Andy Wallace

ANDY WALLACE
wallace@kjrh.com

Thanks for clicking in! It’s great to be a member of the 2NEWS Weather team and it’s an incredible experience getting to work in Tulsa. My hometown is Joplin, so I’ve spent a lot of time in Tulsa. In fact, as a kid I used to watch the late Gary Shore on channel 2 from an old black and white TV that I had in the second story of our house. When the atmosphere was just right, I could get channel 2 clear enough to see Gary’s forecast. I remember his coverage of the massive flooding that hit Green Country back in October 1986. Anyone else remember “snizzle” or the old “Storm Search” radar?

 

I started my television career in my hometown of Joplin while I was still in high school. After that, I moved on to southwest Oklahoma to Lawton and worked my way from working weekends to mornings to the chief meteorologist position. Lawton was the market that really taught me about severe weather coverage—we saw everything. My first big storm as chief meteorologist was a heat burst back in May 1996. We had 60-90 mph winds and 100 degree temperatures after 11pm! Lots of damage, but interestingly enough, we had only a trace of rain. Over time, nature would through other storms at us including tornado outbreaks in October, 1998, May, 1999 and October, 2001. And those were just the big events. There were plenty of smaller ones.

From Lawton, I went to Waco, TX as chief meteorologist of the ABC affiliate down there. My Waco story centers around one night in the spring of 2006. It was a Friday night, and we had a tornadic storm moving into the city of Waco. It was the second such storm in a week. The first one clipped the far east side of town. This one was going to move across the central/southern sections of the city. Actually to be more precise, it was moving toward the television station. As it approached, I cleared the room sending everyone else to shelter. I put a radar picture up, and with winds approaching 100 miles per hour, I continued to broadcast from underneath the weather desk while the ceiling and doors shook. When I left the station, I was presented with an award for my service “at and below the severe weather desk”!

Since then, I’ve worked in Oklahoma City and Fort Smith, and joined the 2NEWS team in January, 2010. I’ve always wanted to work in Tulsa, and getting to work at the station that I watched growing up just makes it even better.

When I’m not at work, you can find me attending grad school at OSU (Go ‘Pokes!) or watching a baseball game. My favorite teams are the Texas Rangers and New York Yankees.