Severe Weather Coverage - Lexington

[William_Yeager]

I was in Lexington yesterday to have dinner with a friend, got there early, and decided to hang out at the shopping center at Man O War and Richmond. After coming out of Kroger to find out there was a tornado warning in the area, I went to Baskin Robbins to wait until the storm passed. They had a simulcast of WKYT on the radio in there. When the tornado warning for Central Fayette, South Bourbon, and Clark was issued, the EAS alert went off. After the alert, it was about 5 minutes before the tornado warning was mentioned on the air. Is that a typical lag time between radio and TV?

 

[KR4BD]

As far as local Lexington radio was concerned last night, live radio coverage of storm information, especially at night is seriously lacking. Please correct me if I am wrong, but at night, NONE of the local radio stations have anyone in any sort of LIVE "news" capacity, on duty. Last night, I noticed WLAP (and supposedly other area Clear Channel stations) simulcasting Channel 27's coverage at times, but not continuously. The NOAA weather warnings were typically delayed by about a minute or so on WLAP which is the strongest station I receive at night on the SW side of Fayette county. WVLK-AM's night pattern is terrible here and WLXG is full of co-channel interference, but mostly "listenable". I rarely listen to WLXG, so if they had any storm coverage (other delayed NOAA alerts), I was not aware of it.

Even back in the late nineties, when I worked at WCGW (A DAYTIMER), we would stay on the air well into the night when storms threatened the area because we KNEW we were the ONLY AM station with LIVE programming (Southern Gospel Music Format) in the evenings. Of course, the computer replaced me (and others) in 2001 and they seem to be enjoying the savings the robot has given them....

 

[getmeoutofhere]

I think WLAP-AM started simulcasting WKYT-TV around 6:25pm on Friday, mediabase shows the clear channel FMs followed WLAP-AM into simulcast coverage at 6:39pm and stayed with the WKYT-TV simulcast until 8:30pm. Looks as if all clear channel stations stayed with WKYT-TV's storm coverage until the tornado warnings cleared the metro. It also looks like the clear channel stations started simulcasting WKYT-TV again at 2:27am until 3:30am which was the tornado warnings in Garrard, Boyle and Madison counties. In both situations I believe the simulcast started a little before for the tornado warnings were issued. The first metro warnings on Friday hit at 6:55pm, the second in the early AM hit around 2:40am. No tornado warnings were issued in the metro counties during the 6:00am storms. While I wish radio stations would do their own long form storm coverage during severe weather events I don't know how practical that is in todays radio environment. The TV simulcast works in most situations and most TV weather departments have a live Doppler radar.

With that said, at least clear channel made an effort to service the community, it looks like the Cumulus and LM clusters never stopped normal programming at any point for long form coverage or a simulcast. Which I find somewhat concerning.

 

[radiorob2.0]

The April 3rd 1974 tornado outbreak didn't affect Lexington directly, though the thunderstorms did knock out power to almost all of the city. WLAP was the only station on the air thanks to a generator as they were EBS primary and dropped music for continuous coverage. Even staff of the other stations that were down for the count made their way to Radio Park to help with the coverage. Legend has it Kentucky Central's Garvis Kincaid had a generator delivered to the WVLK transmitter site days after that event so his station would never be off the air again.

Of course that was then and this is now. But the difference back then is we all got our hands dirty conveying information especially since management, staff and in the case of WVLK ownership was local; bottom line it was a matter of pride.

I know the WVLK transmitter site is unmanned these days so who knows if the generator still exist or even functions.