TOP 25
The top 25 teams in The Associated Press’ women&rsquo

Cody Pelton

Ice damage also darkens 10,000 homes

STEVE MOCARSKY and MARK SOWERS smocarsky@www.timesleader.com

The ice and snow storm that walloped the region Saturday night through Sunday wreaked all sorts of havoc, causing power outages and the collapse and partial collapse of two local TV stations’ transmitting towers.

Heavy snow and ice buildup -- coupled with high winds -- caused WNEP’s 800-foot tower near Mountain Top to collapse just before 7 a.m. Sunday, taking the station’s main broadcast signal off the air, said President and General Manager Lou Kirchen.

WNEP’s collapsed tower may have cut the power line to WYOU, which took that TV station off the air as well, said Lou Abitabilo, vice president/general manager of WBRE, which has a shared services agreement with WYOU.

And the top half of public television and radio station WVIA’s 800-foot transmitting tower snapped off between 7 and 8 a.m., causing a temporary interruption in service until the broadcast signal was routed to an older, smaller tower with a slightly smaller broadcasting range, said WVIA President Bill Kelly.

The towers are among dozens located on Penobscott Mountain near Mountain Top.

PPL Electric Utilities reported that more than 10,000 of its customers in the Hazleton and Wilkes-Barre areas lost power some time after 4:30 a.m. Sunday.

All 2,942 Wilkes-Barre area customers and 5,772 Hazleton area customers had power restored by early Sunday evening. Power is expected to be restored to about 1,600 Hazleton area customers by 3:30 p.m. today.

WNEP’s tower collapse was not immediately apparent because a power outage in the area knocked all local TV stations and several local radio stations off the air around that time. When power was restored to the mountain, most stations resumed broadcasting over the airwaves, but WNEP did not.

Kirchen said that only Comcast Cable customers and Dish Network subscribers continued to receive the WNEP signal because they have fiber feeds. Long before the collapse, WNEP began providing a direct signal to those two companies.

WNEP does have a second tower on Penobscott Mountain that remains standing. This tower is used to broadcast the station’s digital signal. At 2 p.m. Sunday, WNEP resumed its digital broadcast, which was off temporarily due to the power outage in the area.

Kirchen said some cable companies are receiving WNEP’s digital signal and down-converting it to analog. WNEP is working to get a signal to several cable companies and DirecTV. For many cable systems this will mean replacing their analog receivers with digital ones. DirecTV collects local analog TV signals from rented space at WVIA-TV near Pittston.

Kirchen said about 90 percent of WNEP’s viewers use cable or satellite. The station will do its best to restore service to customers who use their own antennas.

Viewers who are unable to see WNEP on their TV sets are still able to watch it on their Web site. WNEP has converted its live video stream from their 24-hour news channel, Newswatch 16 Anytime, to its main broadcast feed.

Abitabilo said WBRE was only temporarily off the air Sunday because of a general power outage, but WYOU would be off the air for a longer time because of the severed power line. It is unclear whether it was WNEP’s tower or WVIA’s tower that severed the power line.

Joe Glynn, WVIA’s vice president of engineering, said WVIA crews couldn’t even find the top half of the WVIA tower on Sunday because of the sleet and extremely high winds atop the mountain.

Kelly said WVIA was fortunate that its tower snapped off above the radio station’s FM transmitter, so the radio station never left the air.

He said the top half of the damaged tower contained a digital transmitter, so while the station is able to broadcast an analog signal on Channel 44, its digital channel – Channel 41 – cannot be transmitted.

All stations are continuing to assess damages and work to restore service to all customers.

The last time a local station’s tower collapsed was when WBRE’s collapsed on Jan. 8, 1989, the victim of an ice storm. To continue its broadcasts, the engineers tapped into the microwaves at its competitors, WYOU and WNEP, enabling viewers to watch WBRE on cable. The station relied on a temporary tower until a permanent one was installed in October.

The collapse of WNEP-TV’s analog tower could have been much worse for local broadcasters.

The WNEP analog tower is located in the middle of several other towers on Penobscott Mountain, with WYOU and WVIA’s towers just to the south and WBRE and Fox 56’s towers just to the north. The guy-wires for all these towers tend to cross each other and it has been long feared that if one tower were to fall, it would pull several others down with it.

Near the WNEP tower are many transmitter towers for services like Magic 93 radio, The National Weather Service and the Luzerne County Communications Center.

Luzerne County Emergency Management Agency coordinator Stephen Bekanich said his biggest concern on Sunday was having the county’s 911 tower collapse, given what had happened with the TV stations’ towers.

Bekanich said engineers were out evaluating the county’s tower to determine if it might be in danger of sustaining damage or collapsing.

And just in case the county communications system did go down, Bekanich said fire departments throughout the county that have the ability to dispatch to emergency crews in their areas were manned.

Bekanich said his agency received no reports of people who needed shelter because of power outages throughout the county.

Richard Flinn, deputy director for the state Emergency Management Agency, said that as of 3 p.m. Sunday, 137,355 customers were without power over a wide section of eastern Pennsylvania.

Police attributed several minor vehicle accidents to the snow and ice. Details were not available at press time.

Storm tips TV towers