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Small outage for WICC Yesterday (5/1)

R

RadioMan203

It seems some birds were the cause of a fire out on Pleasure Beach, home to WICC's transmitter site yesterday. The station was off the air for about 45 minutes while things were brought back under control (without any road or bridge out to the island it makes the job more difficult).

I was sort of surprised that the generator didn't kick in, as I was listening to see when things would return.

An interesting aside, I was near the WSHU-AM (former WMMM-AM) transmitter site while tuned to 600 and besides hearing bleed from 1260 I also heard another, totally different station. I suppose it could have been a beat with the car's IF but I found it interesting and unexpected none the less.
 
The outage was caused by a birds nest that was built across two of the three phase primary lines that feeds power to Pleasure Beach. The problem with getting the station back on with generator power is the transfer switch is very old and is in need of parts to repair it. The switch will no longer sense the loss of commercial power and will not start the generator and transfer generator power. Parts are no longer available for the switch. Thanks to the Bridgeport Harbor master I was able to get boat ride out to the site and start the generator and transfer the load and baby sit the generator. The transmitter ran on the generator power from 10:25 am to 3:25 pm as workers from the United Illuminating company made the repairs. A new generator switch is in the budget and will be replaced very soon. Also many thanks to the Bridgeport Fire Department putting out the fire.
 
Al "Late Night" Lawrence once told me about an outage WICC had when he was on the air New Year's Eve 86/87. Al did a 10-second countdown to midnight, then the station went off the air. That's because right at midnight some kids lit fireworks that killed the electricity going to the transmitter building.
 
Gotta give kudos to Ed for getting things back on as quickly as he did, considering the lack of an access road. I'm sure that adds to the headache when dealing with any emergency out there.

What a way to kill a good portion of the day waiting for repairs to the power lines.

While not as enterttaining as birds, I remember finding a "fried" mouse on top of one of the transmiiters when I was engineering WMMM. It seems it must have gotten a little too close the the antenna contactor and when someone did a hot switch between transmitters it must have been in the way.
 
Must have been Monk Parakeets building a nest up on the tower.
 
The pole that had the nest on it was the second pole from the bridge on the Pleasure Beach side. The first pole is where the underground cable rises which holds the three cut outs for each of the three phases. The birds nest was not home for Parakeets. There is a very large bird population out there and for the life of me I can not remember the name of the bird but I do know there were eggs in the nest when it went up in flames. How do you like your eggs cooked?
 
Bill DeFelice said:
It seems some birds were the cause of a fire out on Pleasure Beach, home to WICC's transmitter site yesterday.
Click to expand...

For some reason, I always thought their transmitter was on Booth Hill in Trumbull? Not to mention, I thought the elevation explained their excellent coverage all the way up to Torrington. Now I'm stumped as to where I heard this.
 
The Studios for WICC were at one time back in the day located at Booth Hill
This goes back when WJZZ now WEZN Star99.9 were sister stations along with WICC TV Channel 43. The Transmitter has been located at Pleasure Beach since 1933.
Before that the transmitter was located on sport Hill Road in Easton. The station went on the air in 1926
 
No footbridge access to Pleasure Beach? WICC might need to keep a boat for the engineers and/or United Illuminating (power company) to get out to the transmitter.

oldschooltv said:
I thought the elevation explained their excellent coverage all the way up to Torrington.
Click to expand...

WICC can't be heard in Torrington -- there's a local in that city on 610.
 
Ed B said:
The Studios for WICC were at one time back in the day located at Booth Hill
This goes back when WJZZ now WEZN Star99.9 were sister stations along with WICC TV Channel 43. The Transmitter has been located at Pleasure Beach since 1933.
Before that the transmitter was located on sport Hill Road in Easton. The station went on the air in 1926
Click to expand...

For those of you who are curious, CPTV did a special called "You're On The Air" about Connecticut television. There was footage of WICC-TV and some of the radio studios shown from the era back when WICC was on Booth Hill (if I remember correctly) back when Bob "Hogan's Heroes" Crane was on the air there. I'll have to pull my copy to be sure.
 
Bob Crane was the one who held up a $100.00 dollar bill on WICC TV and said the first person to call the station wins the $100.00 dollars. No one called. That ended WICC TV. No one had a UHF TV back in the late 50's early 60's. WICC TV was way ahead of the time. I also know there was a fire at the Booth Hill site back then, the place burnt to the ground. I do not know if the CT. post would have the pictures or the story in there archives.
 
Ed B said:
... I also know there was a fire at the Booth Hill site back then, the place burnt to the ground. I do not know if the CT. post would have the pictures or the story in there archives.
Click to expand...

The film was the only thing that survived the fire. I'd love to see the whole thing instead of the few short pieces they played as part of the CPTV special. That's a piece of history!
 
Star 99.9, WEDW-TV, WPKN and WSHU-FM 91.1 AFAIK have their towers on Booth Hill in Trumbull. 'ICC's sister station WEBE 108 is on top of a smokestack in downtown Bridgeport.
 
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