Webster County Sheriff Roye Cole on Friday revealed the identity of the individual who was killed Thursday morning (4/19) as the television tower housing the transmitter for Ozarks Public Television‘s KOZK-21 in Springfield, Mo., located to the east of the metropolitan area in Fordland, Mo., crashed to the ground.
It is the head of the Washington state-based subcontracted team hired to handle tower and transmitter needs associated with the FCC‘s post-spectrum auction repack process.
A spokesperson for KOZK owner Missouri State University told RBR+TVBR on Thursday that Columbia, S.C.-based Tower Consultants Inc. (TCI) had subcontracted the tower work to Blaine, Wash.-based Steve Lemay.
Cole on Friday confirmed to local media that Lemay lost his life while working on the tower. He was 56.
The team assembled by Lemay was adding structural reinforcements to accommodate new equipment as part of a repack process, the university spokesperson said.
A staff member of TCI’s Lynwood, Wash., office declined to comment to RBR+TVBR, directing inquiries to South Carolina-based co-owner Jean-Alain Lecordier.
Lecordier was not available for comment on Thursday and had not returned RBR+TVBR‘s request for comment by Friday’s 4pm Eastern deadline.
A Logan-Rogersville Fire Protection District officially initially said the tower work was part of “routine maintenance.”
With the toppling of the broadcast tower, a Missouri State representative reached by RBR+TVBR could only confirm that KOZK was still accessible via AT&T U-Verse; the station’s over-the-air signal was no longer in operation as of 3pm Central on Thursday (4/19).
Simulcast partner KOZJ-26 in Joplin, Mo.-Pittsburg, Ks., is not impacted.
While some news organizations reported that Class C2 NPR member station KSMU-FM 91.1 used the tower, this is false as KSMU uses a different facility in Springfield. The information was incorrectly supplied to local media at a morning news conference at the tower site.
KSMU on Thursday offered its regular Noon newscast to listeners, and lead with a report on the tower collapse. The station noted that six workers were working on the 105-foot tower when it fell. One person was trapped; three were transported to hospital. The others suffered only minor injuries. KSMU notes that the Webster County Sheriff’s Office is conducting an investigation. Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigators are on site, KYTV-3 in Springfield reported midday Friday.
“OSHA investigators say they will not only look at the cause of the collapse, but also if the company was following all OSHA standards,” KYTV noted in its coverage. “The investigation could take up to six months.”
According to KTTS-FM in Springfield, Mo., the National Weather Service also used the tower to broadcast weather radio updates. In a Tweet, NWS confirmed that the NOAA weather radio signal at Fordland (162.4 MHz) is off the air until further notice.
“Once you get down and see the accident site, it is very lucky that we did not have more fatalities out here,” Logan-Rogersville Fire Protection District Assistant Chief Rob Talburt said in a press conference conducted at the tower site.
The tower height is 1,891 feet. It was donated to the university by KYTV-3 in Springfield, Mo., in the early 2000s.
Interestingly, the Springfield News-Leader reports that ice toppled another tower serving the Springfield, Mo., market, in 2001. KTXR-FM 101.5 and KOZL-TV (then KDEB) were impacted; the stations leased space on the tower.
The KOZK tower collapse is the second tragedy involving a television station transmitter to occur in the last six months.
On Sept. 27, 2017, three individuals working on a television tower used by Sunbeam Television Corp.‘s FOX-affiliated WSVN-7 and BH Media Group Holdings’ ABC-affiliated WPLG-10 in Miami died after a piece of equipment they were on collapsed, plunging nearly 1,000 feet to the ground.
The trio of WSVN and WPLG tower workers were deployed by Tower King II, based in the Dallas suburb of Cedar Hill, Tex., and were contracted to upgrade one of WSVN’s transmission antennae. The tower, owned by WPLG, was completed in 2009 and began digital transmission the same year.
