You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Streets of fire.
I still love that news jam.
Like any old dinosaur who has been around the tar pit a time or two, the jam doesn’t come as easily as it once did.
To feel that visceral over load now, the jam’s gotta be something different, something special, something that makes a you sit up in your hospital bed with a broken hip and say “holy crap!”
That news jam is a tingle that starts at your tail bone and shimmeys up your spine.
It radiates into your arms like breaking news and a police siren.
It pulses under skin. Even your eye brows feel alive.
The news jam is the feeling you get when you know you have a story that is breaking hard, probably exclusive, teeter tottering on crazy, perhaps even dangerous.
I’ve done a lot, seen a lot, covered a lot.
I had never seen city streets erupting like volcanos blowing man hole covers 15 feet into the air.
I have now!
It all starts with a tanker truck hauling gas and diesel fuel. For some reason the truck tips over and 8,500 gallons of flammable liquid splashes into the sewers.
There’s a spark and like a Bruce Willis film it follows the liquid into the dark recesses under Nashville.
Suddenly; BOOM.
Like Mt. St. Helen, fire erupts from sewer grates under 10 streets. There are multiple explosions as man-hole covers blow out of the asphalt like the space shuttle taking off.
It looks like a war scene from Baghdad.
Like most breaking news stories, it all starts with the Scanner.
Fire! Explosion! Gas leak! These alarming words blare from the tiny speaker.
These are the kinds of words that get a newsroom’s collective heart pumping.
If you were writing a story about a ribbon cutting; you stop.
If you were setting up an interview with the mayor; you hang up.
When the scanner gets ugly like it did Wednesday, you pretty much push back from your desk and get your ass out the door.
Kenny was one of those who got scuttled into the great news unknown.
Kenny is an old sea dog of a photographer. He’s covered everything that Music City has thrown his way.
After 3 decades, it would be hard to fool this grizzled news veteran.
Kenny is nothing if not calm and precise. After 4 plus decades of news gathering, he prefers his stories predictable.
But Kenny, like the rest of us, knows that news is a four letter word and predictable has way to many syllables.
Volcanic eruptions blowing out of a perfectly good street might not be his first choice for story coverage.
But Kenny is a veteran’s veteran and he shows up in the middle of hell before any one really knows what the hell is going on.
He has driven into the belly of the beast which is barfing up flames and farting petroleum flavored smoke out of the sewers.
It’s so chaotic, when Kenny shows up on Louisiana Avenue, people’s lawns are on fire.
WTF?
So he pulls up near some emergency crews parked on the volcanic thoroughfare.
That’s when a resident screams to the newsman “Get out of here. Manhole covers have been exploding.”
Kenny carries a handkerchief and keeps his works shirt tucked in.
You don’t have to tell this venerable ENG jockey to move back twice.
So Kenny backs up half a block and gets out of his rig.
He throws his camera on the sticks and zooms in to the very spot where he had almost parked.
His viewfinder is filled with a man pacing back and forth. There is a shirt wrapped around the man’s face. In the foreground you can see bursts of petroleum flavored vapor lighting up the afternoon sky with a sizzling orange.
Kenny is recording the scene and he locks down his shot.
He goes to his trunk to get his TVU, a device that allows him to send him video back to the station using cell phone technology.
Just as he is approaching his rolling camera, zoomed into the action….
BOOM.
There is a major eruption of fire and gas and angry churning flame.
The man with the shirt around his face jumps like a coyote shot with a bb.
He runs out of frame.
The fire-ball blows into the air.
Suddenly there’s another explosion as gas blows out another manhole cover.
Kenny’s viewfinder fills with blistering, swirling, burning energy.
Inside the dragon’s breath a manhole cover can be seen twisting like a quarter in a fiery tornado.
A third explosion is heard and the flames subside.
It is the shot of the day.
Hell; it’s the shot of the year.
Kenny will later tell me that he has never come so close to cashing in his chips.
He tells me he felt the blast on his body, the heat against the back of his neck.
The grizzled vet is no worse for ware.
He gets in his car and goes to another location and keeps shooting. The ultimate professional.
His footage is full of amazing, once in a lifetime type visuals.
His footage makes it on World News Tonight.
His footage is the talk of the town.
Kenny doesn’t like the attention and will play down the significance of the news moment.
Kenny wants to thank the neighbor who saved his life.
“Had I not backed up, this might have ended up very differently,” he will later say to the man on the phone.
He’s right.
This could have been much much different.
News people are cops without guns or bullet proof vests. Reporters and camera people are fire fighters without axes or helmets. Broadcast Journalists are daredevil sky divers without the parachute.
We live for the jam, we live for the win, we live for the day that the dragon belches flames out of a city street.
Kenny would never admit it, but somewhere deep inside, when the streets of Nashville became a Michael Bay blockbuster, Kenny was feeling that jam.
Maybe it was when the third manhole cover blew up behind him. Perhaps it was when the hair on the back of his neck was singed. Perhaps it was when every damn person in the newsroom had to stop by and pat him on the back.
Whatever doesn’t kill you in news is just cool.
Kenny was lucky to be alive Wednesday. He was also lucky to stand in the breath of the beast and soak in all its electrified uncertainty.
When city streets are measured with seismic devices and exclusive video, now that’s a jam
Life’s Crazy™