HURON –  Approximately two months after lightning struck the Big Jim 93.3 tower, the local radio station sets its sights to be back on the air by the end of this week.
The storm took place during the early hours of April 10, and the tower, located on land owned by Baruth Farms near Alpena, took a direct hit, and the station shut down. Members of staff at Performance Radio went to the transmitting station to dissect the problem, only to find the issues were going to require much more than a quick fix.
“When it originally happened, we found one of the power boxes completely melted,” explained radio broadcaster Matt Watson. “So Jason Howard from Howie Electric came in and replaced that box. Then we checked everything and turned it all back on, but we could tell there was some damage somewhere up the tower.”
With the source of the corruption being unknown at the time, with the exception of definite wreckage on the tower, which stands 1,000-feet in the air, the next step was to seek assistance from a tower company.
“Our equipment hangs at 650-feet and we don’t have a way to get up the tower, so we had to call a tower crew, and they are very difficult to get on site,” Watson noted. “The one we called first was booked through 2021, there are not a lot of people who do it so they are in high demand.”
But luck prevailed as a tower service company plus engineers were all scheduled to be on-site as soon as Wednesday, May 1, and the issues up the antenna were finally able to be examined further.
“The tower company and engineers came on May 1, they got up there and what they found was that the transmission line got hit directly by lightning. It hit the line, the tower, the antenna; it hit right there. And they decided we had to go completely off the air or we were going to do some damage to our own equipment. So we’ve been off since May 1,” Watson said. “So then we had to order all the parts. One place said it would be four to six weeks to fabricate the line and get it to us, but we found another company, SCMS Inc., and they were able to get it to us in three weeks.”

While progress was being made, the time consuming nature of each task caused more delay than initially anticipated. But the tough grind continued.
The antenna and transmitting line were both lowered to the ground from the tower, where the damage to all the various parts was evident. The line was cut into sections in order to be removed from the tower, while some pieces that were stored in the transmitting station displayed burn holes and areas which had been melted.
Stored safely next to the line were the 24 inner sections of the antenna, which were completely taken apart and cleaned.
To get things ready again, required an extensive process, Watson explained.
“There are 24 sections and with each one you take the ends off, pop them open in the middle and clean out all the soot and residue from the lightning strike. It just literally fries the inside of these things. Those 24 parts fit together to make 12 sections, two each of those go on an antenna, so there are six antenna bays altogether. It takes a long time to get it all down and taken apart, get them all clean as a whistle, then start testing and replacing the failed components.”
There is no compromising when it comes to nature, and while the circumstances may have been difficult to overcome; help was found through supportive individuals within the local communities.
 “It’s been a struggle but a whole lot of people have helped. You hear people talk about small towns rallying together, but almost everybody that we called has been great and has done everything they could to help us,” Watson said. “That really says a lot about the community.”
Following the storm that caused the tower damage, a mid-April blizzard brought near record-breaking amounts of snow, causing further delays
“We couldn’t get out there,” Watson said. “These are minimum maintenance roads and they’re not plowed. So Ryan Mees and Shawn Hoglo from Alpena have a side by side with tracks on it, and they brought me out there on April 10. Howie brought me out here multiple times over the course of a couple days as well.”
As problems continued to arise, it seemed there was always a helpful hand.
“The new transmission line weighs 2,600 pounds and it’s 6-feet tall,” Watson said. The truck driver came two days early so I had no means of unloading it at all. I called around and Keith Cundy works at the federal surplus, he was able to line us up with a loading dock so we could roll it off the semi-truck. Then I talked to Keith Stroud at TrueNorth Steel, and when I told him the situation, he sent over a driver to come get it, and they stored it for us for almost a week,” Watson shared.
“It was huge that everybody did what they could to help and without them we wouldn’t have had everything figured out so quickly. We should be back on the air by the end of the week.”
Big Jim 93.3 has remained available through the app or online, plus a cash prize for dedicated listeners, named “Thunderstruck Giveaway,” in light of Mother Nature’s challenges is up for grabs. For more information and updates visit www.performance-radio.com.