>
> I'm someone who has a job that has to plan for these sort of
> things. You can have every contigency plan in place and
> executable, but in a storm such as this unpredictable things
> happen. Perhaps the site flooded, and their longwire backup
> fell down. I'm fairly sure they are doing everything they
> can to get back on the air too.
>
I had a site I rebuilt in the 70's in Puerto Rico with the goal of withstanding the hurricanes which hit PR much more often than places on the mainland. We put the building, which went up on a small hillock, so that its concrete floor was 30 inhes abover ground, so even torrential rain could not flood it. We built the generator into a cage on the floor, sealed from the transmitter room with reinforced concrete walls. The genereator room had a mesh outer wall with heavy cement filled pipe every 18 inches, to insure air flow. A roof of reinforced concrete hung out several meters. The transmitter room had reinforced concrete on all sides.
Ventilation to the transmitter was an inverted duct that ran upwards vertically for 6 feet before looping in, with filters installed. The air return to outside was similar but that proved the weak link. The winds of one hurricane, where gusts hit around 180 mph at our location, caused a vacuum to form, and rain water was sucked into the transmitter. Obviously, it failed. Miserably. The short affected the trnsmitter switch, so the aux would not fire by remote control.
As soon as I could get to the site, I assessed damages and the parts we did not have were ordered by air freight, and arrived the next morning. Having a generator, a $200,000 building overhaul, plenty of normal spare parts and good engineers did not help. The storms of this kind are just beyond the ability to cacluclate for. Oh, we had the towers 3 feet above ground, and the whole site was on an incline, about 12 feet above a road, with a gully to the other side. Still, we got hit.
