Dear WRMI Friends, Colleagues and Clients:
I am writing this at 0400 UTC
Sunday, September 10. Here in Okeechobee the winds are starting to pick up as
Hurricane Irma heads to Florida.
The exact path of the hurricane
continues to change somewhat, but it appears that the eye of Hurricane Irma will
be passing a bit to the west of us, but we will still receive tropical storm
force winds which are to the east-northeast of the storm. We will remain on the
air with all of our transmitters as long as possible. However, once the winds
get to a certain strength, our transmission lines will start flapping around and
arching, which could cause serious damage to the transmitters and components. If
that occurs, we will probably shut the transmitters down in order to avoid
equipment damage until after the storm passes.
Our transmitter building
itself is quite strong, and several members of our staff will be staying inside
the building. But the hurricane could of course do damage to our antennas. We
will hope for the best.
After the hurricane passes and winds die down, we
would hope to be able to resume transmissions if we have electricity. However,
realistically, we know that power outages generally occur in these situations,
and they may last from hours to days or even weeks. We have a generator at our
transmitter site, but it is designed to maintain our control room, lights and
computers operational; it is not large enough to maintain our high-power
transmitters on the air. So if the commercial power goes out, we will be off the
air. We may be able to maintain one transmitter on the air at low power; this
will likely be 9455 kHz, and this may not be possible until after the storm
passes and the winds die down. If our Internet service remains functional, we
should be able to maintain our live stream operational. This is the programming
that is on 9955 kHz shortwave. You can hear it on our webpage, www.wrmi.net. Click on the audio player on the lower right side of
our home page. You can also hear this stream on services such as TuneIn,
Streema, Radio Garden, etc. (Just search for WRMI.)
We will try to keep
everyone up to date on our status via our Facebook page, http://www.facebook.com/wrmiradio
Thank you to everyone who
has been contacting us with your thoughts and prayers. We look forward to being
able to resume normal operations as soon as possible.
Best
regards.
Jeff White
General Manager
WRMI Radio Miami
International
10400 NW 240th Street
Okeechobee, Florida 34972 USA
Tel
+1-305-559-9764
Fax +1-863-467-0185
(WRMI Radio Miami International Facebook
page, Sept 10)
(via Alan Pennington, 1035 UT Sept 10, BDXC-UK yg via DXLD)
