An urgent Associated Press alert came over, notifying me and others in our newsroom about a deadly shooting at a medical lab in Oregon.  Two people were dead.  As I have friends in Portland, and worked there for 4 years in the 1990's, I started searching on-line for more information.  Police had blocked off the area, and the location stood out:  Martinazzi Square in Tualatin.  Boy, that brought back memories. 

In 1996, our winter weather pattern in Oregon had brought us a confluence of events that created the worst flooding in decades.  It started with severe snow and ice storms, followed by rain and a warm snap.  I was a reporter at the NBC station in Portland.  I'd been sent out to cover a blizzard at the western entrance to the Gorge; I grabbed my bag of winter weather gear and went, where I described, on live TV, the "wind-whipped flakes of snow pounding my face like tiny ice-picks", or something to that effect.  Here's another memory:  no bathroom around for miles, and no way to leave the live truck location to find one.   

Some time later, an ice storm hit, and I was sent out to a frozen overpass for live coverage.  There, the most memorable thing was my oh-so-timely purchase the previous night of a pair of crampons that I'd seen in the aisle of a hardware store.  The crampons were steel spikes that attached to my boots with rubber bands.  The ice was so slick, any step in mere boots could send you flying and landing on your back, even where the ground was level.  Those crampons were the only way I was able to stay vertical, while interviewing stranded drivers and bus riders.  I added those crampons to my bag of indispensable gear.   

Now back to Martinazzi Square.  After the snow and the ice that had built up started melting in the warm snap that followed, the ground around the Portland metro area started getting saturated, as did almost all of Western Oregon between the Cascades and the coast.  Rivers started swelling with the melt-off.  The "falls" upriver from Tualatin became more of a level churning mass of water, simply because the river below rose so high.  Tualatin's Martinazzi Avenue became one of the places where the overflowing water from the nearby river started covering streets, blocking traffic, rising higher and higher.   Guess who got that assignment?  Right you are. 

Well, I came well-equipped in some ways, with my own set of hip-waders, stowed in that huge bag of gear.  I waded right into the middle of a normally busy intersection, and proceeded to deliver live reports for our ongoing flood coverage.  The water reached up above my knees, maybe to my thighs, at the deepest point.  I was there probably for 12 hours.  It was cold.  It was wet, with all the rain.  At least here, I could use the restroom at one of the few businesses still open.  The sight of that deep water had attracted its share of onlookers, people who wanted to take part in the spectacle of this flood event.  I remember so many nice, helpful people.  Someone volunteered to get us food.  Another kind woman brought me a hat, saying she'd seen me on TV and I looked cold.  (I still have that warm hat!  It’s now part of my “gear” bag.)  Fortunately, at some point, the rain started letting up.  The mood of everyone around, including our crew, started to lift.  Maybe the worst was over, we thought.  It was.  But the flood-waters wouldn’t recede for weeks.

I remember the physical misery of covering that flood; it probably stands out too much in my mind.  We, the reporters, photographers and live truck engineers, were wet, cold and sleep-deprived.  The sheer volume of stories to cover was overwhelming.  Seeing the toll on people was difficult.  I interviewed a woman whose mother was crushed and killed, while in her own home, when another home’s foundation gave way and it slid down the hill onto hers.  In coping with her grief, she, too, offered me something that I treasure to this day.  It’s a beautiful antique glass plate; she wanted me to have something by which to remember her mother.  I interviewed a bunch of people who lived along a tributary stream.  Parts of their homes were washed away.  I know they didn’t want to hear it, but I told them they were lucky compared to some of the others I’d talked to. 

Now it’s November, and we’re bracing for winter weather coverage here at KKTV.  Our meteorologist, Brian Bledsoe, says it’s going to be an active storm season.  As one of the station’s nightly anchors, I’ll probably be inside this nice warm studio, bringing you that coverage.  Our hard-working reporters and photographers are going to be the ones heading out into the elements, providing the live reports from the roadsides and mountains, as I once did.  Our viewers will appreciate all that you tell them, but they can never appreciate fully how cold and wet you’ll be, and how miserable it can get.  I can.  All I can say to our crews, is, “Been there, felt that”.  Believe me, I empathize more than you know.  That, and bring your gear.