JOANN RANDLES “You’ve probably travelled the night before,


arrived around 11pm or midnight and you’re back up again at 5am, sometimes doing a 12-hour day and then you go again,” he says. “When we covered Storm Babet in Scotland, we did about three 14–15 hour days back to back.” BBC journalist Alastair McKee was a presenter of BBC Inside


Out when the Somerset Levels flooded in 2014 – in the UK’s wettest winter in 250 years. More than 150 homes and 17,000 acres of farmland were destroyed as the whole area became submerged. Residents were ordered to evacuate and the Royal Marines were deployed to reinforce flood defences. McKee had covered floods – but this was on another scale. “It was a massive story,” he says. “I remember driving a


15-mile round trip just to get five miles from the motorway to the village we had identified.” McKee was encouraged to ‘get stuck in’ and remembers climbing aboard a makeshift pontoon that was floating through a village dropping off sandbags. “I ended up on this barge, meeting people who were living on the first floor of their house, refusing to leave,” he says. He and the accompanying cameraman and producer had


to keep the equipment dry while finding somewhere to film. “There was a sequence where they wanted me to go into someone’s home,” recalls McKee. “I leapt off the barge and, as my foot went in to the water, I remember thinking, I don’t think my boots are big enough and I remember seeing the water going up to my waist. I made a face and the cameraman smiled and kept filming.” “We were very aware of the risks. Flood water is a mixture of drain water, sewage and rain, but you have to treat it like sewage. At times, it was chest height – something the BBC wouldn’t let me do now. “You’re dealing with people who are losing everything and, for some of them, it wasn’t even the first time it had happened. I think that was the challenge for us – we couldn’t help them but also we didn’t want to be exploiting them.” McKee ended up helping people try to salvage belongings.


“As a journalist, you want to get the biggest, loudest version of the story, but you can never take for granted the impact that it has on people’s lives.” Alastair McKee, senior journalist, BBC


“I had to really use the physicality of my body to anchor myself.” Charlotte Leeming, north of England correspondent, Sky News


“My boss once said as I was heading out to a storm: ‘I want to see you strapped to a post.’ ” Nick Ellerby, broadcast journalist, Talksport


“I just said, ‘Look, you take that, I’ll grab those’ and I ended up having a conversation about ‘do you really need that lamp stand?’,” he recalls. Looking back, he thinks the empathy he had for the victims came across and helped them get the footage and


interviews they needed. The BBC’s rules on health and safety have changed 0a lot since then. McKee says he would not be allowed to mount a floating pontoon without a life jacket or buoyancy aid now. Ten years previously in August 2004, BBC radio producer


Matt Small had just joined BBC Radio Cornwall as a reporter when a devastating flood swept through Boscastle. Heavy rain caused two rivers to burst their banks, sending some two billion litres of water down the valley into Boscastle. Cars, walls and bridges were swept out to sea and buildings destroyed, resulting in millions of pounds worth of damage. A major rescue operation was mounted. Fortunately, no one died.


“I remember the north Cornwall MP, Paul Tyler, phoning


the newsroom to say that the flood water was rising, and he was trapped in his car,” recalls Small. Ironically, Small had been staying at the Wellington Hotel in


the village the previous weekend. The ground floor was flooded and the contents of the office (including his room bill) were swept out to sea. There were no telecommunications in the village and mobile phones had poor or no reception. “You’d have to drive miles out of the Valency Valley if you needed to file stuff back,” he says. Small interviewed quite a few victims and remembers


walking through Boscastle one evening several days after the flood and hearing the singing of a local shanty group. “It was moving and authentically Cornish – the recording


featured in one of the packages I put together,” he says. So what’s the best advice for covering extreme weather? One thing every journalist agrees on is a decent set of


waterproofs. “Clothing is critical, otherwise you’re shafted,” says Ellerby. “Once you sort that out, you can do anything.”


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