eNCA Suffers Power Surge Pushing Channel Off-Air, again

South Africa's most watched news channel, eNCA, experienced a power surge at their Hyde Park facilities on Monday, April 28th that forced the channel to go off air for well over an hour.

The channel went off air at approximately 10:12am on Monday morning during a live news bulletin. The channel then had a black screen with the channels on screen ident for well over twenty minutes. A few minutes later, the channel then unintentionally broadcast its raw satellite feed from its Cape Town broadcast facility that just showed the screen below:

This screen appeared intermittently between then and a few minutes past twelve.

Eventually, the channel showed various taped content, like Against All Odds and Judge for Yourself, with just a static image of the channel's  logo appearin during what should have been ad breaks.

Eventually, the channel came back up at 11:56 with Andrew Barnes live from Cape Town welcoming viewers with "A very good morning to you, this is NewsDay on eNCA, I'm Andrew Barnes. Good to be back on-air after some gremlins have been weeded out of the system."

This was immediately followed by the first story, leaving the tradtitional read of the headlines at the top of the hour. However, this did not last long as the channel went back off air at 12pm, returning to the airwaves at 12:04pm, this time with a full rundown of the headlines before normal news resumed.

While the country's most watched news channel was experiencing these technical difficulties, Phuti Mosomane of ANN7 decided to take time to send some unprofessional tweets about the situation. Though it would be okay for journos of rival channel's to tweet something to get viewers to change the channels and try something new while their channel of preference was off line, Mosomane instead chose to tweet things like "Can't cope?" then inserting the channels Twitter handle.

This is not the first time eNCA experienced a power surge that set them off the air. In 2010, they experienced a similar situation that damaged the sets used by etv's breakfast show, Sunrise. That of course, sent that show off the air for weeks while new sets were constructed and eNews Prime Time was done from Cape Town due to damage.

It is going to be interesting to see when the channel resumes broadcasts from their Johannesburg facility again.