I have no doubt that all the Baltimore TV news teams responded quickly and fully and have their own stories to tell. This is part of what Baltimore’s CBS O&O, WJZ, did in the first hours as the magnitude of the tragedy unfolded.
At 1:30 in the morning on March 26, a container ship struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge across the Patapsco River in Baltimore, causing the bridge to collapse. The bridge was the second longest in the nation and the third longest in the world. The story became national news, and still grabs headlines.
Just a week ago, on Monday, April 15, dive teams found a fourth victim of the collapse in a vehicle underwater. There are still two men missing and presumed dead.
Given the enormity of the event and the fact that it occurred in the middle of the night, I wondered what it was like for a local TV news operation to respond as the story is unfolding in real time.
I have no doubt that all the Baltimore TV news teams responded quickly and fully and have their own stories to tell. This is part of what Baltimore’s CBS O&O, WJZ, did in the first hours as the magnitude of the tragedy unfolded.
Tanya Black, WJZ’s news director, started working at WJZ in 1988 as a part-timer on the assignment desk while still a student at the University of Maryland. She became the news director in May of 2023.
Black says on the night of incident, she got a call just after 2 a.m. from the assistant news director. “She says, I think we have a mass casualty incident. Something happened at the Key Bridge.”
Black says WJZ news crews were on their way to the site.
“I immediately started mobilizing, making phone calls to get crews on the ground to be able to sustain our coverage,” Black says.
She reached out to Kathy Hostetter, WJZ’s GM, and the decision was made to start the morning news at 4 a.m instead of the normal starting time of 4:30.
What the station knew at that moment was heard through the police scanner and DataMinr, but details were not confirmed.
Black says the station had “two news crews in the morning, a reporter and a photographer, and they were some of the first on the ground to get there.”
Black says before she left her house just after 4, crews on scene reported that the bridge was fully collapsed.
“Immediately my thought was, if this is what I believe it is, we’re not going off the air,” Black says. “And so two reporters and two anchors and a traffic reporter can’t sustain that coverage.”
Black says before becoming WJZ’s news director, she was the managing editor for several decades and during that time, “one of the things I did was make sure that I had a big breaking news plan. Part of that plan was making sure you had a crew that you could contact at any hour of the day, and they will mobilize,” Black says.
One of the first reporters she called was Paul Gessler, who’s been at WJZ for about five years.
Gessler says the station had secured a boat at a ramp that was close to Gessler’s house. They scrambled a photographer who was scheduled off that day to meet Gessler at the boat.
Black says she was looking for an angle that would differentiate WJZ’s coverage. “For me it was getting out on a boat. Because that was an angle that no one else had.”
Gessler says it was about 9 in the morning when they boarded the boat, just a small outboard.
The first thing he noticed as the boat came around a turn was Fort McHenry, where Francis Scott Key wrote the Star-Spangled Banner. He says there were more people than usual at Fort McHenry and they were all looking out.
“You make that turn and what used to be the bridge is a giant cargo ship and steel trusses in the water and the empty sky was the visual that really stuck out right away,” Gessler says.
“It was so calm, so quiet,” he says.
Gessler says he’s been on a “lot of breaking news scenes and it’s chaotic. The audio of ambulances, people on the sidewalk, crime scene tape, just the sounds of the city. But when you’re out on there on the water, it was the exact opposite. It was just calm and quiet and almost somber.”
Gessler says the captain of the boat asked him where he wanted to go. “Take us to where you think we can comfortably be out of the way,” Gessler told him.
The only other boats out there on the river were tugboats and Coast Guard vessels.
Gessler says in those early hours, it was still a search and rescue operation. “We were told be on the lookout for anything in the water,” he says. “You want to be of help because you’re one of the few boats on the water. We redirected our boat to floating debris just to make sure it wasn’t a body or a person.”
Gessler stayed on the boat doing live shots all day, from 9 in the morning until 6:30 that night. There was no head on the boat (nautical speak for bathroom).
“When you’re live on TV and you have limited information, you just go with what you’re looking at,” Gessler says. “You go with what you’re feeling. You try to be a sponge for the viewer. You absorb as many things from your senses as possible, and then spit it back out.”
“We took the viewer with us,” Black says. “To be able to see him on the water the way he was, showing the impact, and to be able to share that with the viewer was an unmatched perspective.”
Gessler says he lost count of how many live hits he did, but Black says his shot was up pretty much the entire day.
Gessler says his photojournalist, Kenny Whichard, who just graduated from Morgan State University, “did an exceptional job on the water that day, keeping everything in focus through his viewfinder while balancing himself in the wake of the Patapsco River. I am so proud of this team, and I’m proud of what we did for this community.”
NOTE: WJZ partnered with United Way of Central Maryland to support the Bridging the Gap Fund to help those most affected by the recent collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge.
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