Investigators: Gym owner started deadly blaze that killed firefighter Scott Deem | The San Antonio Express-News

Local officials have released few details about a deadly blaze that killed San Antonio firefighter Scott Deem. But an arrest warrant affidavit obtained by the Express-News reveals that arson suspect Emond Javor Johnson was plagued by financial problems and confessed to starting the fire to get out of a monthly $2,500 lease at the Spartan Gym. Authorities arrested Johnson Wednesday. Story by Emilie Eaton, John Tedesco, Caleb Downs, Fares Sabawi and Kelsey Bradshaw

The Wall | USA Today Network

More than 30 reporters and photographers interviewed migrants, farmers, families, tribal members — even a human smuggler — to examine the feasibility of President Donald Trump’s border wall. “In this report, you can watch aerial video of every foot of the border, explore every piece of fence, even stand at the border in virtual reality.”

Harvey laid bare lack of resources, training at Houston Fire Department | The Houston Chronicle

When Houston firefighters rushed into Tropical Storm Harvey’s currents in late August, they were hobbled by a lack of resources, old equipment and a shortage of manpower ready to go when the storm hit, according to a Chronicle review of internal reports and emails, and dozens of interviews with firefighters and other officials. “Internal reports show fire department leaders should have known they weren’t prepared for a catastrophic hurricane.” Story by St. John Barned-Smith

Texas official after Harvey: The ‘Red Cross was not there’ | The Texas Tribune and ProPublica

“The Red Cross’ anemic response to Hurricane Harvey left officials in several Texas counties seething, emails obtained by ProPublica show. In some cases, the Red Cross simply failed to show up as it promised it would.” Story by Justin Elliott, Jessica Huseman and Decca Muldowney

Police responded to his 911 call for help. He died. What happened to Tony Timpa? | The Dallas Morning News

Dallas media organizations spent more than a year examining Tony Timpa’s mysterious death and fighting for public records from the city of Dallas and Dallas County after Timpa’s family complained that police were stonewalling. They discovered that Timpa, unarmed and frightened, died in the custody of police officers as they mocked him. Story by Cary Aspinwall

Kilgore College VP was told quit or be fired, files show | The Longview News-Journal

At the time of his June resignation, records obtained by the News-Journal reveal that former Kilgore College Vice President of Finance Duane McNaney was set to be fired over performance issues and “serious misconduct” — problems that weren’t previously known until the newspaper filed an open records request. Story by Meredith Shamburger

Amid staff exodus at health agency, some say chief has political agenda | The Texas Tribune

Dozens of experienced senior staff members have left Texas’ health and human services agency, saying morale has sunk after the arrival of Executive Director Charles Smith, a longtime ally of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. “Current and former employees attribute the exodus to widespread dissatisfaction with the executive commissioner, whom they say lacks technical knowledge of the agency and pushes a political agenda backed by the governor.” Story by Edgar Walters

Did I miss a good story? Contact me or leave a comment below. Don’t forget to sign up for blog updates and check out more watchdog journalism from the great state of Texas.

The post Texas watchdog journalism roundup: Arson, the Red Cross and Trump’s wall appeared first on John Tedesco.

Texas weather can be wild and dangerous, as Hurricane Harvey is showing us this week, so here are some techniques that have helped me track the impact of storms, floods and other natural disasters in San Antonio and other parts of the state:

Weather forecasts and warnings

The National Weather Service provides so much useful information it’s hard to know where to start. For Bexar County, I usually check the service’s detailed “zone” weather page, which provides a snapshot of current conditions, forecasts and hazardous weather warnings.

Zone forecasts are available for all counties — you can find the ID number for your zone in this list of Texas counties. The list includes links to RSS feeds and profiles for each zone. Click on a profile, and you’ll see all current weather watches, warnings or advisories for that particular zone.

I follow my local office of the National Weather Service on Twitter and turn on mobile notifications when the weather turns bad. The forecasters in your area use Twitter to provide a steady stream of updates and weather data.

ICYMI: Here's a short summary of the peak winds & highest observed rain totals from #Harvey.

For a full listing: https://t.co/4vep1s1DY4 pic.twitter.com/omNlaa5C60

— NWS San Antonio (@NWSSanAntonio) August 29, 2017

AccuWeather Platinum is the best smartphone app I’ve found to keep track of the weather. It not only tells you when it’s going to rain in your location, it predicts the intensity and duration. It also offers an interactive Doppler radar map.

Google provides a real-time, interactive map of public alerts for a wide variety of emergencies.

Measuring rainfall

The National Weather Service offers hourly weather observations, including rainfall totals, for the past three days at the San Antonio International Airport, the main site for weather stats in Bexar County.

The weather service also compiles archives of observations and data for the San Antonio area, and it issues public information statements with more rainfall totals, river flooding and other statistics.

Floods and traffic

Bexarflood.org provides an interactive map of low water crossings and their current status. You can sign up for alerts when a crossing closes or opens. The city of San Antonio also posts emergency street closures.

The Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service offers an interactive map of current and predicted river levels. Each site on the map is color-coded to show where major flooding is expected to occur.

TexasFlood.org, a state website, provides a similar river-level map that lets you add additional layers of data, such as weather advisories and Doppler radar images. You can set up an account and sign up for email or text alerts when specific gages show a river or creek is flooding.

Drive Texas is a map provided by the Texas Department of Transportation that shows current traffic conditions on Texas highways and roads. The map shows any flooded roadways.

Rescues and emergency responses

The San Antonio Fire Department’s “active calls” page shows a list and location of emergencies firefighters are responding to, including high-water rescues.

Broadcastify provides a digital feed of police and firefighter radio traffic at departments across the United States. The scanner traffic is available on its website and through a smartphone app.

The Texas Department of Public Safety provides daily situation reports about any emergency conditions in the state and how officials are responding. The reports cover everything from hurricanes to droughts.

CPS Energy provides a map showing the location of current power outages in its service area and the number of customers without power.

Did I forget anything? Contact me or leave a comment below if I missed any useful resources and I’ll be sure to add them to the list.

The post Web tools to track weather, flooding and natural disasters in Texas appeared first on John Tedesco.

If you read weather updates on Facebook from the San Antonio Express-News, then you’re keenly aware that it’s summer and the forecaster is not happy about it.

“There is no weather,” a typical forecast reads. “There is only this. Always this. Unchanging. Eternal. Forever. This.”

Then there was this gem:

“It’s mostly sunny and almost 100 degrees again, a forecast that’s not even fit for a country music song. Well, certainly not a good country music song that goes platinum and wins a bunch of awards as a crossover sensation that does particularly well with the 18-24 demographic while simultaneously sparking a resurgence in line dancing that leads to lots of bad paperback romance novels with taglines like, ‘She danced to remember. He danced to forget. They found one another — and love — on The Line.’

“The forecast would at least need some summer showers to pull that off. You can’t just openly profess your secret love outdoors when it’s 100 degrees. It’s simply not done.”

Don’t forget the update that called for readers to create their own forecasts, with a suggestion of “partly snuggly and 40 percent of kitten.”

The comedic genius behind these quirky Facebook posts is Chris Lykins, a recent hire by the Express-News team that oversees the newspaper’s premium site for subscribers.

Over the past few months, Chris has miraculously transformed boring weather forecasts into creative, amusing rituals that a growing number of readers look forward to.

I sat down with Chris to talk about his unique job, his inspiration, and his goals as the newspaper’s funny weather guy. Here are the highlights, lightly edited:

Question: First of all, where did you get the idea to write these clever weather updates?

Answer: I started when I first got on Facebook when I was at Seguin at the Gazette and was just trying to inject some levity. Because so much of what we do is really kind of depressing at times. You’re dealing with sad stories and tragic stories. And I was just trying to spice things up a little bit and make it clear that newspapers offer more than bad news. And it started to take off from there.

It ended up driving a lot of new Facebook fans. What was silence sort of got replaced by conversations. And not just on the weather posts but on the other stories that we posted.

People were getting more engaged?

Yeah, we sort of built this community to the point where I didn’t even have to really do a lot of moderation on some of the story posts because people took it upon themselves that this was their home on Facebook and they were going to treat it that way. So it was a pleasant sort of surprise.

You didn’t expect that.

I really didn’t know. I’ve always had an offbeat, quirky sense of humor. And there were a couple people at first who really didn’t like it. They expected the newspaper to be stoic. The thing I used to explain to people is, the newspaper has always been more than that. It’s always had comics. And puzzles. And opinions pages. It’s more than just headlines that you typically see. So we wanted to bring a little of that to Facebook and it paid off.

What time frame was this when you were at the Gazette?

Oh, gracious.

Because then you went to New Braunfels, right?

Yes, that was one of the things that I was asked to do when I came over to New Braunfels. And I probably did it for two years maybe in New Braunfels. And probably five or six before that in Seguin. But it got progressively more elaborate as I went on.

Probably the best known stuff was the three posts that I did in New Braunfels that ended up being a weather romance. It just happened one night. I was sitting at home and I was thinking, I gotta come up with a different way to do this because I’m running out of this one-liner material. And I said, what would it be like if I wrote it from the perspective of a Harlequin romance novel? And so I did that one time and it blew up huge and pulled in these crazy numbers. And so I did it a second time about a month later. And then that one actually got picked up by Chron.com and ended up on mySA here.

Is that how you got on our radar screen?

I’m not real sure but I”m sure that probably factored in a little bit. So that was a story that got picked up and that’s sort of when I was like, oh, it got noticed.

This is reminding me of a Reddit threat where a guy wrote fictional updates on what would happen if modern troops went back in time and fought the Roman empire and it went viral. Is this a weird, unexpected, creative thing that’s going on that people respond to?

Yeah, particularly with the romance stuff. What worked out so well was this was after the peak with E.L. James and Fifty Shades of Grey, and these erotic meteorological ramblings really did well. And I think it’s because people are sort of hungry for something a little different.

What’s great is a lot of people who are in San Antonio who have started picking up on this, they’re kind of taking ownership of this. Being in smaller community newspapers before I came here, I always thought of San Antonio as this sort of giant, metro establishment. But people in San Antonio consider the Express-News their hometown paper. It really struck me that it’s all the same, no matter the size of the city. People want to take ownership in the things that cover them.

So that’s really been kind of fun to watch that community and to watch people tag their friends and say, ‘Hey, have you read this?’ and watch those numbers climb on a daily basis. It’s been a lot of fun.

Coming up with something funny to say about the weather sounds incredibly daunting. You’re kind of like the astrologer for the Onion. Somehow, there’s always something different about the same thing. Where do you get your ideas?

Just absolutely random things that sort of pop into my head. Sometimes I’ll hear a song and I’ll think of a way I can segue into that or it’s just random crazy neurons. And summer is brutal. It is very difficult to come up with different things when it’s 103 degrees, partly cloudy, for days and days and days on end.

Well, it seems like that works because we’re all stuck in summer.

Yeah.

And so we’re all sharing in the joke of this suffering, right?

Right.

Does that create a receptive audience for these weather jokes?

I think it does because it’s the thing that impacts all of us.

Yeah. There’s no escaping it.

You’re not going to get away. What’s really kind of interesting is during the winter, you’ll see those winter Texans, they get in on that. Because it’s all part of that thing. They leave and come here to escape it. I’ve poked fun at them before when it’s 50 degrees outside and everybody who’s from here is wandering around in jackets and you see people out in shorts and tank tops and it’s like, ah, they’re from Minnesota. The weather is like death and taxes. It’s one of those constant things.

How do you measure the response from readers? Shares and likes?

Yeah, we look at that. I look at reach, too, to see how far it goes. A lot of times I will go back and I will look at the people who have public shares, I’ll read what they’re writing and what kind of comments they get on that. The best one was somebody saying, ‘If they keep doing this, I might have to resubscribe.’ And I’ve had several of those over the years. And I’ve had people message me, or call, and say, ‘I’ve resubscribed to the paper because of this.’ And it’s like, that’s great. That’s the high bar you want. If you can get some of those, now you’re rollin’.

The theory behind it at first was, OK, we need to bring in people and make people aware that we exist. And then be able to put other things in front of them. Because not everybody is going to have a story about (city) council or what they’re going to do at the Alamo show up in their news feed.

Related: Fake Steve Jobs misses the real point

But if you have something that people go to every day because they want to see what I’ve written, then they get all of that other stuff. It’s sort of my way of kind of gaming the system because Facebook has changed the algorithm that determines what they see in their feed. But if they go to our page directly because they don’t want to miss something, now you have them.

Then other stories pop up in the feed below that.

Yep. Right.

We should mention here your day job is social media ninja, right?

Yes. I basically decide what comes off of the premium site and goes on to social media. How to spin it, when to play it. Sometimes that involves bits and pieces of the story that I think will attract attention. And sometimes it’s shepherding conversations to make sure we don’t go too far afield.

What are some of your favorite comments from readers related to weather updates?

Uuum … I’ve had some people say I’m gonna marry that guy. Which is problematic because I’m already married. There was the one today, ‘I need to be BFFs with this person.’

I saw that.

I get that quite a bit. Sometimes people are like, are you — and then they’ll tag somebody — the one who writes these? And those are always really funny for me too because I think most of us have that person in our circle of friends who’s always got something funny to say, who’s always there. I’m that for a slightly larger and growing crowd.

There was one earlier this month where you said, ‘It’s Friday, all bets are off, the weather is whatever you want it to be.’ You had some good comments. I like this one guy, he was like, ‘Scattered Cracker Jacks throughout the day with 100 percent of bourbon in the evening.’

I love that sort of interaction because it’s what we really need. People need to feel invested and part of something.

Is that a problem newspapers face where readers don’t feel like that?

Yeah, I think that’s something that, as other media has come in and you’ve ended up with these really close communication and collaborative tools with people, I don’t know that newspapers were as quick to adopt them as some other folks have been. And particularly new media.

And there’s a notion with some people that newspapers are more solemn and not as approachable. And so opening that door and saying look, we’re people just like you, is important.

Yeah, I think some people view newspapers as stodgy and oldertimerish. But in our features section, for example, we’ve had writers who lead rock bands. They’re lead singers of rock bands. Hector Saldana. These guys are as hip as they come. But do people know that?

I don’t necessarily think that they do. I think that it’s one of those things where newspapers have tried as an institution to make delineations about, you know, these people may have political opinions, but they’re not reflected here. And we’ve had to do that. But everybody who has done this work, we all have cool, interesting parts of our lives and cool, interesting stories to share. I don’t think we really have a way to reveal that to the readers.

Would these weather updates work in a different medium? Could they work in the print side of things, or is it more suitable in a quirky online format?

I don’t know how well it would work in print because the audience is fundamentally different. Like the weather romance stuff. I would never in a million years put it inside the New Braunfels paper.

The thing I mainly try to focus on is making sure everybody is in on the joke. Not coming across as terribly patronizing.

I guess you get instant feedback, too, online.

Yes. In milliseconds.

Did you know that Jack Handey from SNL’s Deep Thoughts used to work here?

I did not.

He did.

Really?

Yeah. He’s a real guy. Used to work here. Apparently his position was eliminated because he wrote an unflattering story about auto dealers. Do you think newspapers offer an adequate outlet for clever, funny people?

Well, I know they have talked about what they want me to do, maybe a column on the premium site. So they clearly want me to do more than what I’m doing.

How have our likes grown?

We’re coming up on 26,000. And when I interviewed for the job, I think we were at 19,000. I’ve been here since the end of March, so we’ve grown quite a bit. But more importantly, we don’t have a lot of what I call dead stories. Stories that have no likes, no comments, no shares. We don’t have a lot of those anymore. Because there’s more of a community built up now that is participating.

Related: How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search

It’s been a lot of fun. And it is really flattering to see something that you wrote in the morning and you see how far it goes, how many people share it, and what people are saying about it.

All these people who say they want to be my best friend, how can you not feel great about that at the end of the day?

The post Meet Chris Lykins, the funny weather guy at the Express-News appeared first on John Tedesco.

Local weather watchers have been dutifully documenting San Antonio’s temperature, precipitation, and other climate data for 140 years. If you’re curious how this year’s drought compares to past dry spells, meteorologist Robert Blaha with the National Weather Service has done you a huge favor.

Blaha helped dig up old climate records and published monthly rainfall totals for San Antonio going back to 1871. I stumbled across this interesting piece of the city’s weather history while helping out with a story about the drought, and I made this interactive chart based on the data. (There are a few gaps in the rainfall totals in the 1800s, so the chart starts at a nice round number — the year 1900.)

“We were able to find the records,” Blaha told me. “In the 1800s, they hand wrote (the climate data) in ink. It was in a paperback book. When I came here in 1975, they were in notebook format. In 2050, they’ll be in the format of that day.”

Blaha said the rainfall gauge in San Antonio has changed locations over the years. In the early days it was at a co-op station and then moved to Fort Sam Houston. In 1891 it moved to a downtown office building. Somewhere along the line it was at Stinson Field. In the 1940s it moved to the San Antonio International Airport and stayed there ever since.

Related: Web tools and apps to track weather emergencies in Texas

All that work helps us compare this year’s drought to past dry spells. This year, we’ve received 5.6 inches of rain so far in San Antonio. That’s about half the total precipitation for the lowest year on record since 1900, when it rained 10 inches in 1917.

In 2010 it looks like we got quite a bit of rain –37.4 inches. But click on the monthly figures for 2010 and 2011. The data show that September 2010 was our last significant taste of rain.

In the nine months since then, we’ve barely gotten anything.

(Photo credit: Terry Shuck on Flickr)

The post Just how bad is the Texas drought? View San Antonio’s precipitation data from 1900 to 2011 appeared first on John Tedesco.

Thankfully, this isn’t wishful thinking. Check out Express-News reporter Vianna Davila’s video showing the impact of Hurricane Alex in the Rio Grande Valley. Notice how this video is a mini-documentary — Vianna is simply an observer showing us the sights and sounds of a major storm.

Related: A review of the Sigma 17-70mm lens for videographers

I’m a big fan of these kinds of online videos, where the reporter is unobtrusively giving viewers a sense of place. For some stories, like a hurricane making landfall, the news article and the news video can compliment each other nicely.

The post Video: Covering Hurricane Alex with no crazy media stunts appeared first on John Tedesco.

Flying into Chicago two weeks ago, I encountered a crazy thunder storm that stranded my plane on the tarmac of O’Hare International Airport. Turns out, more storms pounded the city the week after I left, and the light show was captured by amazing videos and photographs.

Related: A review of the Sigma 17-70mm lens for shooting video

This is a cool time lapse video of lightning hitting the three tallest buildings in Chicago. A photographer for the Chicago Tribune captured the moment of lightning striking two buildings, which sparked an online debate about whether the photo was doctored. Kelly McBride at Poynter discussed how the photo was verified by crowdsourcing.

Long story short: Lightning is cool, kids.

The post Daily Diversion: Chicago lightning storms appeared first on John Tedesco.