On Thursday, May 22nd a pair of tornados ripped through the Laramie area. This is an EXTREMELY rare event due to the terrain.

My assistant and I were still on the road, returning from a trip to several transmitter sites in the Western part of the state. We were out of cellular coverage but heard the weather announcements on our other network stations. My first thought was “Uh oh…”.

Even though we had limited cellular service, I was able to receive a call from our Laramie transmitter site around 1:30 PM informing me that the power had gone out and that the generator was running. I quickly fired up the auxiliary transmitter while I still had cellular service and a connection to the remote. This ensured that our Laramie transmitter site still had some kind of signal on the air.

Unfortunately, the worst of the weather started to hit Laramie at this point and the station we were listening to went silent. Most likely this meant that the satellite uplink was being impaired by extremely heavy rain. The Laramie station is also fed by this uplink which meant that it was also being interrupted (even though there was power at the site for the backup transmitter). Fortunately our other two stations in Laramie were NOT fed via satellite and were still available to get continuous emergency information to the public. Eventually the signal returned on the station we were listening to but the signal in Laramie did not. This meant that something had happened to the satellite dish at our Laramie transmitter site. I sent a local engineer to the transmitter site now that the storms had somewhat passed. An hour or so later he had the station back on the air…The dish had become covered in heavy wet snow.

We finally made it back to Laramie. All other local FM stations were still off the air. 8000 people had been left without power due to downed power lines and other damage. It was only us, the local AM station and one or two satellite fed religious broadcasters with transmitter sites in unaffected locations.

I settled into bed that night but was awaked at 10:30 by ANOTHER call from the remote control informing me that the generator had run out of fuel…D’OH! To be continued in the morning…

Here are a few photos of the damage via the Laramie Boomerang. I had just returned to town after the storm passed and was too busy restoring service to snap any photos myself…