New age radio coverage of hurricanes...

[trixter]

It's good to see that there is still a local effort to cover a hurricane! I have read quite a few posts concerning Irene on this site and it is remarkable that many stations elected to run regular programming (voice tracking, canned music etc.) with hopes the event would just go away or no one really noticed! I won't get into my spill on this (as I did with another post elsewhere) but, regardless; if it's a rare mom and pop station or a company owned station, YOU DROP REGULAR PROGRAMMING AND DEAL WITH THE CRISIS. You would be surprised that stations up and down the East Coast that were affected and DID NOT use any common sense on this.

 

[B Lewis]

I believe he was referring to Beach 104 in Nags Head (or somewhere around it). Normally, I do not get them very well here, because of Foxy on 104.3. However during and after the storm, I could get them some, on my vehicle. I don't know if it was just a fluke, or if 104.3 had to go to low power for some reason. They did (and usually do) an awesome job of providing continuous coverage. I have to give it up to the First Media stations here (in Roanoke Rapids). Eventhough, they all went down by 1pm on the day of the storm, they managed to get 97.9 and 102.3 up on low power with a small generator (I remember doing that once, after Hurricane Isabel, at WZRU). So, they did a good job getting out valuable information to this small area. I agree with another post, 93.3 and 95.1 also did well. GoMix Christian usually carries Channel 9 (b/c their main station is in Snow Hill). I heard Channel 9 for a short time, then they flipped to music. Apparently, the Go Mix station here lost contact with it's main station, WAGO. After losing that link, they just played alot of Southern Gospel...and they have a full power generator at the studio and tower! Being without power for a week...I listened to alot of radio...LOL...

 

[MaxGM]

News Stud... apology accepted.

If you operate in an area where a mandatory evacuation is issued you can't "order" your staff to stay. At that point everyone has to use their best judgement and do what they need to do to keep themselves and their families safe. In those cases airing the audio from another source may be the only option for a particular operator. I can tell you that if a storm was strong enough I would order every one of my staffers to leave. With anything much stronger than Irene or Isabel we probably wouldn't be able to broadcast anyway. Personal safety comes first.

I was fortunate enough to have a staff that wanted to stay and knew the importance of getting information out before, during and after the storm. I also have a great engineer who went to the WCXL Beach 104 transmitter site TWICE for issues with the generator (which we test often... but stuff happens). All of our stations were off at one time or another, 99.1 WVOD and 104.1 WCXL were on most of the time. Both of our streams were maxed out.. 500 max on Beach, 150 max on WVOD... for most of the storm and the next 2 days. We never lost power at the Nags Head studio and the Wanchese studio ran on generator. So when the transmitter issues occurred we just kept broadcasting because the streams had sizable audiences listening.

And if you might be thinking something like... "well if you just plan better you can be ready for blah blah blah....) Nope. Any plan you develop will be junk because you simply cannot predict what hurricanes will do and what will be damaged as you go through the long period of time in storm conditions. You make preparations and react to situations as they occur. I learned things during this storm and will make a few physical changes to the overall plant that may help us next time.... which I hope is a long way off.