Primeau & Grose: Behind the Scenes

It was a quite a surprise to come in yesterday and be told we'd be broadcasting on QR77 for the afternoon. A fire at Shaw Court in Calgary knocked all of the Corus stations off the air down there. Of course after welcoming our Calgary listeners we discovered we were, in fact, not on the air down there at all. By 3:30 they had figured out the technology and we were live in Calgary. 20 minutes of dead air isn't great but it's not as bad as it sounds. Listeners come and go to radio shows and some people have a specific time that they start to listen so as the afternoon went on we picked up lots of Calgary listeners who didn't know QR77 had been off the air.

The challenge was to keep the interest of Calgarians. All departments made a great effort to get information on Calgary weather, traffic, news, sports etc and sprinkle it in without making our Edmonton and area listeners feel ignored. I think we managed to do that. Keep in mind we had no Calgary station to help us... they were all in the parking lot watching their building burn.

I assume everything is now up and running in Cowtown and we're back to being an Edmonton show... but it sure did feel good to have a Provincial audience even if it was just for a few hours.