Hurricane Sandy was the first time I personally experienced a weather event on the opposite side of the country directly impacting our systems at KOIN Local 6. While our meteorologists tracked the storm as part of their normal coverage, we didn’t anticipate that our own broadcast operations in Portland would be affected. The critical link was our syndication software provider, based in New York City, which handled all of our live feeds for both broadcast and digital platforms.

When the storm hit New York, our entire broadcast went offline. Engineering teams quickly reworked the signal and restored on-air broadcasting using backup systems, but our digital platforms faced a bigger challenge. All video feeds for our website and mobile apps flowed through the New York provider, and with their servers flooded in an underground Manhattan office, we lost the backbone of our video pipeline.

To keep our online viewers connected, I devised a temporary but effective workaround. I coordinated with our engineers and content producers to segment our live broadcast feed into clips, upload them to a newly created YouTube channel, and then manually embed those videos back into our website and mobile apps. This process, though manual, ensured continuity of coverage for our audience during a critical event.

The solution worked so seamlessly that many viewers never realized anything had broken behind the scenes. While the outage revealed the risks of relying on a single vendor, our quick pivot maintained trust with our online audience and preserved the integrity of our coverage during a time when information was most critical.

This incident underscored the importance of redundancy and disaster recovery planning. We later learned that the vendor’s entire headquarters had been knocked offline by flooding, with no backup data center. In response, they eventually opened a secondary facility in the southwestern United States. For KOIN, the experience also accelerated our transition away from that provider. My temporary YouTube based solution became the blueprint for migrating our digital video delivery system to YouTube as a primary platform.

• Crisis Response
Restored critical digital functionality under high-pressure, real-time conditions.

• Workflow Innovation
Developed a manual video distribution system leveraging YouTube as an ad-hoc CDN.

• Cross-Team Collaboration
Coordinated engineering, content production, and digital operations to keep coverage online.

• Disaster Recovery Insight
Identified vendor vulnerabilities and influenced future platform strategy.

• Platform Transition Leadership
Built the foundation for KOIN’s later migration to YouTube as its primary online delivery system.

Syndication Platform
Third-party live feed management system (New York–based, pre-outage)

Broadcast Infrastructure
KOIN engineering systems for live signal re-routing

Content Management System (CMS)
KOIN web and mobile platforms

YouTube
Emergency video distribution channel (later adopted as primary platform)

Manual Embedding Workflows
HTML/JS for segment integration into site and apps

Cross-Department Coordination
Engineering, Production, and Web/Digital teams