One of the lessons learned (or not!) from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center towers was the importance to public safety of NOT having most or all of your city’s TV and radio station transmitters at the top of a single building. When the north tower collapsed, most of the TV stations in New York City went off the air.
WCBS was the only major station with a backup facility immediately online – they still were maintaining a backup analog TV facility in the Empire State Building (where everyone had their equipment 30 years ago before the WTC was built in the 1970s). Here is a partial account of the problems (the page is incomplete).
It’s probably important to note that people watching on Cable TV and Satellite kept receiving the New York City TV signals and were not affected since the TV studios are in Midtown.
So – what is the point? With easier access to the FCC transmitter data on the web site, I followed data (testing) and wound up at WPWR TV in Gary Indiana – and looked at the map. Their TV transmitter is actually on the Sears Tower in Downtown Chicago – who would have thought that? What other TV stations are also on the Sears Tower? (everyone in TV loves a tall building!)
TV Stations on Sears Tower:
- 5 – WMAQ (DT 29) – NBC
- 7 – WLS (DT 52) – ABC
- 11 – WTTW (DT 47) – PBS
- 19-DT WGN (analog Channel 9 currently is on Hancock Tower) – CW
- 23 WWME (Class A – MeTV – not to be confused with MyTV)
- 26 – WCIU (doing hard cutover to DTV on same channel) – Independent
- 31-DT WFLD (analog Channel 32 is currently on Hancock Tower) – Fox
- 34 – WEDE (Class A LPTV – FamilyNet)
- 36 – WJYS (DT 36) – Independent
- 38 – WCPX (DT 43) – ION (formerly PaxTV)
- 39 – WWME-LP – Low Power DTV counterpart of channel 23
- 40 – W40BY – Translator for Trinity Broadcasting
- 44 – WSNS (DT 45) – Telemundo
- 50 – WPWR (DT 51)- myTV
- 60 – WXFT (DT 59) – Univision
FM Radio Stations on Sears Tower:
- WKSC
- WFMT
- WLS
- WBBM
- WTMX
- WCFS
- WJMK
- WLIT
- WGCI
- WCRX
And on the Hancock Tower a bit more than a mile away:
TV Stations:
- 2 – WBBM (DT 3) – CBS
- 20 WYCC (DT 21) – PBS
- 66 WGBO (DT 53) – Univision
FM stations:
- WXRT
- WNUA
- WBEZ
- WVAZ
- WUSN
- WKOX
- WOJO
- WILV
- WLUP
Holy bat crap, robin! – the nearest TV station that is NOT on one of those two buildings is WJYS in Hammond, Indiana.
Chicago’s Mayor Daley is concerned about this – he had his city employees destroy Meigs Field in 2003 in the middle of the night (the airport on the man made island in Lake Michigan. He did this without FAA or any federal government approval – specifically because he was worried that a plane taking off from Meigs Field could hit the Hancock or Sears towers with only few seconds of reaction time. (So if he had 5 minutes more warning about a hijacked jet from Midway, what could he do about it?)
But surely by now TV stations have backup transmitters in place even if they are low power – “just in case”… right?
Well there are a “few”. In the entire country, there are 37 analog TV stations and 12 Digital TV stations with licensed, authorized, and tested transmitters on standby. (tested recently?)
In Chicago, there are two TV stations with standby digital TV transmitters – Tribune’s WGN and PBS station WTTW.
WGN (see above) has its Analog transmitter on the Hancock Tower, but is moving to Sears Tower for Digital – their digital backup transmitter is in the Hancock Tower.
WTTW is at Sears Tower, and is staying at Sears Tower – and their backup DTV transmitter is at…. The Hancock Tower. Don’t you feel a lot better now?
Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should be asking broadcasters in Chicago to conduct a drill – all simultaneously pretending the Sears Tower lost its ability to transmit TV and radio signals – try switching to their backup facilities (that don’t exist) and see how well that works out – rather than reading the private emails of law abiding citizens who oppose homosexual marriage.
Back to New York for a moment – at the 1 World Trade Center – called the Freedom Tower until we were informed that Freedom might be perceived as offensive to the Global Community- the TV stations are about to cancel their plans to pay $20 million to build transmitters at the top of the non-Freedom tower and another $10 million per year in rent – which may doom or at least delay the entire Trade Center project . (nothing a Trillion dollars from Tim Geithner can’t fix – maybe that’s the real point of the threat to pull out)
Digital TV doesn’t need an antenna on top of the tallest building in town to work correctly. More and more people are watching TV on cable or satellite partly because of the shift to digital TV and HDTV – how well the “Over the Air” TV station works is becoming less and less important.
Since 9/11, the New York stations have mostly moved back to the Empire State Building (34th @ 5th Ave), and an improved facility on the Conde Nast Building on Times Square (that’s the building where NASDAQ has their TV studio at 43rd and Broadway). There is a vague plan to maybe build a 2000 foot tower over in New Jersey, but it isn’t a reality yet.
Did we learn anything yet?