NBC Washington chief meteorologist Doug Kammerer was reporting on a possible tornado when he briefly paused his live segment to call his kids and warn them about the storm.
"I’m tracking this so closely now. This is going to go right over my house. So, very close to my house,” Kammerer said as he was showing that the Chevy Chase area of Maryland was under a tornado warning.
Kammerer then called his son on the phone.
"You there, buddy?” he said. “All right, hey, man, I want you to get down in the basement. We got a tornado warning."
Kammerer instructed his son to grab his sibling and wait in the basement.
"Get in the bedroom down there and just kind of wait for 10, 15 minutes," he said before he hung up and resumed his broadcast.
Kammerer said he had to call his children because they were most likely playing online video games and not paying attention to the weather.
NBC Washington shared the video on its Instagram page. As of Saturday morning, it had been viewed nearly 3,000 times.
Kammerer said that thankfully no one was hurt in the tornado.
“This was a scary moment for me,” he said on NBC's "TODAY" show. “As I am zooming in on the radar, I noticed my house is right in the path of the tornado. My kids were home alone, and I knew they would not be paying attention to the warning. As I was live on air, I was debating in my head if I should call them while I was on TV, and I soon realized I had to make that call. I had to protect my kids.”
"Thank goodness no one was injured as a result of that tornado. We are all safe," he added.
CORRECTION (April 3, 2022, 7 p.m. ET): A previous version of this article misspelled the last name of NBC Washington’s chief meteorologist. He is Doug Kammerer, not Kammer.