In 2007 fires, Mt San Miguel in San Diego was overrun by wild fires taking out a small building
and the power line feeding four of our DTVs, Analogs & several FMs. After a short outage for
personnel evacuations, most stations returned on-air using fall-back power generators.
Fuel truck brigade was active for quite a while as the high voltage lines were reconstructed.
In L.A. 86% of households subscribe to cable and/or Sat which are fed via direct connections,
so only those TVs not connected to cable/Sat would be affected in those households....
[Although there may be some cable headends that use OTA....soon to be revealed....]
However most of the other 15% have no fallback....except bite the bullet and subscribe....
Two San Diego stations (not on San Miguel) can be received in S-W parts of L.A. and there is a
PBS station in Riverside (E end of L.A. smog basin), plus a few scattered Low Power stations.
But if Mt Wilson is off the air for any significant period of time, people will be stringing
backup systems on top of tall buildings downtown.....another advantage for implementing
Distributed DTV Systems....BTW: there are actually TWO antenna farms on Mt Wilson...
the other one, a few miles away, is called Mt Harvard.
One network is simulcasting an English subchannel on their non-colocated Spanish language
station....many of them on Mt Harvard...
Mt Wilson Solar Observatory TowerCam:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~obs/towercam.htm
Keep trying....it's overloaded...
Here's a recent picture....there are NO FLAMES in this photo...just lights....
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=151435&d=1251699446