Power Outage takes 2 San Diego Stations Off Air

[NotInTV 63]

The Kearny Mesa area of San Diego experienced a power outage last night, where two of the local stations are based. KFMB (CBS/CW) and KSWB (FOX) both went down for hours last night and did not air their scheduled newscasts.

 

https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/power-outage-in-kearny-mesa-leaves-kfmb-studios-in-the-dark/509-63152ed3-2c00-4922-84c5-c67c1e0265a0

 

KFMB ended up carrying a feed from Tegna sister station KXTV (ABC) in Sacramento, where their newscast was going over the governor's new policies and changes for reopening. It was quite confusing for some viewers, as KXTV Sacramento refers to themselves as ABC 10, but there is also an ABC 10 in San Diego (KGTV).

 

I do not know if KSWB ended up carrying KTLA or a similar feed, or stayed off air.

[DENDude 217]

The question is why doesn't KFMB have a Generator to keep them on the air??   If I were Tegna that would be something i would be looking into.

[Weeters 1916]

They DO have one, out by their satellite farm

 

There are a number of problems that they could have run into. Generators aren't exactly magic, they have flaws and mechanical issues. It might have taken more time to spin up than the batteries could keep critical infrastructure online. It's possible that as it spun up, it couldn't generate enough power to meet demand (a substantial load, such as studio lights, for example) and shut down as a safety precaution.  There's also the possibility that they didn't completely lose power, and only lost one "leg" of their three-phase service, which I've seen happen elsewhere. If the generator's transfer switch isn't set up to monitor all three phases, it's possible that one phase goes down, knocks out power to 33% of the building, and the generator doesn't notice because the phase it's monitoring is still active. This would require a manual transfer and startup which, generally, few people know how to do especially outside of the engineering department. By that time, it's probably been a few minutes and your equipment has powered off anyways, and now you're recovering from systems being shut down abruptly and booting up unstable.

 

For what it's worth, often when there's an expectation that a station will need to operate on generator power (such as during a hurricane) the switch over is controlled, well before they actually need it. If the hurricane is going to hit on Friday, they make sure it's working on Tuesday and manually transfer from the power grid to the generator on Thursday.

 

tl;dr there's not a whole lot you can do if the power goes out <30 minutes to show, and one thing goes wrong in the complex sequence required to switch over to generator power.

[Gavin 118]

On 5/8/2020 at 11:39 AM, NotInTV said:

The Kearny Mesa area of San Diego experienced a power outage last night, where two of the local stations are based. KFMB (CBS/CW) and KSWB (FOX) both went down for hours last night and did not air their scheduled newscasts.

 

https://www.cbs8.com/article/news/local/power-outage-in-kearny-mesa-leaves-kfmb-studios-in-the-dark/509-63152ed3-2c00-4922-84c5-c67c1e0265a0

 

KFMB ended up carrying a feed from Tegna sister station KXTV (ABC) in Sacramento, where their newscast was going over the governor's new policies and changes for reopening. It was quite confusing for some viewers, as KXTV Sacramento refers to themselves as ABC 10, but there is also an ABC 10 in San Diego (KGTV).

 

I do not know if KSWB ended up carrying KTLA or a similar feed, or stayed off air.

 

Probably KTLA

[nbc9houston 22]

20 hours ago, Gavin said:

 

Probably KTLA

 

Perhaps KTXL in Sacramento.