Fire knocks WABC off the air
Cory Bergman May 28th, 2007
Just before the 11 p.m. newscast last night, a light exploded in WABC’s news studio, setting a curtain on fire and flooding the building with smoke. “As soon as and we said we got a fire going, all of the sudden, it went boom and the whole thing,” said cameraman Lou Torellas. “I looked at the back of the set, there must have been 10 to 15-foot flames flying up to the ceiling.” The staff quickly evacuated, and WABC went off the air for two hours until it was able to patch into the West Coast feed. The staff was allowed back in the building at 2 a.m. to discover “extensive damage” to its new high-definition set and some equipment, yet they were able to scramble a newscast on the air beginning at 5 a.m. Lots of photos and video on WABC’s site here, and ThousandRobots.com has a screen shot of WABC’s air during the outage. (Thanks, ADM!)
5 Comments Add your own
1. Roon | May 28th, 2007 at 10:49 am
How did the other stations in town cover it? Or did they?
2. Allen | May 28th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
How dare they miss sweeps by a week!
3. Steve | May 28th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
2 hours to patch into another feed? I find it amazing that there was no way to do that from their transmitter, assuming it wasn’t evacuated as well.
4. Swift Loris | May 28th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
WABC anchor Sandra Bookman, who was about to go on the air with the 11pm newscast last night when the fire started, did a report on the fire on the 6pm news tonight from the anchor desk in the damaged studio, while Bill Ritter anchored from the newsroom. You could see workmen cleaning up the mess behind Bookman.
5. Alyssa | May 29th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Don’t they have some sort of emergency backup plan to air over another transmitter or something?
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