This RCA tape begins with Peter Jennings narrating The Century on WEWS Cleveland, then switches to WEWS rebroadcasting WCPO Cincinnati’s coverage of the April 9, 1999 Blue Ash and Montgomery tornado. Channel 3 breaks in too. This is a Cleveland recording of Cincinnati coverage, not a direct WCPO capture.
The storm coverage includes a pager-alert segment, a CinciNow.com piece, insurance information, and a Fast95 illegal-operation message on the weather radar. Somebody got a Windows error during tornado coverage and kept going.
Program inventory
- The Century with Peter Jennings, including later segments on Yo-Yo Ma and the Ayatollah
- WCPO Blue Ash and Montgomery tornado coverage rebroadcast on WEWS, plus a Channel 3 interruption
- Storm pager and email alerts, CinciNow.com, insurance information, and the Fast95 radar error
- Maury with a sextuplets segment, part of Oprah, and 20/20 reports on Kosovo and Iraq
- Cleveland station continuity and local advertising
Public retrospective footage of the storm exists elsewhere. This tape is still a very good reminder that a live radar computer had the same ideas about timing as every other Windows machine.
