Florence storm surge floods studio

Sinclair's WCTI New Bern, N.C. had to evacuate the station Sept. 13 and go off the air due to storm surge from Hurricane Florence.

The FCC confirmed the outage in its first report on communications outages from the storm, which it released Friday.

Meteorologist Donnie Cox explained the situation calmly before signing off Thursday (Sept. 13). 

According to the FCC info, which was as of Thursday at 11 a.m., WCTI was one of two TV stations off the air—the other was WYDO (a virtual TV station also owned by Sinclair and created after Sinclair sold spectrum in the broadcast incentive auction), while 42 TV stations remained up and running, though that could change with the storm's landfall Friday. 

According to the FCC, which relies on a voluntary self-reporting system, combined cable and wireline outages in North Carolina as of Thursday were 66,889 subs, with another 1,470 in South Carolina.

A total of 13 FM radio stations were down, though two of those were sending programming to other stations. No AM stations were off the air in hurricane affected areas.