Read Online Big Miracle by Tom Rose - Free Book Online

downstate contacts to consider it. The Anchorage and Fairbank TV stations only seemed interested in bad news from the North Slope—making them, in fact, no different at all from TV stations anywhere else. The bad-news stories from the Arctic usually fell in one of a few predictable categories: corruption, crime, alcoholism, bear attacks, or the weather. But for North Slope weather to make news in Alaska? Well, it had to be worse than bad. It had to be awful. And those were not the kind of stories that Oran could push anyway as the seventy-five-degrees-below story was not one local tourism folks were keen to publicize.
    Sure enough, when Oran returned the call, Todd wanted to know if anyone had anything new to report on the stranded whales. Whale news was always good news. Pottinger wanted to find out more and hoped Oran could help. Not only did Caudle know all about the whales, he told Pottinger, he had just spent several hours filming them.
    â€œYou mean you’ve got video of them?” Todd Pottinger excitedly asked.
    â€œYou betcha,” Oran proudly answered, employing the ubiquitous Alaskan idiom.
    â€œCan you wait just one second?” Pottinger asked, conveying his own excitement as he put Caudle on hold. Todd’s hunch paid off. Before Oran could collect his thoughts, Pottinger came back on the line asking how soon Oran could arrange a satellite transmission of some of that footage down to Anchorage. He knew Barrow was home to one of Alaska’s biggest white elephants, a highly sophisticated satellite-transmission facility that stood just south of the town’s runway—the only year-round transportation link in an ambitious billion-dollar state project to use some of the proceeds from the oil-rich 1970s to connect Alaska’s rural villages and settlements with the outside world. But like many other ill-conceived projects of that free-spending era, the transmission facility was rarely used. Although the giant satellite dishes constantly received transmissions, they rarely sent much.
    Oran told Todd he wasn’t sure the “send” mode of the expensive system even worked. Caudle couldn’t recall ever having used it. To him it seemed like a fixture misplaced from a different decade in the frozen tundra. Todd urged him to get an answer back to him as quickly as possible. In the meantime, Pottinger adjusted KTUU’s satellite dish in Anchorage so it could receive a transmission from Barrow, should one be sent. Todd didn’t have time to wait for Oran to call back. If he wanted to try to get some footage for that night’s newscast with time to edit it, Pottinger needed to book thirty minutes on the satellite immediately. He called Alascom, the telecommunications company that owned the $100-million Aurora I satellite launched in October 1982. Aurora I orbited 22,500 miles above the Earth connecting the once isolated forty-ninth state with the rest of the world by telephone, radio, and television.
    Pottinger scheduled the feed for Thursday, October 13, 1988, at 1:30 P.M. , Alaska Standard Time. On behalf of his Anchorage station, KTUU, Pottinger agreed to the $500 satellite time fee whether or not Caudle could figure out how to transmit by then. Meanwhile, Oran Caudle sent his only technician back to the transmission shed to see if he could tune in the video test pattern Oran sent him from his studio to the transmission complex outside the NSB building complex. On the very first try—without any tweaking—the test pattern came in perfectly. Oran called Pottinger to tell him that things seemed all set.
    â€œOh, by the way,” Todd mentioned matter-of-factly before hanging up, “KING-TV in Seattle wants to downlink the feed for their news.” The Aurora I satellite was parked in geosynchronous Earth orbit 22,500 miles above the north Pacific—making Seattle the only city in the Lower 48 that was able to “see” the Aurora I. This meant that