Source of stations’ outages pinned down

The cause of the Team Radio broadcast outage has been tracked to damage to a fiberoptic cable at Waverly Street and Sykes Boulevard.

About 1 a.m., a truck driver pulled his 18-wheeler into a field south of Sykes to take a nap, according to Dave Williams, Ponca City’s IT director.

The driver unknowingly hit a utility pole and snapped the fiberoptic cable, which serves 86 customers, Williams said.

Crews were onsite early Monday morning examining the damage and making a plan of action. It will take a minimum of 15 hours to replace the damaged fiberoptic cable, once crews are on scene with the correct equipment, he said. It will take about six hours at each end of the damage to splice the fiberoptics, with an additional minimum of three hours to hang the cable.

Klaasmeyer Construction, Inc., which is installing  the fiber  to the home project, is sending a team and another contract fusing team to replace the damaged fiberoptic cable, Williams said.

Meanwhile, Team Radio’s crew is working to take an old-school approach to restore radio broadcasts today. Gayle Williams and engineer Tim Diehl from Tulsa will be reinstalling an over-the-air connection the stations used before moving to fiberoptic several years ago.

“We hope to be back on air this afternoon,” Gayle Williams said.

The stations moved to using the fiberoptic connection when Team Radio moved to The Poncan Theatre in 2010. The last disruption was in April 2017.