Dear WRMI Clients, Listeners and Friends:
Yesterday evening, Hurricane
Irma passed very close to Okeechobee, and tropical storm force winds hit our
transmitter site. I'm happy to say that the transmitter building and the
transmitters themselves survived with no major problems. In the antenna field,
one of our 44-degree antennas beaming up the East Coast of North America and
over to Europe and the Middle East was knocked down, and may not be repairable.
Fortunately, we have four other antennas beaming in the same direction, so we
can continue those transmissions when the power comes back on. There are also
about 20 telephone poles holding our transmission lines that are down or
leaning, and they need to be repaired.
At this point, Florida Power &
Light has no estimate of when power will be restored to our site. It could take
days, or possibly even weeks. But we should have a better idea about this
within the next few days. In the meantime, all transmitters are off the air,
although our webstream with the 9955 kHz programming is operating. You can find
it on our webpage, www.wrmi.net. There is an
audio player in the lower right corner which you can click on to hear the
programming. This stream is also carried by TuneIn, Streema, Radio Garden and
other similar services. So please continue to upload your programs to our FTP
servers as usual.
For WRMI clients, please be assured that we will put a
credit on your next invoice for any of your programs that do not air on
shortwave.
We do have a generator at our transmitter site which powers
our control room, offices, lights and computers. Unfortunately it is not
powerful enough to operate our fourteen 100,000-watt transmitters.
All of
our staff are safe. Half of them were at the station during the storm (with
some of their pets as well; we had two dogs, a bird and a turtle), and the
others stayed in their own homes throughout the area.
I want to thank
everyone who has called, e-mailed and sent messages with their prayers, best
wishes and offers of assistance. We greatly appreciate all of them, and I will
attempt to answer all of these messages personally in the coming days. The
hurricane has dealt us a serious blow, but we will recover quickly and we'll
continue to broadcast your programs to shortwave listeners around the world.
Thanks for your confidence in WRMI, and I will update you when we have more
news.
