THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 25, 1995 TAG: 9512250153
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C4 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY STEVE STONE, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Short : 35 lines
Channel 33, WTVZ-TV - home to the Simpsons, the Bundys and the Redskins - was off the air Sunday night and there was no word when its signal might be back.
An employee at the studios in downtown Norfolk said the problem was at the station's transmitter site in Suffolk.
A gasket on a piece of water-cooled equipment failed and flooded the building.
Technicians were working to clean up the mess and make repairs to the damaged piece of equipment, but there was no way to know when everything would be fixed, the employee said.
The timing of the outage proved troublesome, too. Some of the station's key personnel were out of town for Christmas.
The station - which was to have broadcast the Washington Redskins-Carolina Panthers football game - went off the air about 3:30 p.m., a half-hour before kickoff.
Would-be viewers on Cox Cable got only slightly more information, a text message reading: ``Due to technical problems, programming for this channel is currently unavailable. WTVZ is off the air.''
Unlike some local stations with direct feeds to area cable operators, WTVZ relies entirely on its broadcast signal to serve all customers, including cable suppliers. by CNB