More than a month ago, in the wilderness heart of the Colorado Rockies, lightening sparked a wildfire that continues to burn. The Decker Fire has consumed more than 8,000 acres and is now reportedly 30 percent contained. Salida, CO, sits just Northeast of the blaze and is the homebase of Three Eagles Communications. The 49-station chain has four stations (KVRH AM/FM, KWUZ-FM, and KBVC-FM) serving the area. Radio veteran Dan Ridenour is the News Director. He’s been very busy, but he took some time to talk to Radio Ink.
Radio Ink: How is this fire affecting your radio stations?
Ridenour: There is the good news-bad news aspect of it. The good news is we have three FM towers, at 12,000 feet on top of Methodist Mountain. The fire did not directly affect the transmitters, it didn’t burn down the tower site because that area is all cleared. The bad news is all the power lines to the site were destroyed. So we operated on back-up generators for a week at low power.
Because we are up there with other important stuff — cell towers and emergency broadcast towers — our energy supplier used a Huey helicopter to bring in a 50 Kw diesel generator. It has to be filled up every two days with fuel. They are using helicopters to bring in the fuel.
Crews can’t get in there to put in more than a hundred new poles or thousands of feet of wire because of the fire. The fire isn’t going to go out until we get two feet of snow. You get snow up there and you’re not going to be able to work up there. So really we’re looking at Spring until we can get power hardwired in there.
Radio Ink: Is this something you are used to dealing with?
Ridenour: I’m from Oklahoma where tornado coverage was the norm in the springtime. It’s all hands on deck, covering something like this; a natural disaster is not uncommon to me. Having it be a forest fire is a little bit different. Substitute forest fire for tornado coverage. It just lasts a lot longer. Tornadoes you have a day or two or three and it’s done; you clean up. This forest fire is going to continue until we get two feet of snow.
Radio Ink: How big of a staff do you have to cover this on your four stations?
Ridenour: Only three of our four stations were directly affected by this. Our country station has a transmitter site on a different mountain that escaped the fire. I’m the news staff, but we have two on-air people and a sports guy. In this situation you bring in everybody. Salespeople were answering our phones. In this situation everyone becomes a newsman.
Radio Ink: Did your digital platforms come in handy during this event?
Ridenour: Yes, definitely. We have an app that you can access all four stations on, they can listen to the streams on our websites. Early on we were pushing that because we didn’t know how the whole power thing was going to work out.
It was amazing, I don’t have the exact numbers, but the number of apps that have been downloaded and the numbers of people listening online, the people visiting our website and hitting us on Facebook has been amazing. The jump-up has been incredible, a 500 to 600 percent increase across our platforms.
(Laughing) I’m the worst speller in the world. I’ve been doing radio for 42 years and I write things how they sound. Now I’ve got to use spellcheck. I actually have to spell people’s names right, the way they’re suppose to be, not the way they sound.
Radio Ink: Does an incident like this show the importance of local, live radio?
Ridenour: It’s so true. I’m just an old radio guy, I’m 60 years old, I’m going to do this till I die because I’m in radio, right? I might as well do it surrounded by these mountains. The view through my studio window is gorgeous — we are surrounded by 14,000-foot mountains. I’ve cued up records, played carts and cut up audio tape, but something like this is why I got into the business. This is what I do and what local radio can do. When something like this happens your are reminded that this is radio. This is why I got into this business. This is my time to shine.
Thanks to Dan Ridenour. You can contact him at 719.539.2575
