KCBD Recovers Fast From Tower, Power Loss

Minutes after a single-engine Piper PA-46 struck a guy-wire of the 743-foot TV tower next to the KCBD studio in Lubbock, Texas, on Feb. 4, sending the top two-thirds of the tower and the plane crashing to the ground, other broadcasters, cable operators and the school district rallied to get the Raycom Media station back on the air (and cable) — and succeeded in just three hours.

“At about 7:35 [p.m.], my master control operator called and said, ‘We’ve lost power,’” recalls Ricky Price, the NBC affiliate’s director of technology. “I asked him if he had switched to the alternate power, which he had, but that was down, too.”

Price headed for the station and on the way received another phone call from the same MC operator telling him the station’s tower had fallen. As it did, they later confirmed, it ripped out the two power lines feeding the station.

At about the same time Price received his call from the master control, Brad Moran, president of Ramar Communications, owner of Fox affiliate KJTV, was having a meeting at a popular local restaurant. “The lights flickered at the restaurant, and shortly thereafter I got a call saying the KCBD tower had fallen,” says Moran.

After driving to KCBD to see the collapsed tower for himself, Moran offer his assistance to Price and KCBD General Manager Dan Jackson.

That help included putting KCBD back on the air, on a subchannel of KJTV (subchannel  33.2; PSIP channel 11.1), pulling down the NBC network satellite feed and making his station’s engineering, operations and management team available and personally calling 10 to 15 cable engineers working at small cable systems to tell them KCBD had been moved to a new channel so they could retune their receivers and continue delivering the station to subscribers.

Kenneth Dixon, station manager of the Lubbock Independent School District TV station, also suspected something was wrong when the lights started flickering at about 7:30 p.m.

“Right after it happened [the crash], all across the city there was a flicker,” says Dixon. “I got on Facebook to see if I could find out what caused the flicker and saw the tower had collapsed and that KCBD had lost power.”

At about 8:15 p.m., Dixon received a call from someone he knows at KCBD who said the newsroom and studio were dark and asked if the station could use the school district’s two-camera broadcast studio to produce its newscasts. Dixon said OK and KCBD journalists and producers soon began arriving at the studio, writing scripts and preparing for the station’s 10 p.m. newscast.

KCBD also used the school district’s fiber optic link to feed Suddenlink Communications, the main cable TV provider in Lubbock. “We were able to send that signal and at the headend, Suddenlink was able to remap our signal onto KCBD’s channel,” says Dixon.

Using a LiveU IP ENG link, KCBD also streamed its newscast live via the Internet to another Raycom station, which in turn put it up on the KCBD website, says Price.

Although Suddenlink subscribers and online users could watch the make-shift 10 o’clock news, KCBD didn’t return to the airwaves until 10:35 with the start of the Tonight Show. KJTV made that happen by downlinking the NBC feed and broadcasting it from its tower on the subchannel set aside for KCBD.

About an hour later, KCBD switched from the raw NBC feed to the NBC feed of KAMR, the Nexstar NBC affiliate in Amarillo, Texas, with the help of Suddenlink, which relayed the KAMR signal to KJTV.

“The straight NBC feed doesn’t have any commercials,” Price says. “By using KAMR’s signal, there was no dead air between network program segments.”

The morning after, KJTV provided dubs of commercials that have been airing on both KCBD and KJTV. The commercial reel made it possible for KCBD to insert breaks into its two-hour morning news as well as its noon and evening newscasts.

Power was restored that evening and KCBD was able to produce its 10 p.m. news from its own studio. Until a new temporary tower and transmitter is ready, the station will relay its signal via Suddenlink to the KJTV.

To assist Price in picking up the pieces and preparing for its own temporary transmission site, Raycom sent a team of engineers to the station. It included group VP of Technology David Burke, group Director of Engineering Bob Thurber, Corporate Engineering Manager Eric Bergman and Butch Adair, former chief engineer of KLTV Tyler, Texas, who had retired after 26 years with Raycom and Liberty Broadcasting only four days before the incident.

“At any station that is in a situation like this, the staff is going to be working as hard as it can with its normal operations and the added responsibilities of getting back up and running,” says Adair, who dealt with a tower collapse at KLTV in 2006. “Raycom brings in extra help to a local station when something like this happens.”

In the week since the incident, eight different Raycom stations have sent technology to Lubbock. “I have had trucks showing up every day since [the incident] with equipment for the STL, for a temporary antenna, for the line,” says Price.

Price has found a tower used at one time by an analog UHF station three miles away from the KCBD studio. If all goes as planned, the structure, which is owned by American Tower, KCBD will resume broadcasting from the tower on its own channel 11 in the coming days with a one-bay antenna and a low-power digital transmitter, which together will produce .9kW of effective radiated power (ERP).

That’s a far cry from the 41kW ERP the station delivered from the antenna affixed to the 63-year-old tower destroyed in the collision. However, Price says he expects the temporary setup, along with the Suddenlink cable coverage, to reach about 95% of the 158,400 homes in the DMA, 12.5% of which rely on an over-the-air signal. Currently, the station is reaching about 85% via cable and the signal on the Ramar tower.

The pilot of the Piper, Dr. Kenneth Mike Rice, a Lubbock-area internal medicine doctor, died in the crash. No one else was aboard. He was on approach to Preston Smith International Airport in Lubbock when the incident occurred, according to an FAA statement.

The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash. An NTSB spokesman says a preliminary report on the cause of the crash is expected to be released in the coming weeks.

The tower had been painted within the past year, and security camera footage of the tower and surrounding area indicate the structure’s lights were working properly on the night of the accident, says Price.

Burke says it’s too soon to know whether the station will ultimately erect a new structure or lease tower space.

The tower collapse is not the first for Raycom, says Burke. In his 17-year tenure with the company, at least four have come down, but in each case the station group’s employees have overcome the adversity.

He says the quick response in Lubbock is directly attributable to the talent and dedication of Price, whom he calls “a hero.”

Price, however, credits the broadcasters and others that came to the station’s aid.

“The Lubbock area has always been good about helping each other out, and that just bore out in this instance. It’s just West Texans helping West Texans.”