Don't break the tower, man!

It was my first day of work at Power 93. I walked in to the dumpy little un-completed office building in Columbus, NC at the foot of the mountain where our MONSTROUS antenna tower was located. 1500 feet on top of the 2nd highest mountain peak in Western NC. At 93,000 watts, we went THUNDERING into 5 states. From Charlotte to Knoxville, From Virginia, through South Carolina and into Georgia. . . We were truly "Cra Cra Crankin'' out the POWER HITS!"

So I walk into the . . . Studio. really, it was a room full of artifacts that were found in a dig of an ancient radio equipment burial ground. The walls were covered by posters of wilson Phillips, Tara Kemp and a life sized cardboard stand up of Judge Wapner. I was met by some bleach-blond guy who looked like he left his surfboard on the shore of Daytona Beach just before his airshift. He was surfer dude, right down to his well-worn Top-sider deck shoes. . . The first thing that surfer boy did was to show me the remote control for the transmitter. There was a key pad on the rack in the back corner of the studio. He typed in: "*601" the remote control responded with the voice ov the Vic 20 computer "Metering Channel One. . . Plate Current. . . " and so on. . .

"Check THIS out" said Surfer Boy. . . He typed in some other code to which the Vic 20 replied with "Command Channel Sixteen. . . Tower De-icers. . . Off!" The novelty of the Vic 20 quickly wore off, so he started showing me how to crank out the hits. He forgot all about the fact that he had turned the tower de-icers off. It was warm outside. . . We didn't need them anyway. . . Until. . .

"We're the NEW Power 93 - Greenville, Spartanburg, Anderson Asheville! It's just about 8 o'cloc*Pfffffffffffffffffffffffffff. . . " Off the air. . . Couldn't have anything to do with the icy weather and the fact that the de-icers had been turned off MONTHS ago, now could it?

The night before, the town had been covered with sleet and freezing rain. The tower had a nice coating of ice on it. That morning when the sun heated the face of the tower, the ice melted from the inside. As the ice plummeted to earth, it shaved the tower slick on all sides. Military antennas, STL dishes for other radio stations and an array of other high-dollar accessories raining to the ground as if they were dumped out of the clouds! For the final trick, the ice then destroyed the "ice bridge" at the base of the tower and severed every cable that was run under it to the transmitter building.

Hundreds of Thousands of dollars of damage because back on a warm night, surfer boy was playing with the transmitter remote control.

I never told and nobody ever knew what happened. . . Until now!