Office of Public Information (OPI) was looking at installing yesterday afternoon new air conditioning units at the KVZK-TV transmitter site on Mt. Alava, after the units failed Friday night, taking the state-run television station off the air.

Residents were wondering what happened to the KVZK channels over the weekend, and when they would be back on air. A KVZK public announcement was sent to local radio stations Saturday, explaining it was off the air due to air conditioning problems at the Mt. Alava site.

Responding to Samoa News questions yesterday morning, OPI director Fagafaga Daniel Langkilde said it was last Friday night that the “alarms went off” at the station at Utulei “indicating that the room temperature at the transmitter site on Mt. Alava was very high.”

“We dispatched our engineers that same night to check the transmitters and found that they were overheating due to the air conditioners failing,” he said. “I instructed the engineers to then shut down the transmitters to prevent any damage from overheating."

The air conditioning vendor went up first thing Saturday morning and could not bring the AC units back on line as the needed parts were not available at the time, said Fagafaga, adding that new AC units were expected to be installed yesterday afternoon and “we will then resume broadcasting if all is okay.”

The Mt. Alava shut down affected KVZK-TV channels 2 and 5 as well as the PBS channel which is retransmitted by BlueSky Moana Cable on their Ch. 7. It also affected the CBS/KGMB live feed which is re-transmitted on cable Ch:8, said Fagafaga.

There were a lot of unhappy sports fans when they realized that they were not able to watch CBS television network programs on Sunday due to KVZK being down. At the same time, many local churchgoing families were also unhappy that they were unable to watch the Sunday night “Sauniga Lotu” program on Ch: 2.

Meanwhile, Fagafaga says KVZK plans to carry a live broadcast on Saturday from Veterans Memorial Stadium for  the StarKist Samoa 50th Anniversary ceremony — provided the station is back on air by then.