Roanoke Rapids Daily Herald ready for Hurricane Irene
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With Hurricane Irene bearing down on North Carolina, The Daily Herald in Roanoke Rapids made plans to print the Sunday, Aug. 28 edition earlier than usual on Saturday before the storm was projected to hit. Unfortunately, Irene arrived early and with more force than forecasts predicted. The Daily Herald lost electricity early Saturday and was forced to move the press run to late Sunday morning.
With widespread power outages across the state, including every single person who worked at the office Sunday, more than a dozen newspaper staffers worked a full day just to complete two full sections of pages despite the building not having power or Internet until around 11 a.m. To complicate matters even more, the staff was unable to connect to the servers and network. Pages were paginated on individual workstations with files being transferred manually using USB jump drives.
A separate group of staffers then spent the evening printing and delivering the newspaper, and The Daily Herald avoided missing a publication day.
Editorial staffers worked throughout Sunday, Monday and early Tuesday to produce a special "extra" section in addition to the normal Tuesday newspaper to commemorate Hurricane Irene’s impact, which proved much greater than first thought. The "extra" section included official accounts from 12 municipalities, first-hand comments from residents who had trees crash through their homes and a breakdown from the National Weather Service as to why Hurricane Irene, a category 1 storm, looks to be turning into the largest and most costly natural disaster in the state’s history. More than 60,000 people in the greater Roanoke Valley lost power during the storm and many thousands were still without electricity days later.