Hurrican Ike hit Crystal Beach, Texas on the early morning of September 13, 2008. Right in the bulls eye of the storm stood the transmitter for KSTB-FM, owned by Cumulus Media. It was utterly destroyed by the storm, and ceased operations. Not a surprise.
The rule with the FCC is you have 6 months after you go silent to prove you are making an effort to get back on the air, and a hard limit of a year. The FCC will make exceptions to the “Your license expires after one year of silence” rule for special hardship situations, being destroyed by a hurricane being an obvious example.
Initially, Cumulus claimed that they were prevented from access to the location by civil authorities. Then they said they were being prevented from rebuilding on the existing site by regulations about rebuilding stuff too close the ocean. Maybe so.
But now it has been 5 1/2 years, that this oceanfront has been without their local FM station. Each year, Cumulus sends out an engineer to “turn on the station” – probably connecting a portable transmitter to the antenna and putting out a tone for 5 minutes, and then asking the FCC for another year to solve their problem.
A local group is fed up enough that they want to buy the license from Cumulus.
http://www.galvcomradio.org/
While they claim to have an agreement to buy the license, nothing is on file with the FCC as they don’t yet have the money to actually do what they want.
Crystal Beach had been an upscale resort community with expenisve houses – since it is not allowed to rebuild that, the area is FEMA trailers and houses built on stilts to survive the next storm surge. The demographics is the real reason Cumulus has no real interest in rebuilding the station.
On a slightly related note, around 2009 when Clear Channel “went private” they pushed a bunch of stations into the “Aloha Trust” that exceeded the ownership limits because of grandfathered exceptions due to past mergers.
They were supposed to divest them as soon as reasonsbly practical. Many reverted back to Clear Channel just through clever lawyering and paperwork, but 6 AM and 13 FM stations are still in the trust. Even by the most generous definition, they aren’t making a reasonable effort to honor their agreement.