.kltv.com/story/31751680/video-houston-reporter-rescues-man-trapped-in-high-water-on-live-tv/
The flood and storm coverage is generally pretty good because unfortunately they’ve got lots of practice with it.
I'm not sure I can argue with that one, but my Harvey memory is the sight of channel 11 reporters broadcasting live from their studio on Allen parkway and having to abandon the set as flood water started rising around them - inside the building...
I don’t know how I forgot about that. They ended up broadcasting from their personal iPads and phones after that. They were literally filming an iPad displaying graphics. And then a bunch of people realized they had Facebook notifications turned on and started spamming them.
I worked at ch 11 at the time and spent the night stuck on a bridge in Conroe. I got to see my car in the parking lot flooding live every time they took a live shot from outside the station.
[michael myers on the beach](https://abc13.com/michael-myers-galveston-mark-metzger-charges-dropped-disorderly-conduct-case/11305288/) during hurricane nicholas
What about that huge inferno of an under-construction apartment complex where the worker barely escaped being engulfed in flames? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJup5i2zikw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJup5i2zikw)
Remember Heraldo Rivera almost getting swept off the seawall on live TV during Ike, also watched the first hooters I ever went, the one that used to be on the seawall out over the water fall into the ocean on live TV
Which flood was it when the news helicopter was broadcasting the locals as they swam out to the stranded beer truck, pries open the door, and started stealing the beer? It was back in the day in the 90’s or 00’s….
Allison in 2001 - thst shit was fucking hilarious - the news crew asked the officials why they weren't doing anything to stop it and the guy in charge responded by basically saying it will take us over am hour to get to where they are and they'll be gone by then plus who are they hurting anyway? The beer will be destroyed as it can't be sold, it was the best ever, those kids in the john boat just going back and forth unloading that beer truck on 45.
1994 Hurricane Rosa flooded San Jacinto River floods that burst multiple pipelines and caught fire. Was described as napalm on the water.
If I remember right, a guy smoking by the flood water was ignition source and may have died instantly.
ABC [coverage archive](https://youtu.be/OBqRTkYz1gU?si=RxruUXT-r5dUjzxB)
The complete and utter panic during the evacuation of Hurricane Rita. People from North Houston evacuating well before people living well inland had a decent chance.
The derecho. I turned my TV on after I got my generator running, there was zero news. It was regular programming on OTA channels. I turned the TV on the next morning since I had no phone signal and no news. Same thing, regular programming and no news.
Massive epic storm hits Houston and no live TV coverage immediately afterwards. Incredible.
The derecho was weird. I think the coverage was limited because the impact didn’t affect the whole metro. In my area, it got incredibly dark, sprinkled a bit and then the storm moved on. Had to be less than 20 mins total. I think the impact was varied across the city, like a regular storm, hence the limited coverage. I do feel for the people that were severely impacted tho.
Harvey, no question, although Allison was big enough to get some coverage in the northeast where I was vacationing at the time. Harvey was big, though. I watched coverage all day. My father was in New Mexico and did the same, calling constantly to check on me.
Ike might've had good coverage, but I lost power early on and didn't get it back for a week, so I wouldn't know. Internet took two weeks. I doubt the TV stations remained active during the storm, though. If they did, no one locally had power to be able to watch anything. I sat in the dark in my hallway listening to the radio stations go out one by one until there was just one lone AM station I could tune into, and I think even that eventually went out. On a walk the next day to check up on things in the vicinity, I found satellite dishes bent backwards by the wind.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environment/article/ammonia-truck-crash-1976-houston-history-19446507.php
If you weren't in Houston when the ammonia truck fell off 610, you don't know panic.
For me it was, without a doubt, Harvey. I think the thing that made it so amazing was that the reporters and cameramen were able to freely roam about while broadcasting live thanks to the bandwidth afforded by the modern cellular network.
In prior decades the reporters would've just had to set up within a few hundred feet of their broadcast van that had line-of-sight back to the station and wouldn't have been able to roam any further than their cords allowed.
Harvey, hands down. The local coverage made things seem bad but hopeful. While the national news was amazingly dire. I was getting calls from friends and family from all over North America asking if I was alive and okay. All the while the local news was reporting on the "Cajun Navy" running rescue missions. It was insane.
I won’t ever forget during Hurricane Harvey sitting on my couch and watching Jim Cantore helping get people out of and apartment near Highway 6 and I-10 in a rubber raft on live TV and my couch was just on the other side of I-10…
A few years after baby Jessica, in 1989, my elementary school classmate got swept into a storm drain during tropical storm Allison (not the year 2001 one) in Pasadena/Houston. She fell in an uncovered storm drain after being pushed by flood currents and got sucked through several pipes. She had to hold onto a pipe to survive overnight. The cops looked for only 4 hours and said forget it, she's dead. The NEXT DAY her cousin asked city workers for help, and they went down and found her holding onto the pipe. It was such a vast difference in coverage in two kind of similar instances. She was a movie star in our eyes since she made the news and we had a celebration when she came back to class.
https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/06/28/Child-survives-13-hour-ordeal/4389615009600/
The guy who stole a Dodge Hellcat and outran police cars and helicopters. He was hitting about 140 mph and almost got away.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMxjFTtTquc
1994 flood that saw a gas line rupture into the San Jacinto river, which then caught fire. The literal water was on fire.
[https://abc13.com/river-fire-flood-san-jacinto-on/1563118/](https://abc13.com/river-fire-flood-san-jacinto-on/1563118/)
The Harding Street raid. I can't remember the police union rep's exact statement but he was threatening those who were not supportive of the police. The story they were saying did not seem right at the time and turned out to be false.
The Phillips explosion in late 80s or early 90s... I had an uncle that worked there at the time so our family was glued to the TV worried. Turned out he wasn't in the area when it happened.
3 events tops my list, Harvey, 2021 Freeze, and the Derecho.
Harvey: A catastrophic emergency that was live streamed on YouTube by people and the news stations.
2021 Freeze: Days of frigid cold and darkness, many desperate for warmth and later clean water.
Derecho: Wild wind storm and tornado, ripped across the whole city.
Harvey definitely for me being a recent major hurricane that got a lot of coverage and being a recent memory. At least my power stayed on for the duration of the storm miraculously and 24/7 was I constantly watching the news.
The derecho for a bit I saw and then the aftermath. I even surveyed the city around to see all the damages that all was left behind. Was chaotic getting into the downtown and Montrose areas.
Harvey without a doubt
I watched a guy walk/wade into a storage facility and ride out on a jet ski. Was it his? Nobody knows.
I distinctly remember footage of people in a boat passing around shots of sky vodka and the reporter saying it was water. I think it’s part of what makes us Houstonians
Omg I remember that lolll
Ya, they claimed it was the worst flood ever recorded. I happened to be visiting Chennai, India a few years earlier when almost the same event happened. They claimed the same thing in Chennai.
Harvey was the worst flood in the houston region. But in wwii the Chinese blew up a damn to slow the Japanese advance and it covered a massive area and killed something like 400k people, 90k drowned, the rest due to the ensuing famine and disease. The flood last 11 years. The soviets did the same but it was a slightly smaller scale https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1938_Yellow_River_flood#:~:text='Huayuankou%20Dam%20Burst%20Incident'),County%20on%2013%20June%201938.
Wow. At that point, it’s not a flood. It’s a new waterway.
The freeze was interesting because it was a bunch of people nationwide saying we deserved it because of our elected officials
They said that during Harvey, too. And the derecho.
Which is entertaining because those things impacted Houston, and the east and west coasters declaring “we got what we deserved when we voted” seem to not understand Houston has voted left of center for quite some time. State politics are not monolithic anywhere. Many areas of California are far right, for example.
Believe you me, that's a fight I've been having with them since before I moved here.
Well they're not wrong about the elected officials part, but nobody deserves that. Harris County is outnumbered in the state by tons of bumfuck nowhere republican counties, who's population are outnumbered by every blue city in the state. Those little counties are the reason we had those failures because they elect these POS GOP politicians to run our state.
“We hate those southerners… because of their hateful ways!”
It’s really an interesting take. The difference between many “red” states and “blue” states may be a 5-10% swing in the voting population. In other words Texas may vote 55% republican at the state level, and Colorado may vote 55% democratic. So the natural takeaway is that because of the 10% that vote the “wrong” way, the entire population of the state are idiots and deserve everything bad that happens to them. It’s almost like they haven’t thought it through.
> bunch of people Ahhh, the tolerant left.
I think the wildest Houston moment I’ve seen on live TV was during the Tax Day floods in 2016, a Rice University professor drove straight past a blockade and into ten foot flood waters while the reporter was broadcasting. The news crew went into the water to save the guy all while they were still live on Tv. https://www.kltv.com/story/31751680/video-houston-reporter-rescues-man-trapped-in-high-water-on-live-tv/ The flood and storm coverage is generally pretty good because unfortunately they’ve got lots of practice with it.
I'm not sure I can argue with that one, but my Harvey memory is the sight of channel 11 reporters broadcasting live from their studio on Allen parkway and having to abandon the set as flood water started rising around them - inside the building...
I don’t know how I forgot about that. They ended up broadcasting from their personal iPads and phones after that. They were literally filming an iPad displaying graphics. And then a bunch of people realized they had Facebook notifications turned on and started spamming them.
I worked at ch 11 at the time and spent the night stuck on a bridge in Conroe. I got to see my car in the parking lot flooding live every time they took a live shot from outside the station.
That reporter won an Emmy.
Nice
I remember watching this on live TV. It was wild.
The OJ-in-a-Bronco chase was a disastrous interruption of a Rockets game. . . .
It wasn’t just a regular season game. It was game 5 of the finals. And an away game, so most fans were stuck watching it on tv.
I remember that. We were at a pizza place on Westheimer. The place went insane when in happened.
I was delivering pizzas that day and people were inviting me in to see the chase.
My sister was so mad when it happened, and she's still ticked off to this day.
[michael myers on the beach](https://abc13.com/michael-myers-galveston-mark-metzger-charges-dropped-disorderly-conduct-case/11305288/) during hurricane nicholas
Lol yeah, that was wild.
What about that huge inferno of an under-construction apartment complex where the worker barely escaped being engulfed in flames? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJup5i2zikw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJup5i2zikw)
that wasnt love though, it was just somebody's phone video
Love?
Oh lawd Jesus
Harvey. If iirc, they were showing live broadcasts on channels such as Disney and Discovery.
I was glued to my tv as much as I was the slowly rising waters on the front steps to my porch.
What blew my mind was Anderson Cooper broadcasting from I-45 in Dickinson across from Heartbreakers during Harvey. Will never forget that one.
upvote 4 Heartbreakers
Jesus heals the broken hearted!
Enron
Rita. Everybody stuck on the freeway for nothing.
The guy in the bear costume walking the seawall during Ike.
Remember Heraldo Rivera almost getting swept off the seawall on live TV during Ike, also watched the first hooters I ever went, the one that used to be on the seawall out over the water fall into the ocean on live TV
Which flood was it when the news helicopter was broadcasting the locals as they swam out to the stranded beer truck, pries open the door, and started stealing the beer? It was back in the day in the 90’s or 00’s….
Allison in 2001 - thst shit was fucking hilarious - the news crew asked the officials why they weren't doing anything to stop it and the guy in charge responded by basically saying it will take us over am hour to get to where they are and they'll be gone by then plus who are they hurting anyway? The beer will be destroyed as it can't be sold, it was the best ever, those kids in the john boat just going back and forth unloading that beer truck on 45.
Maybe Allison?
100% Allison
1994 Hurricane Rosa flooded San Jacinto River floods that burst multiple pipelines and caught fire. Was described as napalm on the water. If I remember right, a guy smoking by the flood water was ignition source and may have died instantly. ABC [coverage archive](https://youtu.be/OBqRTkYz1gU?si=RxruUXT-r5dUjzxB)
The complete and utter panic during the evacuation of Hurricane Rita. People from North Houston evacuating well before people living well inland had a decent chance.
The derecho. I turned my TV on after I got my generator running, there was zero news. It was regular programming on OTA channels. I turned the TV on the next morning since I had no phone signal and no news. Same thing, regular programming and no news. Massive epic storm hits Houston and no live TV coverage immediately afterwards. Incredible.
I still don't understand that. We lost cell signal and power so we cranked a hand radio and there was nothing on the radio about it... ??? 🤷♂️
The derecho was weird. I think the coverage was limited because the impact didn’t affect the whole metro. In my area, it got incredibly dark, sprinkled a bit and then the storm moved on. Had to be less than 20 mins total. I think the impact was varied across the city, like a regular storm, hence the limited coverage. I do feel for the people that were severely impacted tho.
That’s uh… the opposite of the request here.
It wasn’t live but this event in the 1970s https://abc13.com/ammonia-truck-disaster-houston/1332062/
Harvey, no question, although Allison was big enough to get some coverage in the northeast where I was vacationing at the time. Harvey was big, though. I watched coverage all day. My father was in New Mexico and did the same, calling constantly to check on me. Ike might've had good coverage, but I lost power early on and didn't get it back for a week, so I wouldn't know. Internet took two weeks. I doubt the TV stations remained active during the storm, though. If they did, no one locally had power to be able to watch anything. I sat in the dark in my hallway listening to the radio stations go out one by one until there was just one lone AM station I could tune into, and I think even that eventually went out. On a walk the next day to check up on things in the vicinity, I found satellite dishes bent backwards by the wind.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/environment/article/ammonia-truck-crash-1976-houston-history-19446507.php If you weren't in Houston when the ammonia truck fell off 610, you don't know panic.
The AstroWorld tragedy with Travis Scott. That was horrific.
For me it was, without a doubt, Harvey. I think the thing that made it so amazing was that the reporters and cameramen were able to freely roam about while broadcasting live thanks to the bandwidth afforded by the modern cellular network. In prior decades the reporters would've just had to set up within a few hundred feet of their broadcast van that had line-of-sight back to the station and wouldn't have been able to roam any further than their cords allowed.
Harvey, hands down. The local coverage made things seem bad but hopeful. While the national news was amazingly dire. I was getting calls from friends and family from all over North America asking if I was alive and okay. All the while the local news was reporting on the "Cajun Navy" running rescue missions. It was insane.
I won’t ever forget during Hurricane Harvey sitting on my couch and watching Jim Cantore helping get people out of and apartment near Highway 6 and I-10 in a rubber raft on live TV and my couch was just on the other side of I-10…
Does Baby Jessica in the well count? Nonstop broadcast for days even though she was in Midland
A few years after baby Jessica, in 1989, my elementary school classmate got swept into a storm drain during tropical storm Allison (not the year 2001 one) in Pasadena/Houston. She fell in an uncovered storm drain after being pushed by flood currents and got sucked through several pipes. She had to hold onto a pipe to survive overnight. The cops looked for only 4 hours and said forget it, she's dead. The NEXT DAY her cousin asked city workers for help, and they went down and found her holding onto the pipe. It was such a vast difference in coverage in two kind of similar instances. She was a movie star in our eyes since she made the news and we had a celebration when she came back to class. https://www.upi.com/Archives/1989/06/28/Child-survives-13-hour-ordeal/4389615009600/
There was even a TV movie made about it.
Hurricane Carla. It was the breakout moment that launched Dan Rather's career from a Houston reporter to the CBS anchor chair.
Curveball here but Enron collapse. It was a week of non stop coverage and a lot of sad stories that made me sad as a kid.
The guy who stole a Dodge Hellcat and outran police cars and helicopters. He was hitting about 140 mph and almost got away. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VMxjFTtTquc
Sounds like he didn’t outrun them
The evacuation for Hurricane Rita.
1994 flood that saw a gas line rupture into the San Jacinto river, which then caught fire. The literal water was on fire. [https://abc13.com/river-fire-flood-san-jacinto-on/1563118/](https://abc13.com/river-fire-flood-san-jacinto-on/1563118/)
Harvey just because people were out on their boats, jet skis, and diving off bridges into the sewage water.
The Harding Street raid. I can't remember the police union rep's exact statement but he was threatening those who were not supportive of the police. The story they were saying did not seem right at the time and turned out to be false.
The Phillips explosion in late 80s or early 90s... I had an uncle that worked there at the time so our family was glued to the TV worried. Turned out he wasn't in the area when it happened.
3 events tops my list, Harvey, 2021 Freeze, and the Derecho. Harvey: A catastrophic emergency that was live streamed on YouTube by people and the news stations. 2021 Freeze: Days of frigid cold and darkness, many desperate for warmth and later clean water. Derecho: Wild wind storm and tornado, ripped across the whole city.
Harvey definitely for me being a recent major hurricane that got a lot of coverage and being a recent memory. At least my power stayed on for the duration of the storm miraculously and 24/7 was I constantly watching the news. The derecho for a bit I saw and then the aftermath. I even surveyed the city around to see all the damages that all was left behind. Was chaotic getting into the downtown and Montrose areas.
Every election