...over on YouTube, somebody posted a video aircheck of KGO-TV/7's local coverage (just the first 40 minutes or so) of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake that interrupted the World Series that year. Watched it the other day. And it made me wonder -- I have a DVD of someone flipping between KGO-TV/7, KPIX-TV/5, KRON/4 and KTVU/2 for two consecutive hours that evening, so I know they all went to wall-to-wall coverage. But what of the English-language UHF independents of the Bay Area at the time -- KOFY-TV/20, KICU-TV/36 San Jose, KBHK-TV/44, and KFTY-TV/50 Santa Rosa? Did they go to their own wall-to-wall coverage, or perhaps rebroadcast the coverage of one of the VHFs?...
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San Francisco indies during the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989?
- Thread starter Ultimajock
- Start date
The '89 quake happeend before the days of UHF and VHF duoplies, so no UHF would have picked up a VHF newscast. KOFY, I believe, had just started a 10 o'clock newscast a few weeks earlier, so I'm sure they had coverage of some kind. We did not have cable at that time, and UHF reception was so poor where we lived that we almost never watched anything on that band.
...not so sure about that. After all, back on 22 November 1963, after President Kennedy was shot, both KPHO-TV/5 (indie) and KAET/8 (NET) in Phoenix retransmit the NBC and local coverage from KTAR-TV/12 Mesa. So it wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility that a similar arrangement would have been set up for an emergency 26 years later...
All I recall about the Loma Prieta aftermath is an example from radio: KNBR-AM and KFOG-FM, which had just become 'sister stations' earlier in 1989, when Susquehanna(now Cumulus) bought KNBR, simulcast the KNBR morning show's quake e coverage, with longtime DJs Frank Dill and Mike Cleary.
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