WCCO TV back on the air after power outage forces broadcast to Facebook

Twin Cities television station WCCO was back on the air Tuesday morning after a Monday night power outage and technical failure knocked the channel off the air, and forced its 10 p.m. news to be broadcast on Facebook Live.

”We have some of the strangest most unusual circumstances that prevent us from being on television right now,” anchor Frank Vascellaro told viewers at the beginning of the mini-newscast.

Storms that rolled through the metro area knocked out power to nearly 18,000 Xcel Energy customers across the state, including the station on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis. By Tuesday morning, about 1,300 customers in the east metro and 1,200 customers in the west metro were without electricity, the utility’s power outage webpage said.

With no power, the station presented a barebones newscast on social media with weatherman Chris Shaffer using a road atlas to show viewers where tornadoes and severe weather hit across southern Minnesota.

“I have not used a map like this since third grade,” Shaffer told viewers.

Reporter David Schuman wasn’t able to show photographs of funnel clouds and downed trees captured by storm chasers he interviewed Monday night.

Like most stations, WCCO does have a backup generator that normally would have allowed it to operate. But co-anchor Amelia Santaniello explained to viewers that the station’s generator ran into some mechanical issues that prevented WCCO from going live on TV.

Calls and emails to WCCO seeking comment were not immediately returned.

“We like to set the standard,” Vascellaro said at the end of the 10-minute webcast. “To have a catastrophic failure like this is really unusual. We are sorry, but we wanted to bring you a little something.”

It’s the second time in recent weeks that WCCO TV has suffered technical issues. On July 19, a global tech outage affected its morning broadcast: