One Year Later KTEN Remembers Fateful Lightning - KTEN.com - Texoma news, weather and sports

One Year Later KTEN Remembers Fateful Lightning

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KTEN -- It was one year ago this weekend when our television station suffered the rare power of one lightning strike.  

It was the night of March 23rd, a thunderstorm over our station was producing lightning of extreme power.

Days later we learned it wasn't just any kind of lightning.

Meteorologists from Viasala, a national lightning detection network out of Tucson, Arizona contacted us to let us know that the lightning that hit was extremely rare.

"When we look at lightning, cloud to ground lightning flashes over long period we can make an estimate that the strength of this cloud to ground stroke was one in one hundred thousand," says Ron Holle, a meteorologist with Viasala.

386 thousand amps of electricity to be exact went surging through our equipment, knocking us off the air for more than a week.Just to give you an idea a typical lightning strike contains about 30 thousand amps of electricity so this one strike was way more powerful than that of a typical lightning strike.

Now that night is just a flash of memory. Today KTEN is not only back on the air we are even better than before the lightning struck.

"What we did find about that strike, which was pretty catastrophic, is the crew of this television station, how they all came together to get us back on the air and here we are a year later we are sitting in a brand new set. We have so many tremendous people that went way beyond what they needed to do," says Anthony Maisel, KTEN's General Manager.