ABC Far North Queensland has also suffered during Cyclone Larry, losing one of its transmission outlets, but still remaining on air on other frequencies to get information out to listeners.

The station’s main transmitter, 106.7 fm went down just as the winds got wild at 0400 Monday. A power surge knocked it out and the back-up generator didn’t kick in.

ABC FNQ was able to keep going on its other frequencies (12 in total) and also borrowed two frequencies from Radio Australia on short wave. The station also borrowed web-streaming capacity from ABC Gold Coast to put out its program out on the Web.

ABC FNQ’s Richard Dinnen has told radioinfo:

“It’s been a wild couple of days.

“ABC Far North went live locally throughout Saturday and Sunday, at first just with hourly cyclone reports, and it escalated through the day on Sunday. By late Sunday night we had staff in a hotel across the road from the station and a skeleton crew in the studio. We went to full-time local programs in the early hours of Monday, and I had to drive the staff over from the hotel at 4.30am as the wind and rain began to hit.

“Our coverage went non-stop from 0300 to 1800 Monday. We had callers describing the passage of the cyclone overhead, we put to air a bloke standing at the mouth of the Johnstone River in Innisfail when the eye passed over the top. Our listeners became our reporters and they did a great job, describing the windows buckling, the trees flying through the air, all the chaos that happens in a cyclone. The cyclone took most of Monday to track across our listening area and we kept going till well into the evening.

“It was a tremendous all-of-station effort, and my team showed great courage and resourcefulness in the face of a very frightening situation.”