About

Michelle Dobyne is a resident of the Casa Linda apartment complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma who was interviewed by local news station KOTV Channel 6 about a fire that broke out in her building and the subsequent emergency evacuation of its occupants. Upon the broadcast of the interview clip in early January 2016, the video quickly went viral online and garnered national attention, mainly due to the overly enthusiastic tone of Dobyne's eyewitness account.

Origin

On January 10th, 2016, Oklahoma's local news station KOTV^[1] reported on a fire that broke out overnight at the Casa Linda Apartment complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma,^[1] which resulted in an emergency evacuation of the building that is expected to leave more than 100 residents without power or heat for several days. According to the local officials and news reports, the fire burned the storage unit that houses the electrical panels and serves the entire building. Despite having to take refuge at a Red Cross shelter at a nearby church, KOTV reported that the general mood of the residents was cheerful and optimistic; among them were Michelle Dobyne, a mother of three children and resident in the complex, who offered a highly energetic eyewitness account in an interview with the news station's photojournalist Ethan Pierce:

"My friend came to the door she said, well, I was on the phone cooking me and my baby some breakfast, and she say, 'Hey, something wrong, it's poppin!'. I said 'What!' She said 'Yeah,' I said 'Nah!' So the girl come down stairs. She come out of her apartment with her baby with no shoes on. I said, 'Ah, girl, it's cold outside!' She said, 'Something ain't right!' I said, 'Aw, man!' She said, 'Aw, man, the building is on fire!' I said, 'Nah, what?' I grabbed my three kids, and we bounced out. Uh, uh. We ain't gonna be in no fire! Not today!"

That same day, KOTV reporter and sports anchor Charlie Hannema uploaded a video clip of the interview to his Facebook page^[16], where it accumulated nearly 16 million views and more than 413,000 shares within the first 24 hours.

Spread

Upon the publication of the article, Dobyne's interview immediately became the talking point of the story, even within KOTV's original report which noted that her humorous account had "[their] entire newsroom laughing." In the next 48 hours, KOTV's interview clip quickly began circulating the online circuit of local news stations in Oklahoma and across the country^{[2][6][7][11][12][13]}, with many articles hailing Dobyne as the latest "overnight internet sensation" and others drawing comparisons to Sweet Brown, an Oklahoma City resident who had garnered similar internet fame after her eyewitness account of an apartment fire went viral in April 2012. On January 11th, various links to video clips of Dobyne's interview began surfacing on a number of internet culture news sites and social news aggregators, including Reddit^[3][17], The Daily Dot^[10], Mashable^[8], eBaumsworld^[9] and Break^[15], as well as a few UK-based online news sites like The Sun^[4] and Metro UK.^[5]

Various Examples

Meanwhile on YouTube^[14] and Vine, dozens of duplicate clips of the original interview were uploaded by numerous different users, as well as a handful of early-stage remix videos featuring the two most quotable lines said by Dobyne, "It's poppin'" and "We ain't gonna be in no fire! Not today!"

Search Interest

External References