All of Our Eggs In One Basket
The late night fire in Fisher Plaza [Seattle] Thursday night, shows that housing several important backbones of commerce in one building, may not be the wisest thing to do. The fire, in an electrical vault in the basement of the building, caused a sprinkler system to flood the floor with about two feet of water. Power went out in the building, shutting down the 11:00 newscast at KOMO 4. But that is not all.
Verizon Communications Internet and wireless service to many parts of the city was lost for hours. This also caused the loss of service to customers of Authorize.net, a firm that provides credit card services to more than 238,000 businesses. Also out of service during this time, Adhost, a Seattle-based web-hosting service.
In addition, all Seattle radio stations in the building [owned by Fisher] went silent. That was KOMO 1000 [for a few hours], KOMO FM, 570 KVI, and 101.5 KPLZ [these three stations still off the air as of 12:30 afternoon Friday]. KOMO TV is simulcasting KATU/Portland on cable systems.
This makes you wonder about how communications and commerce would stop in the event of a major outage or a terrorist attack on the nation’s power grid. Television would be of no use in the event of an emergency. All ‘over the air’ broadcasts have changed to digital, most of us have cable TV and it appears that KOMO was not able to recover from this fire and return the TV station to service in the 12 hours since the fire.
Housing your cluster of radio stations in the same building might be cost-effective, but how is the community served as all signals are lost when an emergency event takes place? The only Fisher station to recover quickly in this case… KOMO AM 1000. Good old AM radio. The FM has the carrier signal running, no programming, as of noon Friday. KOMO AM is the money maker for Fisher, the flagship news station.
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July 5th, 2009 at 3:18 am
It’s so ironic that in this day and age a couple feet of water took out an entire Seattle news icon for so many hours, forcing them to broadcast from a nearby park! Yeah, imagine if a terrorist act had taken out even part of the nation’s power grid? We clearly are not prepared. Even post 9-11 America has learned nothing…typical. Remind me again why we can’t bring disposable razors on airplanes…?
July 5th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
We are not allowed to bring on a razor because obviously one of the terrorists could conceivably shave someone to death with a Bic.
There is also a limit on the amount of liquids you can bring onboard a plane. A terrorist, given enough Jergen’s lotion, could grease the entire floor of the plane, making it difficult, if not impossible for the flight attendant to walk down the aisle to serve those little bags of crappy pretzels and peanuts. Plus, if the good citizens couldn’t walk to the bathrooms, their bladders would likely explode during the course of the flight and that could be a huge mess. Once they have control of our bladders, the terrorists win!