HOUSTON – “The first hurricane I ever talked about professionally, was Alicia,” remembers KPRC 2 Chief Meteorologist Frank Billingsley.
“I was on the air for the first time talking about Houston,” Billingsley recalls. Alicia hit the Texas coast near Galveston as a category 3 hurricane, causing significant damage in Galveston and the Houston area in August of 1983.
“And it was like, um, it’s going to Houston, and in 1989 I was going to Houston and I’ve been here ever since,” he told KPRC 2 colleague and Meteorologist Anthony Yanez.
Yanez asked Frank about his memories of all the storms that have come through the area while he has been forecasting.
“Is there any one or two or three that stick out more than the others?”
“Well, you know, Ike was Ike and Bolivar was decimated,” Frank said. “Then they wouldn’t let us go to the west end of Galveston to see what was happening. Well, when you won’t let somebody go, it’s like, ‘OK, why not? What’s up? What are we not seeing?’” Frank remembers.
“And then we got in the helicopter and they let us go down there and show what was happening, and while we were showing that, my email box filled up with, ‘When you were down there, did you happen to see my house?’ and I got a lot of those, and I thought, we need to go back and try to show people their houses! And so we arranged this whole thing with people emailing us their addresses and getting on the phone and showing people their houses.”