To the Rescue

In all cases, it was radio's finest hour and worst nightmare.

Stations struggled to stay on air and keep their listeners up to date with almost around-the-clock essential information: Was their house in the path of a wildfire, could they travel over their local bridge, would their livestock die in the heat? Formats went out the window: Céline Dion and Led Zeppelin had to wait as listeners tuned in their battery-operated transistor units and Walkmans and car radios to eyewitness accounts and up-to-the minute reports.

Ordinary citizens and music jocks were deputized as reporters. Anyone with a cell phone or even a quarter for a phone booth gave on-the-spot interviews and reports.

Radio staff felt the crises personally, losing homes and power and sleep. They endured arduous journeys into work because of malfunctioning traffic lights and downed trees and power lines. While disaster loomed around them, staff worked all hours on adrenaline and coffee and catnaps on the studio couches to get information on the air. Off-air personnel fetched food and drinks to fuel the announcers. Engineers fetched fuel to fuel the generators.

For veterans of the radio business, the crises were unlike anything they'd lived through or prepared for (indeed, several stations admitted they had no contingency plan for such events). For newbies, it was a priceless training ground that could not be duplicated in radio school.

Stations that are normally fighting tooth and nail for listeners and advertisers put aside their differences and worked toward one goal: to get the signals on the airwaves, and to help their community.

Listeners rewarded stations for their efforts by discovering frequencies they'd never paid any attention to, and increasing their ratings during and after the crises.

While newspapers -- if they were to publish at all -- lagged behind the coverage, and TV stations broadcast about twice a day, radio was always accessible, almost always on, and virtually saved the day.

Blackout

The biggest blackout in North American history came unannounced in the late afternoon of August 14, though few knew at the time it was widespread across southern Ontario and the eastern United States.

When power went out almost simultaneously, emergency generators at stations from Windsor to Ottawa kicked in nearly immediately, with stations usually going off air for mere seconds, then coming back to tell listeners what was happening.

But it was not without its hiccups.

At the CN Tower, the backup transmitter that serves many FM stations in the Toronto area failed, leaving several frequencies off the air for up to three hours over the course of the blackout, and coming back on the air with limited power on their individual backup transmitters around the city, says J.J. Johnston, general manager of the Corus Entertainment stations in Toronto. While Corus' FM stations Q107 and The Edge were affected by the CN Tower failure, Corus' AM station for men, MOJO, never lost its mojo, beaming a booming 50,000 watts on the strong 640 frequency from its transmitter in Beamsville in the Niagara, which for some reason didn't lose power. For about three hours, MOJO was the only Toronto station airing with full power, Johnston says.

By a fluke of geography, many Ottawa radio stations escaped the worst of the blackout. Because the highest point in the area is in the Gatineau hills on the Quebec side, most FM stations in the capital share a transmitter there, at Camp Fortune. Quebec's power grid was unaffected, so that transmitter kept transmitting.

The CHUM group of Ottawa stations (CFRA and The Team 1200 on AM, and BOB FM and Majic 100 on FM) learned lessons from the ice storm of 1998 and built an enormous generator on the roof of their new downtown studios, which they share with the New RO television station. The generator cranks out 350,000 watts of power, thanks to a 5,000-litre underground tank on the site which provides about 100 hours of generator run time, explains chief engineer Harrie Jones. "We never lost hydro during the ice storm but I watched other radio stations have to drive long distances to get fuel for their generators, such that the engineering staff was just getting exhausted, driving a truckload of jerry cans to fill it up," he remembers.

Because the two CHUM AM stations have a transmitter south of Ottawa, they lost power and had to run on generator for the duration of the blackout.

In Chatham, a city of about 44,000 in southwestern Ontario, the three local stations (CFCO AM, CKSY FM, and CKUE FM, all owned by Bea-Ver Communications) went on backup power and never went off the air, unlike many of the 80-odd Canadian and U.S. radio signals in the region, says assistant general manager Walter Ploegman. The local hydro utility restored power at their studios at 7:30 on Friday morning, after the hospitals and essential services, because the radio stations were deemed so important, he says.

Unfortunately, most Ontarians couldn't listen in during the blackout unless they had a battery-operated unit or tuned in on their car radio while driving around with the scarce and pricey gasoline from the few old-fashioned pumps that didn't require electricity.

When the power came back on, then-premier Ernie Eves urged everyone across Ontario to conserve electricity, hoping to reduce demand on the grid by 50%. The CHUM stations heeded the call and did better than that, using their diesel generator to power their studios, slashing electricity use by about 75%. They went to generator from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. (the peak demand period) for five days until the grid was back in business, Jones says. The stations also cut their transmitter power in half, which slightly reduced their coverage area but greatly reduced their strain on the electricity grid. The Chatham stations also conserved energy.

A natural disaster or public crisis can bring out the resourcefulness in radio. For example, the Corus studios in Toronto were down to just one and a half hours of power left and were making arrangements to head to their brother stations in Hamilton to use an old studio and feed to their transmitter. Luckily, that move wasn't needed as the power came back on just in time.

Since MOJO is "not the news leader in town," Johnston deadpans, it came up with some "pretty ingenious" ways of covering the blackout. For example, it found a list of phone booths in the city and used them to get the word on the street, literally. Other Corus staff hit the streets by directing traffic where the lights were out.

In Chatham, generators designed to last for seven or eight hours needed diesel fuel to keep going. With gas station pumps out of commission, the situation was getting critical. Ploegman was driving into the studios at 3:30 on Friday morning when he noticed lights on in the neighbourhood near a hospital. He went to a nearby gas station and filled up cans to take back to the generator.

Harrie Jones was on vacation in Orillia during the blackout but had trouble calling his engineering staff in Ottawa because cell phone towers were out. Luckily, he had a two-way radio and was able to keep in touch. CFRA morning man Steve Madely was trying to get back into the station to anchor live coverage the evening of the blackout but wasn't making much progress because traffic lights were out. He finally ditched his vehicle and walked to the station, working until 11 p.m. and returning for his morning shift the next day, says CFRA program director Dave Mitchell.

With little connection to the outside world, CFRA lucked out because one of its talk show hosts works from his home in Lunenburg, N.S., which was not affected by the blackout. Using a functioning ISDN line, the station called the host, who relayed live CNN audio feeds from his house.

Many stations, regardless of format, went with wall-to-wall news coverage of the blackout for at least the first day, when the power came back on. Others continued to cover the aftermath when thousands of workers stayed home at the request of the Ontario government.

CFRA, a news/talk format, went wall-to-wall as soon as the blackout hit, and continued for about a week, says Mitchell. In fact, it was simulcast on the other three CHUM stations for the first five hours of the blackout. Broadcasting on the FM stations, whose transmitter in Quebec was unaffected, increased CFRA's power, Mitchell notes.

The Chatham stations have a combined news staff of seven people, who went with wall-to-wall news coverage of local events on CFCO, an information and classic gold station with a strong 630 AM signal.

Because the blackout was in most cases not a life or death situation, the drama was exciting to the radio station staff who are news junkies or like to talk or want to be the first ones to tell somebody about something.

In fact, the Corus stations got such a kick from covering the blackout -- even though some were only going on four hours' sleep -- they were ready and raring to go when warning came a month later of a natural disaster that was supposed to hit Toronto but petered out. "Our guys were so pumped about Hurricane Isabel, they were so ready for it, that they now call it Hurricane Fizzabel," says Johnston.

While it's hard to prepare for every type of emergency, many Ontario stations thought their backup plans served them well.

However, the Toronto stations using the CN Tower are discussing installing new backup generators there, Johnston says.

The Chatham stations have since added a larger diesel fuel tank outside their studios to run a generator for longer periods.

Many stations also saw increased listener response after the blackout. MOJO seemed to pick up more listeners when it was the only station on the dial, Johnston says. The summer BBM ratings book measured a few days of the blackout. Normally, MOJO loses about one-third of its audience in the summer after the end of its Maple Leafs broadcasts. But this summer, it only lost 7% of its audience, he says. "Some of that audience gain came as a result of the blackout."

The AM band did particularly well during the blackout for two main reasons: most news/talk formats are on AM, and the signal was often stronger than FM frequencies, which gave them greater reach when broadcasting on diminished power.

Fire

At about 3 a.m. on Saturday, August 16th, lightning struck a tree in Okanagan Mountain Provincial Park, south of Kelowna, B.C. At seven that night, Bob Mills, program director of Pattison-owned Power 104 (a rock format) and CKOV AM, was called by a staff member to say the stations had been contacted by the forest service, asking to make some announcements warning residents of the fire. The AM station, which is news/talk/information, was broadcasting a B.C. Lions game and cut in with news updates on the fire. Once the game ended, the station went "full-tilt" with fire coverage.

By Wednesday, it was obvious the fire was raging and heading quickly towards Kelowna. That day, all five Kelowna stations were covering the fire practically full-time until the beast was tamed on Sunday.

On Thursday, many residents, including some radio station personnel, were told to get out of their homes. Mills was one of them. "I raced home, got my dogs, threw my clothes that I could in one bag and got the hell out as the police were coming down the street saying, 'Get out, get out now' and going door to door to make sure everybody was accounted for and gone. And I looked up that hill and that monster was coming down and it was frightening."

Friday, known as "Firestorm" Friday, saw about one-third of the city -- some 30,000 people -- evacuated, staying with friends or family, in hotels, or in the makeshift evacuation centres held in public buildings. Among the evacuees was Don Shafer, vice president and general manager of the B.C. Interior Group of Standard Radio, who had just moved into his Kelowna house that week.

That day, the fire raced 100 yards a minute, shooting flames 200 to 300 feet up. "The whole south end of the city on the Friday night was simply one big ball of fire. It looked like a scene out of Apocalypse Now," Mills recalls. "Everyone who was evacuated was simply staring back at that side of the city going, 'There goes everything I've ever worked for.'"

Mills' boss, general manager Bruce Davis, lost his home to the fire. Helicopter loads of water saved station salesperson Kim McKechnie's house, which is just across the street from Mills' home, which was also spared.

None of the Kelowna stations have a large on-air contingent, so covering the fire wall-to-wall was challenging. Standard, airing Sun FM (hot AC) and 1150 AM, was able to call on reporters from its network of stations in the Interior with cut-ins, and had some employees fly in from Vancouver and Terrace to help out.

Silk FM, a soft rock station independently owned by Nick Frost, was live from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. at the height of the fire, and used volunteers (such as friends and ex-employees) overnight answering the phones to keep listeners up to date. Silk FM also operates a local Web news portal, Castanet.net, which carried detailed information on the fire around the clock.

In many cases, it was fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants radio, but everyone is credited with acting professionally under incredible pressure and emotions. "It was as slick as you can expect when you hear people yelling in the background as they run to get out of their house. It sounded like a war zone on the radio," Shafer recalls. "You could hear somebody on the side of the mountain talking about the height and the heat and the ferocity of the fire as you heard helicopters, water bombers, and sirens and people yelling all around in the background. That's pretty horrific."

As horrific as the fires were, staff at all five radio stations were pumped up about keeping listeners informed. "That's why people work in radio. It's about being there for our listeners," says Rick Dyer, Silk FM's general manager.

"It was electric," says Shafer. "You just couldn't compete with the power of radio in terms of people grabbing a cell phone and running down the mountain with the fire chasing them and putting that on the radio."

None of the Kelowna stations lost power, so they kept broadcasting through the whole ordeal. Nor were any stations evacuated, although the Power 104/CKOV studios were just 300 yards from the evacuation line.

But the fire sought revenge in other ways. Thursday night, it burned the transmitter on Okanagan Mountain that was shared by all three Kelowna FMs. They had to go to their back-up transmitters, broadcasting at a fraction of their normal power. A new transmitter is expected to be up and running by November 1st.

At one point, Power 104's standby transmitter went down for unknown reasons, and they had to go on a "backup"-backup of only 250 watts to keep them on the air.

Silk FM was lucky. Sensing the fire was heading for the main transmitter, its engineer prepared the backup generator and called Dyer on Thursday night to say they could flip the switch when needed. "That was at 7 o'clock. At about 7:20, we lost our (main) site," Dyer says. They were only off air for about three minutes before the backup kicked in.

The Standard stations were also fortunate. About 24 hours before the FM transmitter burned, chief engineer Larry King commandeered a backup antenna that was en route to Kitimat to do an FM flip and got it operational in Kelowna. King was keeping an eye on the main transmitter hut, remotely measuring the temperature inside. "There was a brief moment where it skyrocketed and we lost contact with it and you just knew it was out," Shafer says.

Castanet's Internet site crashed until it got a second server to handle the bulge in traffic. At the height of the fire, it had 244,000 unique visits, mostly to the page with fire information, Dyer says.

The Standard stations had their share of computer problems, as King worked until 2 a.m. one morning getting the newsroom computers working. "It was like a M*A*S*H unit" with everyone performing roles, Shafer says.

Silk FM, with just one station and four on-air staff, managed to cover the fire with whatever was at hand: reading press releases on air, covering news conferences via cell phone and land line. They even rented a plane for four days and sent a reporter to describe the damage. "Red Green would have been proud of us for doing some of the things we did with just not having the equipment," Dyer recalls.

The fires also showed how radio gets involved in the local community. For example, all the stations (along with television and newspapers) in the Kelowna area put aside competitive differences and promoted a yellow ribbon fundraising campaign that was started by Patrick Riley, morning man at Standard's EZ Rock in Salmon Arm, where smaller fires had started before the huge Kelowna blaze. The Kelowna campaign raised about $250,000 for fire recovery efforts. Don Shafer joined the board of directors for the City of Kelowna and Okanagan Fire Recovery Fund to help the community rebuild. All stations are also promoting various compilation CDs to raise money for relief efforts.

Listeners showed their appreciation for their radio lifelines by bringing baked goods, flowers, chocolates, and cards to station staff. While Kelowna does not do a summer ratings book, Shafer intuitively knows there was increased radio tuning in late August. "There's not a BBM to go to that says radio won the day, but you just know it did." „

Everyone in the Okanagan, radio stations included, is trying to get back to normal as much as possible. But there are still gruesome reminders of the devastating fire. After the ordeal, Bob Mills drove to Bertram Creek Park, a popular spot at the south end of the city, and saw it had burned to the ground. "Up in three blackened, lifeless trees were about 20 vultures. And it was the most frightening, eerie thing. It was like being in an Alfred Hitchcock movie. It was absolutely bizarre."

The fire spurred Standard to switch formats on its AM station because so many listeners were sick of the tragedy and requested "happy" music, Shafer says. So The Bullet AM 1150, playing country, is now Oldies 1150.

Castanet.net has seen its popularity double since the fire, going from around 20,000 visits a day to 45,000. "The Gulf War put CNN on the map. The fire put Castanet on the map," Dyer says. "I probably have 300 emails from people all over the world saying thank you" for letting them keep an eye on family members affected.

Silk FM's backup transmitter is only about 1 km from the main site, and both were in the path of the fire. The station is considering moving its backup to another location. But everyone in Kelowna hopes it will never be needed again.

Hurricane

After things returned as much as possible to normal in southern Ontario and the B.C. interior, Hurricane Juan slammed into Halifax to bid a cruel goodbye to summer.

Rich Horner was sitting at home on Sunday evening, Sept. 28. Watching TV, the news director of the NewCap stations in Halifax (classic rock Q104 and country 780 Kixx) saw a weather forecast calling for up to 80 mm of rain and winds of 60 km/h. Nothing out of the ordinary for a tropical storm or depression, he thought. At around 8 p.m., he went to the ocean east of Dartmouth to check out the storm. "At that point in time it didn't look that bad; in fact, I've seen worse," he recalls. "I really wasn't all that concerned."

A staff member working in the station called him at around 10 p.m. to say the forecast had changed and there was going to be a "full frontal assault" on the city. Horner left for the station at around 11 p.m., "not realizing at the time that I was probably going to be driving through the height of the storm when it hit land."

He almost didn't make it in. A drive that normally takes 15 minutes lasted an hour and 20 minutes as both bridges crossing Halifax Harbour were closed. Already, power was out in one neighbourhood and "the rain was pounding down worse than any blizzard that I've ever driven in," Horner says. "It was kind of like riding a mechanical bull in the dark, my experience driving the car. You couldn't see a damn thing." He found himself part of the story, experiencing the storm first-hand. "When I was probably 20 minutes away from the radio station, I felt scared for my life and I don't ever recall having felt that way before. And I guess it was at that stage that I understood the magnitude and the ferocity of what this was all about."

When Horner arrived at the station at 12:15 a.m., he was on the air with regular bulletins about what was now a Category 1 hurricane. He stayed until 7 a.m., when he was relieved by his regular news staff, except for the sports director, who was stuck in Ottawa because flights to Halifax were cancelled.

The morning news person on Q104, Lisa Blackburn, was also trying to get to the station but she hit a sign that blew over and got a flat tire. She called to get a station engineer to pick her up in a 4x4 but he, too, had hit something and had a flat. An on-air appeal for help yielded a trip to the station from a listener. Blackburn was on the air until later that afternoon.

While they never did wall-to-wall because of fewer staff resources, the NewCap stations did frequent information updates and included reports from listeners about bridge closures, downed power lines, and other dangers. When the storm was over, they mentioned which stores were open for essential items.

With the power out to some 300,000 customers in the area (including Horner's house), Halifax stations had to go to diesel-powered generators for several days. For some reason, 780 Kixx (with a country format) lost power until Wednesday at 4 p.m., Horner says.

One change that may come as a result of the hurricane is to consider adding more access points to the transmitter site. "That's all it would have taken is a couple of trees down and they would have had to haul gallons and gallons of diesel fuel up the hill, I suspect," Horner says.

While Hurricane Juan did not arrive completely by surprise, no one expected its full force. Plus, the media had a tough choice: do you make a big deal out of something that ends up being nothing (like Fizzabel)? "There's always that fine line between crying wolf and doing a public service," Horner notes. In the end, he is convinced that he and his staff put their lives at risk to get to the station to keep listeners informed. "If I wasn't in the business, I wouldn't have been out on the road," he says. "Life's too short."

Laurel Hyatt is a freelance journalist based in Ottawa.