How We Cover Severe Weather

If you watched our newscasts Wednesday, we ran a story about why we interrupt programming during severe weather situations. It's an issue that brings out passionate responses in many people. If you missed the story, you can watch it here.

When severe weather happens, we have a system for breaking into programming. Here are the guidelines we use:

Tornado Warning
When a Tornado Warning is issued for any part of the Stateline, we do a cut-in no matter what. The length of the cut-in depends on the location of the warning and whether or not there's an actual tornado on the ground or if the tornado is radar indicated.

Tornado Warning Example: Warning for Winnebago County

If the warning is near a heavily populated area or we know for sure a violent tornado is on the ground, we will typically go into wall-to-wall (or non-stop) coverage until the threat has passed.

Severe T-Storm Warning
Severe thunderstorms are handled a little bit differently. First of all, we only tend to do cut-ins for our designated market area (or DMA). These are our core counties and the areas that most heavily rely on the information we provide.


There are obviously exceptions to this rule. If a storm is in one of our outlying counties and is especially dangerous, we will do a cut-in just to make sure everyone is aware of the situation.

Severe T-Storm Warning Example: Warning for Stephenson County

Trust me, we don't like cutting into programming just as much as you don't like having your favorite shows interrupted. Our primary job is to keep the public safe from dangerous weather, so if you see us on your television when we're not supposed to be, trust us, there's a good reason it's happening. -BA