After last Tuesday’s early morning eruption of thunder and 80-mile-per-hour winds in Dallas, listener-supported nonprofit radio station KNON 89.3 was thrown off the FM dial for “40 hours and 15 minutes,” says station manager Dave Chaos, “due to outages at both our tower site and studio site.”
Power outages seem like small potatoes now for the longstanding KNON crew, who recently celebrated 40 years on-air. In the fall of 2019 at North Central Expressway and Royal Lane in North Dallas, the station was taken off the air when a tornado ripped into its studio and offices. There were no injuries sustained by staff or any of the station’s broadcast equipment in that tornado, but the building itself took a beating of irreparable structural damage.
Members of the KNON 89.3 FM crew dismantled the radio station's equipment after a 2019 tornado badly damaged the building on North Central Expressway.
Danny Gallagher
KNON’s recent outage of May 28–29 left no rubble to sift through at the station's current headquarters at Interstate 635 and Coit Road, but it gave the staff no choice but to wait out power outages in both North Dallas and Cedar Hill. The station was able, however, to maintain its online streaming feed.
KNON 89.3 first went on the air in 1985 and has since maintained a format of live 24/7 DJ broadcasting, which is becoming more and more rare in an age where most mainstream stations have turned to algorithm-based playlists to fill blocks of airtime during lower levels of listener engagement.
General Manager Dave Chaos came to KNON as a volunteer in 1987. The station scrambled to get back on the air after last week's power outage in North Texas.
Kathy Tran
