Alpha Media/Peoria Weathered City's Power Outage

At The Transmitter

ALPHA MEDIA/PEORIA managed to stay on the air last TUESDAY (7/18) during a power outage that hit the downtown core of the city, using some technical ingenuity and, in the case of News-Talk WMBD-A-W262BY, an old-school move.

WMBD's morning co-host GREG BATTON, traffic reporter KEN ZURSKI, CE WAYNE MILLER, and other staffers headed to the station's TAZEWELL COUNTY transmitter to broadcast commercial-free, and then set up a Marti link to the transmitters of three other stations in the cluster to feed special coverage including OM and AC WSWT (MIX 106.9) PD/morning co-host RANDY RUNDLE.  Meanwhile, WMBD morning co-host DAN DIORIO, news anchor ED HAMMOND, and Producer CORY WARA remained at the stations' main studio in case power returned, and joined the morning show staffs from the other ALPHA stations in feeding information to social media and station websites.

SVP/Market Manager MIKE WILD said, “Our number one priority is serving the community and I’m extra proud of our team for how they handled this unscripted situation. They moved quickly and were able to keep our listeners and users well-informed. This is what ALPHA MEDIA is all about; live and local!”

ZURSKI said, “It was a throwback and kind of an educational thing for me. I do remember not having computers and doing it old school. This was definitely old school. We had no indication there was a problem, all of a sudden, boom the power is out. We did our best to inform listeners of what was going on while doing whatever we could to get back on the air."

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