Page 5 - BusinessWest May 27, 2024

Richard F. Burkhart, CPA and Salvatore J. Pizzanelli, CPA, JD, PFS
The talented team at Burkhart Pizzanelli
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The talented team at Burkhart Pizzanelli provides
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Dave Hayes collects raw data from numerous sources and uses it to craft his daily reports.
day’s current weather and upcoming forecast on social media, as his myriad followers converse about it all in the comments.
And there are a lot of followers — more than 57,000 on Face- book, in fact, and 6,600 on Twitter.
But while Hayes is widely known on Facebook today, early in 2011, he had become disenchanted with the site and deactivated his account.
However, when a tornado struck Springfield and a host of other communities on June 1 of that year, he heard talk of his friends chat- tering online about what he thought about the destructive event. So he eventually logged back on and started talking more often about weather events. When an acquaintance complained that he was doing too much of that, Hayes decided to create a page separate from his personal account, called Dave Hayes the Weather Nut, where friends — or anyone else — could follow him if they wanted
to. And what a year that was for weather in Western Mass. — 2011 featured not only the tornado, but Hurricane
Irene in August, the freak pre-Halloween snow-
storm that felled countless trees, and a few
other events. His reports about a big snowstorm early in 2012 had about 200 people taking part in the conversation, and his reports on Hurri- cane Sandy that summer — which seemed to be threatening New England before turning toward New Jersey — tripled that, to 600.
“People wanted to know what was going on,” he said. “I didn’t get it yet. I didn’t under- stand virality and sharing with people and the idea that this might possibly be useful in some way — a hub for weather that’s interesting. But I kept doing it.”
A blizzard in February 2013 saw Hayes’s
audience crest to more than 1,000 people. “People said how helpful my work was to them. And as someone who hadn’t really launched in life yet, I wanted to be helpful to people. So that lit a fire inside
of me, and I said, ‘I’m going to do this daily. This is something that people find useful.’”
When he began daily reports, which continue today, the audience doubled to 2,000, then swelled above 10,000 early in 2014, dur-
ing a colder and snowier winter than any Western Mass. has seen since. Around the same time, he was laid off from a sales job when his company downsized due to the lingering effects of the Great Recession.
“Without a job, looking for work, not finding anything, I went deeper into weather reporting,” he said, and began attracting the attention of public radio, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, and other media — and wondering if this could actually become a career.
Weather or Not
Indeed, when the page was taking off in 2014, Hayes’s father and others in his life started asking him seriously if he could make a liv-
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“Without a job, looking for work, not finding anything, I went deeper into weather reporting.”
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