KATV Tower Collapses

A 2000-foot TV tower 20 miles south of Little Rock, Ark., fell Jan. 11. One person was said to suffer minor injuries.

The 43-year-old tower belonged to KATV, the ABC affiliate in Little Rock owned by Allbritton Communications.
KATV was taken off the air by the collapse, and an analog transmitter belonging to Arkansas Educational Television Network also was destroyed, taking the PBS KETS affiliates signal off of Channel 2.

KATV’s signal was restored within hours to cable and satellite carriers. A post on the station’s Web site by Engineering Supervisor Fred Anderson said the it was “back on the air for most of our viewers, but as you might imagine, there’s still a lot of cleaning up do to.”

Workers were restringing guy wires on the tower at the time of the incident, according to wire service reports. The cause of the collapse is under investigation.

Anderson said, “Remarkably, no one was seriously injured, but crews working to strengthen the tower had been just minutes away from climbing it to replace cable… If it had happened another half-hour later, it would have been a totally different situation here all together.”