Charlotte Sun Copes with Power Outages

By: E&P Staff Loss of about 100 minutes of prime production time late Dec. 3 resulted in a three-hour delivery delay for most readers of the Sunday Charlotte Sun in Charlotte Harbor, Fla.

In a column posted on sun-herald.com last Saturday, Publisher and President David Dunn-Rankin explained what happened the previous weekend and, in unusual detail, how his company will try to cope with any similar situation in the future.

What Dunn-Rankin called the Nightmare on Sun Street occurred in the middle of producing the week's biggest edition and biggest press run. Part of the three-phase power supply was lost when a breaker wire burned out on a power pole across the street. Florida Power & Light restored power just before midnight.

By then, however, the Associated Press wire, all pagination servers, the printing press, and its air and water service had been shut down. Hours after electrical power was restored, the outage indirectly also caused telephone service to fail.

With no papers showing up on doorsteps, readers by the hundreds flooded the paper with calls, ultimately shutting down the phone system, wrote Dunn-Rankin.

For future back-up, the company has invested in a large press at its Venice plant "that will mirror the capacity" in Port Charlotte, Dunn-Rankin wrote, adding that the press now in Venice was able to handle smaller jobs for the Port Charlotte plant when a four-hour electrical problem hit late last week.

Further, the Sun's plant is to be expanded, with the probable installations of automatic switch-over to on-site generator power and a higher-capacity phone system.

Action already taken includes: scheduling Venice and Port Charlotte to share mechanical and electrical technicians; refurbishing a stand-by imagesetter to take over if a newer unit fails; new imagesetter chemistry mixer stations; making tools available to mailroom staff; adding of a fourth part-time driver to the night transportation rotation; data backup and disaster-recovery (including server-failure) provisions for Venice and Charlotte facilities; paper-handler retraining in roll-preparation procedures.