It was a dark and stormy night on September 27, 2014. That’s when a second round of torrential rain hit Carbon County and resulted in significant flooding. The Price River inundated Pilling’s Trailer Court in Carbonville, and also overflowed its banks in Wellington, flooding several homes near the river. It is also the date that one of two towers transmitting KOAL’s broadcast signal at AM 750 toppled to the ground and took the station off the air.
It was particularly bad timing since KOAL is the primary station for the Emergency Alert System, and the storm and flooding was definitely an emergency situation. Fortunately the station was still broadcasting on the FM band via translator at 103.9.
KOAL is owned and operated by Eastern Utah Broadcasting. General Manager Paul Anderson said it was originally thought that a lightning strike brought down the tower, but he said it was later determined that, “It fell due to guy anchor failure. There was a flaw in the construction that took 28 years to appear.” The 240-foot towers are stabilized by guy cables tied to heavy blocks of reinforced cement buried deep underground, and are also secured to concrete Jersey barriers above ground.
KOAL broadcasts with 10,000 watts of power during the daytime and 6,800 watts at night. Anderson explained that the station must broadcast in a directional pattern at night to avoid interfering with other stations to the east, and that requires two transmitter antennas.
New guy cable anchors have been installed for both towers, and on Tuesday a new “stick” went back up, hoisted up in two sections by a large crane. The new tower was bolted into place just before Tuesday’s snow storm arrived, but Anderson said, “It will take a couple of weeks to finish the project and get back to 100 percent power.”
[dfads params='groups=4969&limit=1&orderby=random']
[dfads params='groups=1745&limit=1&orderby=random']