VENICE — It’s fitting that ABC 7 WWSB Chief Meteorologist Bob Harrigan owes his 41-year career in Sarasota to a hurricane.
He had recently graduated from the University of Kansas and was contemplating going to graduate school when Hurricane Elena swept into the Gulf in just before Labor Day in 1985, he told the audience at the Venetian Golf & River Club on Monday in a talk sponsored by the VGRC Community Association.
The meteorologist at what was then WXLT declined to cover the storm because of the holiday, so another recent college grad at the station who had done some weather reporting “ripped and read” the latest National Weather Service update on air, saying Elena was moving west, away from the state…