I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned it, but there’s been a bit of snow over the last few days.
In fairness, it’s been pretty bad – according to the experts, the worse in nearly two decades. For once the worse of the weather was in the South of the UK and while here in the North we were hit, it didn’t have as much an impact as it did in London and the South-East.
And as ever, a little bit of snow and everthing comes grinding to a halt, trains across the South East were cancelled, no buses ran in London and Heathrow Airport was closed. In turn businesses shut up shop, schools stayed locked up and somehow everyone felt it was a good idea to work at home.
In Manchester, we were faced by a layer of snow across Greater Manchester and issues on the roads on the higher grounds to the North of the city.
Here, we had major problems on the roads with snow and ice causing problems, and many school closures – but one thing it made it easier to deal with at Key 103 – we were warned that the snow was coming…yes, for once the weather men and women were right…
Local radio stations should come into their own when the bad weather bites. People want to know three key pieces of information…
- The Weather – How bad is the snow…
- The Traffic and Travel – Will I be able to get to work/school? Are the trains/trams/buses running?
- The School Closures- Is my son/daughter’s school open?
Any breakfast show should managing to broadcast the first two shouldn’t be difficult. Even stations without employed traffic reports or ‘down-the-line’ updates, most will at the least be able to access the latest traffic information online. But school closures are often tricky…with the information coming in on the day and there’s lots of it!
With the advance warning from the weather forecasters, I was asked to come in to help out at Key 103, with my sole duty being to take calls from schools and update the website.
Now, that doesn’t sound like a job that you need to get someone in to specifically do, but when you’re receiving 30 + calls an hour it would take a lot of time out of the normal staff’s time.
And the information is really important, when we last had snow back in December, it was the busiest day for traffic all month on www.key103.co.uk, by a clear margin.
Over the last few days, traffic to the Key 103 website has been at such high levels that the site han’t been able to cope and has been regularly crashing – whilst a failure for technology it shows their really is a demand for the information.
It wasn’t the easiest jobs in the world, with websites crashing, headteachers getting annoyed and parent’s being rude but we managed to provide a full service for parent’s needing to know if their kids were in school. To make it easier for parents we created a direct link for them to use – www.key103.co.uk/schools – and when the website was down, we read the full list out on air nearly every fifteen minutes to keep people up to date.
It’s at time like these that you realise how much people are now relying on the media for updates in difficult situations, and how important it is that radio is able to provide the latest for their audiences.
I bet the staff at BBC Nottingham will wish it didn’t pause overnight when they get in tomorrow morning…
I can still the letter ‘C’ mind you…
