I don't even wanna think about what
happened five years ago today.
You may not remember this, but it's
been etched into my brain for half a decade now. A windy snowstorm
moved in on January 3 rd, 2014, ushering in a cold snap that lasted,
on and off, almost two months. But that's not why I don't wanna
think about what happened five years ago today. Nope; the reason I
don't wanna think about what happened five years ago today is what
occurred at 9:03 pm, most likely caused by the wind and the snow and
the cold, although, in all honesty, we may never know the exact
cause.
What happened at 9:03 pm five years ago
today? And why do I even remember the exact time? Well, that's when our antenna array blew up, ushering in a five
month period of us being, well, not much of a radio station.
Those of you who tried to listen on the
air or may remember reading my daily bouts of whining about the
situation know that it was not fun. Something happened 600 feet
above the ground that caused metal to melt and things to fall apart.
Instead of our usual 100,000 watts of power, we were broadcasting at
100 watts—and that's if we were lucky. Because of the extreme cold
the first three months of the year, our engineers couldn't climb up
on the tower to find out what was wrong. And on the days that they
could climb, they had to trace every single inch of feed line,
radomes, and antenna couplings to try and find out what the problem
was. Once they found all of the problems (and there were multiple
problems) we then had to order a whole new antenna array, wait for it
to be built, wait for it to be delivered, and then wait for the winds
to die down enough for the engineers to haul it up 600 feet above the
ground, install it, plug it in, and hope that it worked.
All that was done, and we were finally
back up and running at full power on June 3rd, five months
to the day after storm that started the whole thing.
It was not a five months that I'd
recommend anyone go through. It's certainly a five months that I
never want to have to experience again. It was bad enough not being
able to do what we usually do and have everyone listen who usually
listens. The worst part of it was the not knowing—the now knowing
what the problem was, and the not knowing when it would be fixed. It
was okay the first few weeks; we figured the weather would break soon
and we'd get things fixed. But as the weeks stretched into months
and as we were all of a sudden looking the the real possibility that
a half a year would pass before things returned to normal; well,
that's when the absurdity of the situation hit its extreme.
Thankfully, though, things DID return
to normal. We found out what the problem was, we had a new system
built, and on the afternoon of June 3rd a button was
pushed and our long national nightmare was over. If anything good
comes out of a situation like this it's what happened after we
returned to full power, and had people from all across the U.P. tell
us how much they missed us and how glad they were that we were back.
It was nice to know we were missed. And trust me—we missed each
and every person who couldn't hear as much as they missed us.
Even after five years I get a little
shudder down my spine when a cold snap hits or a winter weather
system started spewing ice over the landscape. I know it's probably
not going to happen again, but the psychic pain and the mental trauma
caused by the accident will probably linger in the back of my mind
for as long as I work in radio. And that's probably nothing compared
to what my boss had to go through; after all, he was the one who had
to pay all the bills for the fun.
The fun that, believe it or not,
started five years ago today.
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