'This is No Joke, Folks': Reporter Blown Away on Camera in New Orleans During Hurricane Ida Fox reporter Robert Ray struggled to keep his footing during a broadcast from a Louisiana parking garage.
By Emily Rella
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Talk about being blown away by the news.
Weather reporter Robert Ray was quite literally taken by the wind during a live weather broadcast which aired on Fox New Channel from a New Orleans parking garage, where he was reporting on Hurricane Ida for Fox Report with Jon Scott.
"It's been like a train all day as these winds and rain have come in, we had to retreat here into this parking garage," Ray says to the camera the wind visibly whipping behind him as his pants and jacket begin to flutter about. "It's just not safe out there at all."
Fox News' Robert Ray shows power of hurricane winds on air https://t.co/LMNVktCd6M
— Fox News (@FoxNews) August 30, 2021
Ray then tells the camera that he's going to "step back slowly" into the open elements and out of the garage. "We've had gusts up to almost 90 miles an hour, sustained over 60. The second I step out, you're gonna see," Ray said as he steps into the street and is quickly blown to the left side of the screen, struggling to stay stable.
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"I just want to show you the power of this wind right now, very close to the Mississippi River," Ray says as he struggles to get his words out while fighting against the wind, grabbing on to the side of the building as he pulls himself back in. "This is no joke, folks."
He notes that the infrastructure in New Orleans is "unraveling" and "falling apart" and calls the storm a "very serious situation."
"If anyone is out there they need to get into shelter, cannot stress it enough, as this storm is just battering New Orleans right now," he pleads as the broadcast ends.
Ray is a reporter for the soon-to-launch FOX Weather, an AVOD platform.
Ida, which has been downgraded to a tropical storm since making landfall, has been absolutely pummeling the state of Louisiana, with the most up-to-date reporting saying there has been least one recorded death and more than one million people in the state without power.
"We've just been through a horrendous night with winds, rain, gusts, water coming up, rivers rising, power outages," St. Tammany Parish of New Orleans president Mike Cooper told CNN. "It's incredible."
Axios reported that the hurricane reached maximum sustained wind speeds of 150 mph.
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