which resulted in the dismissal of several HISD officials. All of these stories were initially reported by investigative reporter Anna Werner, who eventually went on to become the chief investigative reporter for CBS News. The station gained notoriety in 1961 when then-anchor Dan Rather showed what was believed to be the first radar image of a hurricane broadcast on television during Hurricane Carla; this report, which was credited for saving thousands of lives that otherwise would have been lost, would later become a catalyst in his eventual hiring by CBS News. In 1970, KHOU had boasted of the top-rated news team in Houston, led by anchorman Ron Stone (who had been discovered by Rather in 1961), weatherman Sid Lasher and sports anchor Ron Franklin. The station entered a tumultuous period during the early 1970s, when Stone departed for a radio reporter role with NBC News in New York and Lasher died from a fatal heart attack shortly after KHOU's 6 p.m. newscast concluded one night. Stone would eventually return to Houston in 1972 to become the lead anchor at KPRC-TV, and helped that station to overtake KHOU as the leading news station in Houston. Both stations would eventually be overtaken by KTRK-TV, whose Eyewitness News came to dominate the Houston market for the next several decades and which had become one of ABC's strongest affiliates by the end of the decade, eventually becoming one of the network's owned-and-operated stations in 1986. While the station did hire former KPRC-TV lead anchor Steve Smith away from KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh to become its lead anchor in 1975, KHOU continued to trail its rivals as the decade progressed. Departures during this period included meteorologist Doug Brown (who himself succeeded Lasher), who joined KTRK in 1976 as its morning meteorologist and three personalities, news anchor Bob Nicolas (in 1979), along with Franklin and anchorman Bill Balleza (both in 1980) departing for similar roles at KPRC. As a result, channel 11 crashed to last place, and would largely remain entrenched in this position throughout the 1980s. When Belo acquired KHOU in 1984, the station continued to trail behind dominant KTRK and NBC affiliate KPRC, which usually placed a strong second and would further benefit in the decade from NBC's strong prime time programming of the 1980s. Its newscasts fared even worse than CBS' own floundering network programming itself at the time, occasionally even placing behind syndicated