When looking at potential areas that could affected most by a Category 4 hurricane, Asheville, North Carolina doesn’t exactly top the list. But unfortunately, western North Carolina, along with many other inland areas of Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia have been ravaged by flooding and landslides after Hurricane Helene made landfall last week. During that time frame, 570 WWNC and morning host Mark Starling have been guiding Asheville area listeners through the carnage, and have been highlighting the power radio still holds in the process.
Starling began coverage of the storm during his morning show on Thursday. As of Monday, he had yet to leave the iHeartMedia news/talk station. He and a band of colleagues like Eddie Fox, Amanda Fox, Josh Michael, Ariel Rymer Brian Hall, and Ashley Wilson, among others, have been sustaining themselves on peanut butter sandwiches, chili, and sausages from Ben’s Chili Bowl in Washington D.C., that WWNC won in a football bet with a capitol reporter. He laughed as he called the situation “a sick joke from the powers above, and I’m not talking about the iHeart powers above, I’m talking about the holy powers above.”
Equipment issues were aplenty in the early days of the breaking news coverage, admitted Starling.
“We lost internet communication at 2:30 on Friday. A friend of mine hiked in a handheld HAM radio so that I could contact HAM radio operators who had all the information that we needed that we couldn’t get because we were offline, and those guys were absolute heroes,” Mark Starling stated. “So I, basically, was listening to the HAM radio for a segment at a time, until the information dropped, stopped, then we get right back on the air, and we’d go live for two or three hours. Then we’d get off the air for an hour, bank up some information, and then go back live again.
“Eventually, our engineer showed up on Saturday with a Starlink system, we got it put up, and that’s been holding our seven stations on the air. We don’t have any power in the building. We don’t have water at the building. And up until we got the Starlink system, we didn’t even have any internet at the building. We’re back up and running now on diesel power for the generators. Starlink is just absolutely killing it for us right now.”
The response from listeners has been overwhelming, Mark Starling admitted. From their extreme gratitude for the information being passed from government officials to Asheville citizens helping each other find needed medications and unaccounted-for loved ones, 570 WWNC and iHeartMedia Asheville have been an essential lifeline for thousands in the area.
“(Listeners are) sitting in their cars at night, listening to us in their cars just because they get tired of being in the house. They might not have an A, radio, or they might not have internet, so they can’t stream us on the iHeartRadio platform, but can get us on any one of our seven terrestrial signals. To know that people are doing that, and to hear people when they when they call in and they just break down in tears, they’re just looking for comfort,” said Starling.
“They’re just looking for some way to make it through whatever hell that they’re in right now. And strangely, there’s a bunch of us in the same hell, and we’re just trying to get through it with them. I keep trying to reinforce to people it’s ok to not be ok. It’s ok to ask for help, it’s ok to break down in tears, it’s ok to be frustrated. It’s just okay to not to be okay right now. I just want to get my community through this, and I want to get my team through this.”
Corporate radio is an often criticized sector of the business. But Mark Starling immediately stood up for iHeartMedia and it’s leadership group for how they’ve handled the situation, noting that they couldn’t have been more supportive.
“The CFO of iHeart called me yesterday on my phone. He just said, ‘Man, I just want to tell you how much we appreciate you and how much what you’re doing means to us. We know that you’re in the same situation as all those listeners.’ And it was just very nice. It felt like we weren’t being ignored. People know we’re here, people know we’re struggling, and we’re just trying to get through it the best we can.”
Covering hurricanes isn’t a foreign concept to Mark Starling. He previously spent nearly two decades working in radio in Florida, at stations in Lakeland, Tampa, and Orlando. He joked that after he got to his 26th hurricane, he lost count of how many he had covered. He never thought it was something he’d need to pull out of his bag of tricks while working in Asheville, though.
“When I moved up here, I thought, ‘Oh, thank God, I don’t have to do that again.’ And then, of course, fast forward nine years, and here we are. This was the perfect storm, unfortunately,” he somberly said. “Covering this was different. People in Florida, they are used to dealing with hurricanes. They do it all the time. They do it between June and like November every year. People in Western Carolina, this is a new, fresh help for them. So having been through it, I was able to kind of go back on that experience.”
Unfortunately, having experience in that field meant breaking bad news to his listeners.
“(I had to) relay the ‘Here’s that feeling that’s going to come when the storm is over and you’re going to feel like everything is okay because the rain has stopped falling, and it’s dark out, and you haven’t had time to see the damage. And I want to prepare you for that. I want to prepare you for how you’re going to feel about that, and it’s going to be overwhelming.’ You just try to walk it through the process of, here’s what you can kind of expect,” he shared. “I’ve been through this 26 or 27 times. And, slowly, they’ve responded really well to it.
“Anytime someone ever tells another human ‘You need to have patience,’ there’s a real good chance you’re going to get knocked out,” Mark Starling said with a chuckle. “It’s a strong probability, but these folks, they understand that.”
He shared a story of an electrical lineman calling into the station. While he was on the phone, the lineman burst into tears because they had been unable to begin the process of returning users to the electrical grid due to flooding. Starling then shared that the phone lines lit up with citizens apologizing for their statements and resentment for their lack of power, leading to a strong sense of community.
Currently, there’s no end in sight for when the iHeartMedia Asheville stations will return to normal programming.
“We’re just trying to do what local broadcasters are supposed to do for their communities, and that’s be the source of information and be the source of companionship,” Mark Starling stated. “We’re just kind of kicking as strong as we can, and we’ve got seven stations going. And we are just trying to love on our community. That’s really what it’s about for us. I mean, these people — our listeners — they’re the reasons we have a job,” he said as he fought back tears.
“They’re the reasons that we can continue to come in and do what we do. Our advertisers are just amazing people. We have so many local advertisers that have suffered so much from the storm, and everybody in our community has suffered. All of Western North Carolina has been literally reshaped because of this, and we’re just trying to navigate a new landscape, and trying to recover and just really trying to get back to some sort of semblance of normalcy.
“It’s not just lip service. We love these people — we don’t know 99.8% of them, but we love these people. There’s not a single person in this iHeartRadio Asheville cluster that does not bleed radio if you cut them. We are die-hard. I’ve been doing this for 25 years — I’m coming up on my 10 year anniversary in Asheville — and I got to be honest with you, I have never worked with a more dedicated air team in my entire life than these professionals that I work with here iHeartMedia. They are just wonderful.”
Garrett Searight is Barrett Media’s News Editor, which includes writing bi-weekly industry features and a weekly column. He has previously served as Program Director and Afternoon Co-Host on 93.1 The Fan in Lima, OH, and is the radio play-by-play voice of Northern Michigan University hockey. Reach out to him at Garrett@BarrettMedia.com.
