CNN’s Anderson Cooper was hit by an unidentified object while reporting on Hurricane Milton in Bradenton, Florida.
Like several other networks, CNN dispatched some of its talent to report on the storm while standing outside, downpours and violent gusts of wind be damned. The practice is keeping in a long tradition of placing reporters in harm’s way to report on one of nature’s most powerful phenomena.
Shortly after Milton made landfall, Cooper was doing a live hit just after 9 p.m. ET.
“The wind has really picked up,” he said. “The water’s really moving. You can get a sense of just how fast the wind is moving there. You can see it in the light there. It is now just whipping off the Manatee River. It’s coming from kind of the north, I guess northeast. And the water now is really starting to pour over. If you look at the graph–whoa!”
It was at the “woah” when Cooper was hit in the chest and face by a square-shaped object.
“Ok, that wasn’t good,” he informed viewers. “I’ll probably go inside shortly. But you can see the amount of water here on the ground. This is water from the Manatee River. It’s also water coming from the land as well.”
Cooper is far from the first reporter to be struck by an object while reporting in the middle of a storm. While reporting on Hurricane Ian in 2022, Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel was hit by a tree branch. In 2018, one Houston reporter was hit with sheet metal while reporting on Hurricane Florence.
Watch above via CNN.
