It takes a hell of a storm to rattle James Spann.
As the dean of Alabama’s broadcast meteorologists, Spann over a 50-year career has witnessed 114 NOAA-designated billion-dollar disasters that affected the state. He is also nationally recognized among weather enthusiasts as a blogger and host of “WeatherBrains,” a podcast he launched in 2006 as a forum for meteorologists and self-described weather geeks.
Yet earlier this month, as the powerful Hurricane Milton churned through the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida, the unflappable meteorologist was rattled.
Not by Milton, which landed in Siesta Key, Florida, as a Category 3 storm, but a deluge of social media vitriol he received after asking his 1.1 million Facebook followers to stop reposting lies and conspiracies about the federal government’s response to storms.
