Each week in November, we’re featuring radio’s coverage of Hurricane Sandy. Here in Part 3, we’re listening to the Vinny Penn Project, the morning show on WELI New Haven.
I actually made two recordings of WELI, this one, using my Sony HD receiver which was picking up WELI in HD (thus, the grainy sounding 96kb digital signal) as is the norm here, about 15 miles from the WELI transmitter. The other recording was ‘in progress’ from the simulcast of WELI on the main FM carrier of CHR WKCI-FM “KC-101” when the power went out and I lost the entire recording at about 3:30 pm as Hurricane Sandy’s full fury began to be felt in our region.
WELI is mostly in-format here, in a recording that was made sometime around 10:30 AM. Penn stayed on the air on WELI through much of the storm. Other stations at this time were either in full emergency mode with continuous coverage, or voice tracked music stations without a body in the building. Thankfully, Clear Channel made the right decision in simulcasting WELI on KC-101 and dropping CHR during the duration of the storm. Elsewhere, WICC 600 Bridgeport and WTIC 1080 Hartford were doing local wall to wall storm coverage, WAVZ 1300, normally ESPN Sports, had opted for Television coverage (I believe WTNH 8). WDRC AM and stations in it’s talk network were in coverage mode, as were out of local market WGY 810 Albany, WBZ 1030 Boston, WCBS 880 New York, WINS 1010 New York. Those are what I actually could HEAR from my recording location in Connecticut. Philly, Baltimore and Washington DC all had stations covering full time although I could not hear them once the power to my internet connection went out.
WICC would eventually go off the air when their transmitter on Long Island Sound was swamped, as did WINS 1010. Unlike WINS, which moved it’s operations to 102.7 WWFS for the duration of its outage, WICC was not moved to its logical FM, 107.9 WEBE.
Our coverage continues in Part 4, coming next Sunday.
