[BC] KOMO Fire

[Clay Freinwald]

"Milton R. Holladay Jr. wrote - 
Who on the list had a station at Fisher Plaza ? Clay ?

Sorry guys - I spent the weekend working on the homestead.

I did turn on KOMO-TV about 6 AM and noted that they were running ABC network Video but the audio was, un-related, local content from KATU in Portland, Oregon.  First clue that something was wrong.  At about 630 they got on the air from a park near their TV transmitter on Queen Ann Hill.  That was a hoot as they had no teleprompter, graphics, spots etc.   Weather graphics was a white board held up for the camera by the Weather guy.   Traffic reports had the cameraman pan and zoom in on a laptop while the traffic gal navigated to various DOT sites.   I checked the radio - KOMO-AM was on the air, with network feeds from ABC, at the KOMO-TV Site (The STL from their now dark studios runs thru there) they made comments about their 18inch Board.   KOMO-FM was dead carrier, finally they got an internet feed into their STL to restore that.  KPLZ was running nothing but music from some hard-drives at the KOMO-TV Tx Site.  Their other Radio, KVI, had it's transmitter on the air on Friday AM with nothing but a very nasty sounding buzz (they later turned it off)  I did not check KNUS. (TV)  I suspect that they ran Univision direct.

It is my understanding that this all started with a fire in an electrical room down in their underground parking garage where Seattle City Light meets Fisher with about 3,000 Amps.  Apparently, in the process, their transfer switch was also damaged, hence the darkness that continued.

It appeared that all was up and running on Sunday via a pair of 2.5 MW gen sets setting outside their studio facilities (Fisher Plaza)

The take away from this for me is to re-inforce the need to plan for means of dealing with failure of those SPOF's.   We all have them, but we also become complacent and lazy and think that that gizmo won't fail and we will be OK.   Remember Murphy reins !!!!

Thankfully none of the stations that I do work for here was impacted, something that I am very thankful for - 

We are, for sure, looking forward to a future Seattle Chapter 16 meeting where we can have some of the KOMO Engineering team come tell us the whole story.   I'm sure that we all have a lot to learn from this event

Clay Freinwald
Seattle