Ginger Zee, chief meteorologist for ABC News, provided her millions of social media followers with behind-the-scenes updates before and during Hurricane Ian as well as live reports on ABC World News Tonight and Good Morning America.
The last week in September, Ginger Zee, chief meteorologist for ABC News, had plans for a fun trip. Then Hurricane Ian approached the coast of Southwest Florida. “I had to skip our family vacation,” Zee says.
Duty calls. Such is the life of a network news reporter and meteorologist.
Zee made plans to be in Tampa on Monday, Sept. 27, ahead of the storm, ready to pivot when and where it would come ashore.
By Tuesday morning, Sept. 28, it was apparent Ian was headed to turn east the next day onto the shores of Southwest Florida with the eye wall passing directly over Fort Myers and Sanibel/Captiva Island.
So Zee and her team drove south from Tampa to Fort Myers, about a two-hour trip. Along the way, Zee was posting updates via social media, taking her followers along as passengers.
Zee has 1.2 million followers on Instagram, 1.1 million Twitter followers and 631,000 followers on Facebook, so social media was a great way for Zee to connect with them from wherever she was. All she needed was her mobile phone.
“They are such different platforms, so I don’t always post the same things on each one,” Zee says. “I like Instagram Live the best because there is the ability to embed pictures and video as you are talking. The live part allows me to answer people’s questions specifically. That is a big, powerful way to answer someone’s questions and quell their concerns very quickly.”
Engaging social media followers in the process of covering a major event like Hurricane Ian can spur interest in the story and possibly lead to them watching coverage of the story on television.
In Fort Myers, she met up with other ABC News personnel (camera operators, audio tech, producer, technical ops, engineer and drone team) at a hotel resort central to the area, close enough to the storm’s wrath but not too close.
“It’s just a really good central spot for me having access to all those barriers and islands,” Zee says. “We thought logistically that made a lot of sense and I just know that the building is sound. We would have storm surge for sure, but it was a little bit safer, which everybody likes.”
In addition to her social media posts, Zee was providing live reports throughout the hurricane to ABC World News Tonight and Good Morning America.
What made Hurricane Ian different than other hurricanes Zee has covered was how long the eyewall sat over the area, she says.
.@Ginger_Zee is reporting live from Fort Myers as Hurricane Ian makes its way toward land: "We are in the eye wall of Hurricane Ian. That is the strongest part of the storm." https://t.co/hi9rm5f86q pic.twitter.com/z1OyT0bdOu
“Not just 45 minutes or two hours of intensity, it was six to seven hours of sitting in the eyewall,” Zee says.
Even well-built structures start to come apart after that long of being exposed to 150 mph winds and storm surge, she says.
Zeesays most people don’t understand how fast storm surge works. In Hurricane Michael, the storm surge “went from nothing on the road in front of us to the top of the first floor in 90 seconds. It was so fast,” she says.
While Ian’s storm surge was a little slower, it was significant.
“It can be essentially a wall of water,” she says. “It took out cars. It took out buildings. It had to be 10, probably 12 feet.”
Just hours after Ian passed, Zee visited an RV park packed with 900 mobile homes.
“Each of these mobile homes had taken a minimum of 10, probably closer to 13 or 14 feet of water in some of the places,” Zee says.
She met a fragile, older woman in the park who had not evacuated. The woman told Zee she rolled the dice and rode it out in her mobile home.
“So, she is in her place and the water comes up really fast, so she got herself and her cat up on the bed, which was already floating,” Zee says. “Everything else is floating in her house and she only ends up with a foot and a half of air above her to breathe and the water didn’t rise anymore, so she is fortunate.”
Zee says the woman lost her job, her home and everything she had.
“She brought me over to her cat and she said I have my cat, I have my cat food, my birth certificate and I have got this,” Zee says. “I have never seen a bigger vodka.”
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