It’s been one of those days…

First of all, I went against my better judgment by uttering the phrase “Why yes, it HAS been pretty quiet in terms of problems lately…” earlier this morning. Our General Manager was commenting on the fact that he had not heard anything about major issues or outages across the network in the past week or two compared to the rash of failures we had been having recently. I have this theory that the equipment and the weather KNOW when you say things like that. I knew better than to do it, but still uttered those words.

Things went well until some time after lunch…

Contractors had completed the installation of a new generator up at the KUWR transmitter site yesterday and I decided to go up and inspect their work. Andrea and the dogs came along just for fun. The contractors had done a great job on the installation and we had a fun time playing up at the transmitter site with the dogs. (Like I said…Dogs love RF!)

As we were getting back into town, a major thunderstorm began to roll through the area. KUWR was still on the air so I was not terribly worried but there was a significant amount of lightning nearby. It was about this time I received a phone call from the studio that we had lost power. This is the second time in less than two weeks that we have lost power to the entire campus.

My assistant and I had JUST completed some rewiring after the LAST outage to ensure that our STL and satellite uplink gear stay powered up during an outage. Unfortunately the rack stayed powered up but our satellite uplink did not due to the fact that the uplink dish and amplifier are on an adjacent building. That amplifier is not yet on our emergency power system. We are in the process of having an entirely new dish and amplifier installed which WILL be on emergency power but unfortunately the contractors have not completed that project yet.

While I was on the roof trying to figure out if I could get our satellite uplink back on the air, chaos was breaking out down in the studios. Our news department produces a weekly show that goes to air just after the time this power outage hit. Unfortunately they were JUST finishing production on the show 30 minutes before the outage and had to scramble to figure out how to get the show on the air while we were limping along on emergency power.

The production studios and newsroom desktop PCs are not on emergency power…Only the news director’s studio and main control room have emergency power. This made it very difficult for the news staff to get the show to air. Our emergency power system was apparently not originally designed to allow people to keep working at normal capacity during an outage. It was ONLY designed to keep us on the air.

Power returned while the show was on the air but unfortunately the damage had already been done. There were issues during the airing of the show due to the way it was put on the air. It had been burned to CD at the last minute instead of produced and aired from our automation system like usual. I made some offhand comment as I was leaving the control room about producing things such a short time before air. BIG mistake. After the news director got off the air he came into the engineering shop and just about ripped my head off. I had never seen him so angry, nor had my co-worker across the hall from me. She heard the whole thing. The only words I got out of my mouth while he was screaming at me before he stormed off were “I’m sorry…”

Some days I guess you just can’t win…Oh well…That’s why God gives us tomorrow!