Last but not least: Winter disrupts emergency power
The Säntis radio and TV station was offline for 1.5 hours on Friday afternoon. This was due to a failure of the emergency power supply.
The outage at the transmitter—which also broadcasts SRG radio and television programs—affected additional areas of eastern Switzerland, including the eastern part of the canton of Zurich as well as the cantons of Schaffhausen, St. Gallen, and Appenzell. The outage affected DAB (digital radio), FM radio, and television received via antenna, as well as DVB-T.
A few days earlier, a high-voltage transmission tower had collapsed, according to SRG spokesperson Daniel Steiner, as reported by SDA. Since then, the Säntis transmitter has been running on emergency power. That emergency power also failed on Friday around 4:30 p.m. for unknown reasons.
In the event of a real emergency, however, there would still have been a Plan B. Steiner said that a separate emergency broadcast channel could have been activated for crisis communication during major incidents. This would have ensured that the public was kept informed.
