GoKawiilThe community has rallied around "The Dawg," Mike Kirtner explains
Evan Adkins, director of engineering, called Mike Kirtner, the president of Kindred Communications, last Thursday just prior to lunchtime.
“Are you sitting down?” Adkins asked Kirtner after he answered the phone.
Kirtner, 75, has seen a lot in his time as a broadcast owner in the tri-state area of Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio along the Ohio River.
One of his AM station’s copper radials once fell victim to a copper thief cutting its wires.
But an FM transmission line being snapped and cleared in broad daylight? He couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing.
The alleged perpetrator — Paul Crisp of Catlettsburg, according to WSAZ(TV)’s reporting — had severed the main transmission line leading up to the broadcast tower of 93.7 WDGG(FM), a 100,000-watt country-formatted FM station licensed to Ashland, Ky., which goes by the moniker “The Dawg.”
Kirtner isn’t sure how the suspect is still alive.
“He was lucky in that he didn’t die, he was unlucky that he got caught,” Kirtner said.
The cable crosses a bridge from the transmitter building and then runs up the tower located on Musser Lane in Catlettsburg, and Kirtner said the thief cut all of it.
... continue reading