KOMO stays on the air as fire silences KVI, Star 101

Talk station KVI and mixed-music Star 101, (KPLZ) Seattle's no.1 radio station have been silent since about 11:25p Thurs.

A small fire broke out in Fisher Plaza in the basement parking garage in an electrical vault. It's the section of the building where city power lines meet the building's transformers, according to Seattle City Light spokesman Scott Thomsen.

(Tenants schlep servers out of the dark, deserted hulk of Fisher Plaza. (Photo: TechFlash)

KOMO Radio is broadcasting Friday from a building at its transmitter on Queen Anne hill in Seattle, and KOMO TV broadcast morning segments from a truck in Kerry Park.(KVI is quiet because it's transmitted from KVI Beach on Vashon Island).

Lights went out, came back on, then smelling something. staffers at KOMO were herded out of the building by the Fire Department. Readers say a staffer (we'd love to know who) had the sense to plug a cell phone into the board, and was able to stayed on the air interview firemen, company honchos, and others gathered on the sidewalk, such as anchor Dan Lewis, and weatherman Steve Poole who were run off the teevee set during the 11 o'clock news.

Sprinklers went off and damaged generators. It still stinks, they say, in the multi-million dollar facility which is for sale. The burning question: will there be a fire sale?

The KOMO website is still up and running despite Fisher Plaza is a major national data hub. The fire  knocked out dozens of on-line businesses and websites including a credit card processor, Pacific Science Center, Microsoft's Bing Travel, Verizon and some major pornsites including Fuggeddabadit.com, the controversial elderporn site.

KOMO, though vague, reports everything is gradually getting back up and running.

Thomsen said that it appears equipment failure on the part of the customer caused the fire.

Comments

[joanie]

An elder porn site? I never heard of it. OMG! I guess there's something for everyone on the internet.

I usually hate "best of" shows but Randi's was riveting tonight. She repeated the excellent interview with Dave Neiwert and then repeated her dramatization of Sanford's emails. She laughs so hard during parts of it that it was infectious.

I was podcasting some old shows of Dave's last night and caught his rendition of the emails and he was sooooo romantic. He made them sound beautiful. Randi brought me back to reality today. I wish you could have heard it. One of her staff portrayed Sanford and she did Maria with a Latin accent. It was great. if I had a podcast of it, I'd save it on my computer.

Thank god she got over Michael. (She was satirizing his fans mercilessly.)

[joanie]

BTW, I played a video on the My Northwest site of Dave doing a Michael Jackson thing and at the end it credited Frank Shiers - audio technician. So, I guess he's still active behind the scenes as well as filling in on air occasionally.

Dave has a better rapport with Libby on air than he did with Tina who is on air with Reagan waaaaay too much. I do not like her. She thinks toes are ugly. She doesn't think touching is okay. I think she's a cold woman. I can tell, you know. :)

I really like Libby. She never lets Dave off the hook and has a much better radio voice.

Speaking of Tina, I'm finding Reagan (whom I still like) to be occasionally more stuffy and smug than I expected. Once the gig becomes regular, it is harder to hide those small traits that may not be so attractive.

Anyway, even his "niceness" sometimes gets to be too much. He's almost the epitome of pc. Obviously, he was well-trained in the art of never causing consternation or being totally authentic.

But, I still like him most of the time.

But he should keep Tina away from the microphone.

[KS]

Did anyone see the Transformers II?

Maybe not as quite as good as Transformers I, but the critics hated it for some reason. Let's see, was it because they slammed the Obama Administration on their foreign policy weakness by depicting them as indecisive wusses ? (A Defense official had the line "Peace at all costs").

Kudos to the director of this movie, Mr. Bay for the courage to add this to the movie at the risk of being slammed by the critics all part of the White House- Media complex.

[Coiler]

Omg! The WH Media Complex! Nothing like GOPAC in the 90's when Newt was running a pirate station for Rush in the basement of the Capitol.

[KSR]

More often than not, my impression of Blah'M is that he's a total whack-job. After this mess however... he's (maybe) slightly less so.

For reasons, I suspect, are almost totally politically based, this site has been brutal toward what goes on at KVI. Much of it is easy to dismiss as mere political sour grapes. However, Fisher's treatment of the station over the past 24 hours has been very enlightening.

Within 4 hours of the "small fire", overnight news readers were feeding KOMO AM from the Queen Anne TV tower. Sitting in front of the TV transmitter, with nothing but a small mixer and a couple of microphones, they at least kept the modulation meter moving.

By the time the high(er) paid mouths showed up, engineers had added KOMO-FM to the lineup. The TV station was being fed an interesting mix of network video and KATU (Portland) audio. We saw pictures of a Michael Jackson rehearsal while hearing about how Portland was going to be HOT today.

KPLZ eventually came back on, though obviously being fed from what sounded like a CD player. Later stories showed a digital audio player at the TV site... much the same kind of creativity that was keeping the AM on the air.

Somewhere in this mess, KUNS made it back up, also with some sort of satellite feed.

So... what about KVI? Nothing but unmodulated carrier. Not until the Fisher building came back to life did 570 utter a peep.

OK... maybe the station only has one or two live shows left in its lineup. Does KUNS TV have any?

For awhile, it sounded like KVI had lost a radio STL feed. OK... has Fisher been running that place for this many years with no backup feed? The two AMs are on the same island. No interconnecting lines? No way to feed KVI from thw Queen Anne TV site, like they were able to do with all their other broadcast facilities? No way they could have plugged into the KOMO feed?

Fer cryin' out loud... couldn't somebody have taken a ferry over to the transmitter and plugged in a freakin Ipod?

Call it what you want. The fact they just let it sit there tells me a lot about how KVI stacks up on the Fisher asset list right now.

Otherwise, it's going to be interesting to hear (hopefully) what caused all of this. In the process of building up emergency plans, I'm amazed that Fisher constructed such a critical facility with such an Achille's heel. This is admittedly hindsight, but if, as the TV talkers say, millions of dollars were lost in online transactions, shouldn't Fisher have thought about what they'd do if their only backup power source was to fail?

.... and... water sprinklers in the generator room?

Something tells me there are going to be a lot of corporate/staff/customer/tenant meetings coming up.

[KS for conspiracy theories]

"Kudos to the director of this movie, Mr. Bay for the courage to add this to the movie at the risk of being slammed by the critics all part of the White House- Media complex."

The WH- Media Complex can be interchanged with the left-wing whack job pukes of the media.