By Kiley Petracek
“My advice to you? Listen up and believe it this time,” Tampa’s ABC’s Action News’ Chief Meteorologist, Denis Phillips, said hours before Hurricane Charley touched land.
Hurricane Charley made landfall on the west coast of Florida in August 2004, leaving 10 people dead and around $15 billion in damages across the state.
“There’s been a lot of times we’ve had near misses. This one is the real deal,” he said.
Charley even broke records; it was the costliest U.S. hurricane at the time, a year prior to Hurricane Katrina.
“Harsh words, almost dramatic words, but when you see what we’re looking at tomorrow night you’ll know what we’re talking about,” Phillips said.
The National Hurricane Center still had the Category 4 storm aimed directly at Tampa Bay, and the city was bracing for the worst. Even the Mayor at the time, Pam Iorio, was at the station telling the community to stay safe with reassurance of rebuilding.
But Phillips believed it would land south of Tampa Bay. And it did. About six hours before landfall, Hurricane Charley landed near the island of Cayo Costa in Florida, about 100 miles south of Tampa.
“It was my watershed moment, honestly,” Phillips said at a speaking event at The University of Tampa in March 2025. “Because if I got it wrong, I’d be selling shoes right now.”
Denis Phillips had been in the TV industry for about 15 years when Hurricane Charley impacted Florida. The storm changed his career. It also, unexpectedly, introduced Tampa Bay to his famous suspenders.
“For whatever reason, I happen to have one pair of suspenders to my name, and I happened to have them on when I went in to cover that storm. I was on for 36 straight hours,” Phillips said. “After the storm missed us, the station did all this research. Overwhelming response, no idea what the guy’s name was, he was wearing a pair of suspenders.”
It’d been his dream to be ‘the weather man’ since he was six years old, when he used to watch the live tracking of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. After graduating from Penn State, he worked as Chief Meteorologist in Salisbury, Maryland. After working in Gainesville, Providence, and Los Angeles, Phillips landed in Tampa Bay.
Phillips recently celebrated 30 years working at ABC Action News in Tampa, and has seen his fair share of storms. But his audience has changed alongside the ever-evolving media landscape.
“Ten years ago, when people would walk up to me, 99% of the time, it would be ‘I watch you on TV.’ Now, I’m not exaggerating, 99% of the time it’s ‘I follow you on social media,’” Phillips said. “Everything has changed.”
Denis Phillips Live – or DPL, a livestream he has begun on platforms like Facebook – has transformed his career in ways that didn’t seem possible a few years ago. After new leadership stepped into the newsroom, they gave it a shot which has resulted in a waitlist for advertisers, and Phillips becoming the most followed television news persona in the country.
“At one point last year [2024], DPL was the most watched stream in the world during that storm,” he said. “When there is a storm, or even the promise of a storm, we get millions of followers.”
ABC’s social media impact aligns with larger media trends nationally. Around a third of Americans get their news from Facebook and YouTube, each platform used by the newsroom, according to the Pew Research Center.
Alongside more visibility comes more scrutiny as viewers often try to bait Phillips to define what he means by ‘the Gulf’ when referring to the previous Gulf of Mexico and its recent name change in the comments.
“I just don’t even go down that road. People will try to drag me down that road constantly,” Phillips said. “This should not be the biggest concern of meteorologists in this day and age, and yet it is because we are so polarized in the media and our country. We simply are.”
He leaves his viewers knowing what to expect, and keeping his coverage as nonpartisan as possible, even when it comes to climate change. When someone brings up politics in his comment section, he then clicks ‘Bans forever’ on Facebook, which has now encouraged his other fans to join in.
“Why would I go on a hill where I know I’m going to lose half my audience right off the bat? It’s just not smart,” he says. “At the end of the day, we all know no matter what my opinion is, it ain’t going to change your opinion if you feel the other way.”
However, around 9 out of 10 weathercasters nationally believe that climate change is occurring according to a study by the American Meteorological Society. And with worsening storms in the Tampa region, it’s harder for those who study the weather to dispute it.
“Where I’m able to differentiate the two is, yes, I know what’s happening now, but there’s no way for me to know what’s happening in 30 years, in 40 years,” he said. “I’m not avoiding it, but I’m deflecting enough I think, with honesty, that people know my stance. It’s not my specialty.”
While Phillips’ specialty may be telling the weather, it also consists of helping his community navigate fear and make informed decisions in the face of a rapidly-changing storm.
“I think I learned that my job isn’t really getting the weather right, per se,” he says. “It’s getting people through the stressful situation of severe weather.”
Phillips has shown throughout his time that local news, such as having a local weathercaster, contributes to people’s immediate community in more direct ways than national media could as shown through severe weather.
With most of UTampa’s student population coming from out of state, Phillips is speaking to beyond his community as parents are tuning in when a storm is approaching. Especially during the recent hurricanes of Helene and Milton, he spoke with viewers on a new scale, and received the ‘Hurricane Hero’ award from the City of Tampa in response.
“It was almost an intimate experience, because you really were having one-on-one conversations with parents who were petrified that their kids were going to be safe,” he said. “Having the ability to have social media in the mix as part of our arsenal of information was encouraged, really. I thought it was revolutionary.”
Through it all — helping our community during hurricanes, the evolving media landscape, and the noise of polarization — Phillips’ guiding principle has remained the same. Every hurricane season, as the uncertainty creeps in, he reminds his audience of the same message:
“Stop freaking out… until I tell you to. We’re fine.”
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Thumbnail image caption: Denis Phillips (right) talks during the “Let’s Talk About the Weather: A Lunch Date with Denis Phillips,” event at the Charlene A. Gordon Theater on March 27. Photo courtesy of Kiley Petracek