Station apologizes for broadcast interruptions during Super Bowl

The Paducah, Kentucky, NBC affiliate that experienced broadcast interruptions during this year's Super Bowl apologized to viewers Monday and pointed to a faulty power supply as the reason the area missed much of the game's second half Sunday.

WPSD Local 6 vice president of news and operations Bill Evans said in a news release Monday afternoon that "dips and spikes" in electrical service that supplies the station's transmitter were found to have caused a series of outages that led to the interruption.

The company that supplies power to the station's transmitter, Jackson Purchase Energy Corp., on Monday told the station 260 customers experienced power outages likely because of a problem with a "stinger on a capacitor bank."

A stinger, the power company told the station, is a piece of wire that goes from the power line to the capacitor. The power company found one broken and "flopping in the wind."

When the broadcast interruption began, WPSD engineers visited the transmitter site and restarted it remotely, according to the release. The remote restart process takes 12 to 15 minutes.

The engineer who visited the transmitter initially found it to be operating normally, but a few minutes later observed a "high voltage fault," which led to the station's investigation into the electrical service failure.

A series of three interruptions were experienced by viewers, with the exception of Comcast customers in Paducah, who receive their signals through a separate fiber optics connection.

Angry viewers on Sunday immediately slammed WPSD via social media, or blamed their cable or satellite providers. While the interruptions continued, the station posted links to online viewing of the game, and some satellite viewers were able to watch the game's third and fourth quarters with a national link provided by the companies.

WPSD eventually switched to using an emergency generator service to keep the station's broadcast going without further interruption.

The station had never before experienced an outage from the power company, according to the release, and the short duration of the outages caused the transmitter to put itself in safe mode, but weren't long enough to cause the system to switch automatically to the backup generator.

In homes, the dips and spikes in the power supply caused flickering lights.

In the news release, the station offered its "sincerest apologies for the interruption of the broadcast."

"It was not a problem we could have foreseen," the release stated. "And when it arose we responded without hesitation. However, there is nothing we could have done to prevent the problem, as the disruption of the game was due to a failure within the Jackson Purchase Energy Corporation power grid."

eragan@semissourian.com

388-3632

Pertinent address:

Paducah, KY