It was an interesting day to say the least on Wednesday June 8th, 2016.
It started as just another day of construction on Ottawa’s Rideau Centre (shopping mall). There has been ongoing construction and blasting over several months as we give our downtown core a new lease on life. We have been also been tunneling the underside of parts of Ottawa for some time now in preparation for light rail as part of this massive improvement. While the cause of what happened next has not been officially released yet, all we can say is thankfully no one was killed.
At around 10:30 am, part of Rideau Street right in the middle of all this construction activity collapsed causing a water main to break which rapidly saturated the ground beneath. The sink hole was growing fast and furious as it worked its way towards a parked Dodge Caravan – eventually swallowing the van into an estimated 12 meter deep hole consuming the street.
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Aerial view showing the vehicle has disappeared |
It was one of the biggest stories developing rapidly and by chance our studios were just a block away. One of our hosts grabbed his recently configured iPhone with Tieline’s Report-IT app installed, the Shure Motiv MVi digital interface and a Sennheiser HMD25 headset mic. He ran over to the now barricaded action unfolding and hit the ‘connect’ button on the app. The operator back at the studio had the Bridge-IT codec dialed up on the switcher and bang we were live on the air at 64kb/s in 5 minutes reporting the event to the city of Ottawa!
While I explained just days before that you can use the app on its own with no additional hardware, it could be hard to hear the back feed with all the commotion of a loud event and that a headset mic would be ideal.
As the event continued to unfold all afternoon the host did most of his call-in talk show live via the Report-IT app while walking around in the downtown market area. Roll back just 10 years ago, a van full of gear and a RPU transmitter with a mast would have been required which would have taken much more than 5 minutes to set up, even with the studios being a block away.
We use the Tieline family of equipment for all sorts of situations and due to the flexibility of the gear we continue to re-invent the power of radio day-by-day.
Shon Kelly | Technician
Bell Media Radio
MAJIC 100 – 580 CFRA – New Country 94- TSN 1200
Star 96 Pembroke
103.7 BOBFM – 104.9 JR FM Brockville
For more information about Report-IT visit http://www.tieline.com.
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