Updated: 12/25/2008 1:30 PM KSTP.com | Print Story
By: Tim Sherno

SHERNO: Cold vs. Rust

Cold. Very very very cold.

The first thing that catches your eye is 6-below-zero. Yikes. That's cold. But look under the 13mph wind and you see 26 below zero with the wind chill. That's colder. Those the conditions Sunday night in St.Cloud. And under those conditions,  things don't work the way they're supposed to sometimes. Things freeze.

We were in St.Cloud covering the winter storm that had shrieked across the state Sunday. When we left St.Paul, the temp was a balmy 39. It was a rainy day. It was damp. Just a few hours later, temps dropped through frosty, passed through frigid, finally ending up at frozen solid. And so were we. Or at least our truck.

When we are working on a story outside the metro area, we can't use our microwave dishes to transmit back to the station, we have to use satellites. That's the big white dish you see to the left. And the quick trip from a damp day to a dangerously cold day was was just too much; the dish froze in place. Since you have to point the dish right at the satellite to transmit, we were sunk. We could not send pictures back to the station. But that didn't mean we didn't try. The picture you see is one of our live-truck technicians, Rusty Arnston, hand cranking the satellite, making micro adjustments to 'hit the bird.' But that's not all. 

The damp air also took down a tape machine. If you look, you can see 'error 9.' The net effect; we couldn't transmit and we couldn't edit. To the right you see Rusty using a blowdryer to  warm the machine in hopes of coaxing it  back to life. Machines break down in the cold, it happens, it's expected. And it was bitter cold, but Rusty never gave up. He must have climbed onto the roof of that truck 20 times. He was dialing the satellite with one hand, warming up the tape machine with the other.

I've written about this before, but it's worth repeating. The work that goes on behind the camera that you never see, the folks who do it, day in and day out, they're the ones that make the news possible. They make it easier. They put the tv in 'tv-news.' 

News is a team sport. We have a great team you never see. If it's damp, or cold, when things break, or time is running out... our team pulls together and gets the job done.