Exploding Radio

I was sitting on the balcony of my apartment looking out over Biscayne Bay looking toward the city of Miami.  It was a beautiful calm night in the autumn of 1973 and all across the Florida landscape, the city lights shimmered across the water.

Suddenly, what looked like a flash of lightning lit up the eastern sky and an entire portion of the city went black. An explosion at a transformer station knocked out the power. Shortly after, another explosion happened at a transformer station in another part of the city. The electricians union was on strike and some weird things were happening all across the power grid.

At WMYQ, the station where I worked, the power went off, and then surged on again.  The surge was so powerful that it fried much of the sensitive electronic equipment.  The ballasts in the florescent light fixtures started exploding – the one positioned over the on-air console started dripping hot oil right into the main control board.  WMYQ’s studios were ruined.

The station needed to stay on the air.  But with no studio to do the show, what could be done?  A long-distance telephone line was quickly hooked up to the KCBQ production studio, Bartel’s sister station 2300 miles away in San Diego. What listeners heard for the next few days was truly astounding. They heard a 100,000 watt stereo powerhouse FM station with a poor quality mono telephone signal. Shotgun Tom Kelly and other KCBQ jocks were playing nothing but The Beatles and The Stones.

 Listen to WMYQ broadcast from San Diego

Soon after the equipment was repaired at WMYQ and the station was broadcasting, a power outage occurred at competitor Y100’s studios.  In a similar way, Y100 had to go to the transmitter to broadcast.  What listeners heard on Y100 was a record player with a microphone positioned in front of the speaker.  When music was playing, we could hear the hum of the transmitter and people talking in the background.  When the song ended, the deejay picked up the microphone and talked while he fumbled getting the next record on the turntable.  Then, we heard the needle drop and the deejay would put the microphone in front of the speaker. 

South Florida radio listeners certainly got to hear some wild radio on these two competitive radio stations. Eventually, the electrician’s union strike was settled and the electric grid settled back down and the calm returned to the city skyline over Biscayne Bay.