ST. LOUIS – The transmitter for the NOAA Weather Radio in the St. Louis area is down. With severe weather on the way Friday, that could be a problem.
The KDO-89 transmitter in St. Louis went down late Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning after storms moved through the area. It has not broadcast weather information since then.
“People in the immediate St. Louis metro area who do that do have weather radios that pick up the transmission from the St. Louis tower, are not getting are not getting any sort of information through the weather radio,” Alex Elmore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in St. Louis, said.
Elmore said they have their own technicians as well as technicians with the telephone company troubleshooting what the problem is. They don’t have an estimation on when the transmitter will be fixed or a reason for the outage.
“We’re working as diligently as we can to figure out what the problem is and restore the service,” Elmore said. “We’re not sure if the storms were the cause of the issue or if it just correlated with an equipment failure.”
Find a different source of warnings for the upcoming storms if the outage is affecting you.
“If weather radio is your primary source, maybe make sure the wireless emergency alerts are turned on, on your phone,” he said. “Have a friend or a family member who maybe is elsewhere and they have a weather radio that is working. There are a lot of different apps that you can get on your phone.”
Regardless of your primary source of information, it’s a good idea to have a secondary source as well.
“We always recommend that people have multiple ways of getting weather information in case something like this were to happen in the middle of a severe thunderstorm event,” Elmore said.
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