CNN anchor Anderson Cooper was hit by an unidentified object while reporting on Hurricane Milton, which made landfall in Florida late Wednesday, causing widespread damage and power outages.
Cooper was standing on a riverwalk next to the Manatee River just off the coast in Brandeton, Florida, resisting sheets of rain and 100 mph winds as he updated viewers on the storm's progress.
"The wind has really picked up,” he said at around 9 p.m. ET. “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!"
Cooper's report was interrupted by a white, square-shaped object that shot out from the bottom of the screen and hit him on the face and chest. The CNN anchor took a second to recover, then suggested that he and the crew would take cover soon. "Ok, that wasn’t good," he said. “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.”
Journalists sent in harm's way to report extreme weather for their network's viewers often fall victim to those flying objects. In 2022, Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel was struck by a tree branch while reporting on Hurricane Ian. Four years before that, a sheet of metal flew into Houston reporter Ted Oberg while he reported on Hurricane Florence.
