Katie Horner: Success is the best revenge on FireKatie.com

How would you like it if you came back to work after a nice, relaxing vacation and found someone had started up a Website demanding that you be canned?

That's what happened in March when Katie Horner, the chief meteorologist for KCTV-5, returned with her family from Hawaii. A viewer named Derrick Smith had created FireKatie.com after storms passed through the rural parts of the Kansas City area on the night of Feb. 28. Three of the four local news stations, including KCTV, pre-empted their prime-time programs for weather coverage, and a lot of viewers that night were steamed.

• Earlier story: FireKatie, an idea whose time has dot com

  Horner got over the initial shock of seeing FireKatie.com and looked up the final reports on the storm, which were compiled after she left town. That's when she learned, for the first time, that the system she'd been tracking that night was a violent F4 tornado, capable of flattening homes and turning cars into missiles.

  “The first F4 in the country (this year) fell in our viewing area, at night, and I stayed on with it,” she said. “Case closed!”

  Then she started to read her email. By the time she sat down with me in mid-April to discuss FireKatie.com, Horner was able to smile and say, in apparent sincerity, “That turned out to be the biggest blessing. I have gotten more support from meteorologists around the country and around the world, saying, 'Girl, sorry this is happening to you but, way to go.'” Her supporters include silver-throated Bryan Busby of KMBC-9, her chief competitor, who also happens to be a close friend.

  “If I'm known as the person who is totally passionate about weather safety, then I will wear that cross,” she said.

  That passion was first revealed four years ago this week, when a series of deadly night storms tore through the country's midsection. After they had left the Kansas City metro area, other stations returned to network programs. Horner stayed on the air covering the ones in the outlying areas. KCTV had already pre-empted the CBS Sunday movie, so there was no real reason to return to it. Lucky or not, that decision changed the landscape of Kansas City local news.

  The tornadoes of May 4, 2003, would kill 37 people in Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee, making it the deadliest storm in years. The station reaped a whirlwind of favorable press and thank-yous from viewers in outlying areas. Horner and her bosses -- then-KCTV news director Regent Ducas and KCTV-KSMO general manager Kirk Black -- saw it as vindication of their decision to go wall-to-wall. (Whenever I mention to Black that KCTV's ratings kept growing through the night, he hotly denies that Nielsens factor into the decision to keep Horner on the air.)

  “That was the event that set our policy on severe weather, because it saved lives,” Horner said.

  There's some evidence to back her claim. Two weeks after the storms of May 4, 2003, researchers at Kansas State University descended on areas hardest hit by the tornadoes. From their interviews, they concluded that urban and suburban communities, like those surrounding Kansas City, were better warned about tornado threats than rural communities.

  A big reason was television. In the well-informed areas, they found that after people heard warning sirens, most would turn to TV coverage of the storms. As for weather radios -- the devices championed by FireKatie.com's Smith as being just as good as TV -- the K-State researchers had trouble finding anyone who used them.

  “When I wake up in the morning I don't think, 'What were the ratings for that storm last night?' I say, 'Was anybody hurt last night?'” Horner said. “That's the very first thing I'm concerned about. It's human nature to form opinions about other people, and if I'm to take on this responsibility as chief meteorologist, that's just one of the things that comes with it.”

  But the very fact she had become, as she put it, the "poster child" for weathercasting excess in Kansas City was a sign of just how far her star had risen since 1998, when she replaced Gary Amble as KCTV's lead meteorologist. She seemed to lag for years behind her male rivals at the other stations. In these pages I criticized her fumbling approach with the station's new Doppler radar and, if you can believe it, for not interrupting with tornado updates enough.

  Once unleashed on the airwaves for hours at a time, however, Horner was able to give voice to what Busby calls her nurturing, motherly side.

  “Listen to her verbiage: 'Here's what I would do.' She explains things to moms and kids,” said Busby. “I don't think I've ever explained to children what to do in a storm during wall-to-wall coverage.”

  But Horner can also turn into a ferociously protective she-bear. When I asked her about WeatheRate, an independent firm that has for years certified KSHB's Gary Lezak as Kansas City's “most accurate forecaster,” she coolly replied, “I'm not going to name any names, but I think about Lawrence, Kansas” -- a reference to May 8, 2003, when a storm caused extensive damage in southwest Lawrence -- “and I think about a meteorologist who claims credibility and accuracy going on the air and saying, 'Lawrence, you're not going to get hit by this tornado,' AS they were being hit by that tornado. And I think, how could anybody claim credibility when they just missed that? When lives are at risk, that's all that matters.”

  “Let the numbers speak for themselves,” Lezak replied in an e-mail.“We have been No. 1 in forecasting accuracy four years in a row now.And the new numbers just came out for this fifth year and once again KSHB is No. 1 and it isn't even close.We take on the challenge every day and welcome it.”

  Horner has not only boosted Channel 5's fortunes, but her own as well. Several reliable sources confirmed that the last time Horner's contract was up, two other stations in town tried to sign her away from KCTV.

  I had been hearing reports that Ducas had pushed Horner to stay on the air longer than she wished to. But when pressed to give her own philosophy about when to interrupt TV shows for weather, she gave a nearly identical response to one Ducas had given two months earlier.

  “If there is a tornado warning, we're going to stay on the air until everybody is out of the path of the tornado,” Horner said. That means anywhere in the 11-county viewing area, “because what makes a person's life in Mound City any less important than a person in Prairie Village?”

• Vote in our poll: Who's your weathercaster?
• Related audio: More of my interview with Katie
• Earlier: Regent Ducas, the exit interview

The Horner file

Born Nellsonville, Ohio.

Bachelor's degree in public relations and marketing from University of South Florida; became weekend weathercaster at WEAR-TV in Pensacola; later earned geoscience degree from the Broadcast Meteorology Program at Mississippi State Univ.

Married to Frank Armato; three children: Chelsea (from first marriage), Anna and Ava.

Was offered job in Chicago; KCTV countered by promoting her from mornings to evenings in 1998, changing places with then-chief meteorologist Gary Amble.