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Through Irish Eyes: Former WDEF Reporter James Mahon Authors Autobiography

  You may remember JamesMahon as the Irish reporter who used to be on WDEF, Chattanooga's News Channel 12.  Mahon's first book, Through Irish Eyes, chronicles his journey from an adoptee from communist Romania to being an Irish newsman in the Scenic City and more.

Here's an excerpt from his LinkedIn page:

"70 miles away an EF3 tornado had touched down and when I turned the radio on, my world changed. Sirens, evacuation alerts, talkshows flooded with calls of cries and screaming. It began to rain, the drops hitting the dashboard and windows of the heavy jeep, as fear enveloped the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of people. 

I joined interstate 75 southbound towards Atlanta and red dots appeared. Miles of traffic bumped back, blocking, panicking people pulling children from schools. Horns honking and yelling for as far as the eye could see. 18 wheelers had skidded out of control in heavy winds helped by sheer walls of hard rain, smashing into barriers blocking lanes of more traffic as blue police lights lit up the afternoon skies across rural Georgia. Out of the corner of my eye just north of Dalton I saw a fellow white news jeep, the dark blue CBS eye staring back at me as my own filled with fear. There is no training for this, my masters didn't teach me how to live report during tornadoes. I had seen Twister but that was not going to help now. This was real life and the quiet winding roads of Galway never felt so far away. The winds kept howling, the rain kept lashing down and the videographer's jeep swerved in behind mine. We had formed a convoy. An exit ramped appeared, darting down it, Google maps readjusted taking me on backroads as a state of emergency was declared for Georgia and the national guard was rolling in. Roads were collapsing and police from counties I had never heard of had assembled checkpoints around the quaint little Georgia town of just 4000 people. A giant Red Cross tent loomed in the distance as helicopters fluttered in the now calming winds. Houses split in half, the front walls on the ground in hundreds of pieces, trees smashed into cars, trucks overturned and the sounds of pain and dismay echoed around a community whose heart had been ripped out by mother nature and left pumping and dying in front of them."