During her coverage of Hurricane Ian, one reporter went to extraordinary lengths to keep her belongings dry, but the rest of us have also gone to such lengths to protect our own property.
On Wednesday, viewers who were watching NBC’s coverage of the Category 4 storm in Florida noticed an unusual mic attachment that the network was using.
Kyla Galer of NBC explained to the audience that in order to shield the microphone from the precipitation, she had placed a condom over it.
‘A lot of people are asking, what is on my microphone. It is what you think it is — it’s a condom!’ Galer explained.
‘It helps protect the gear, we can’t get these mics wet. There’s a lot of wind, there’s a lot of rain, so we got to do what we got to do, and that is put a condom on the microphone.’
She was reporting from the Naples area of Florida, where thousands of people have been left without power as a result of the Category 4 storm.
After that, Galer continued to use the microphone as part of her reporting, providing NBC’s viewers with live coverage while also safeguarding her equipment.
‘That’s how you wrap up a weather segment for sure,’ said one social media user, posting on Twitter.
Florida reporter defends putting condom on mic during Hurricane Ian broadcast pic.twitter.com/s4txv1BLhx
— HARD FACTOR (@HardFactorNews) September 28, 2022
‘My Waterman Broadcasting colleague has been fielding lots of questions, haha,’ said ABC7’s Jeff Butera, who added that they practice ‘safe hurricane reporting’.
‘Weather comes at you hard!’ said a second social media user.
‘If it works it works’, added a third.
As a result of news stations sending their most experienced storm chasers to cover the hurricane, journalists all over the state have been subjected to violent weather.
A weather forecaster from CBS was sent to Miami, which is the largest city in Florida. She was stationed outside by the palm trees that are emblematic of the state while it poured rain upon her and the news crew.
One weather forecaster from Fox News traveled all the way to the state to get ready for Hurricane Irma and tracked the storm in Charlotte County while wearing thick goggles and a long raincoat.
One or more of the other correspondents can be seen wearing helmets to protect their heads from the flying debris.
According to the Pentagon, 3,200 members of Florida’s national guard have been called into service, and an additional 1,800 will report later.
Authorities in a number of cities, including Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Tampa, have been handing out free sandbags to local residents as a means of assisting them in protecting their homes from the threat of flooding.
In addition, terrified locals have been furiously digging enormous trenches in an effort to divert flood water away from their homes, and others have emptied the shelves of local supermarkets of all of the water and supplies they could find.
Because more than one million homes along Florida’s west coast are at risk of damage from storm surge caused by Hurricane Ian, schools in 26 different districts across the state of Florida have announced that they will be closed.
