More than two dozen radio stations across four states were knocked off the air after Hurricane Helene made landfall as a Category 4 storm late Thursday evening.
The tally was released by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) early Friday morning, with most of the affected AM and FM radio stations located in Georgia.
The hurricane made landfall near the city of Perry in Florida’s “Big Bend” region. The town is not too far away from the Florida-Georgia border, which the storm crossed through within about two hours of reaching shore.
According to the FCC, a total of 13 radio stations are off the air in Georgia, five are offline in South Carolina, four in Florida and three in North Carolina. Most of the radio stations affected are FM broadcast outlets, and nearly all were forced off the air due to power-related issues.
More than 3.5 million residents and businesses are without power across those four states, according to local utility officials and government agencies. Nearly four dozen people have died from the storm, Fox Weather reported late Friday evening.
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While advocates continue to promote AM and FM radio stations as a more-resilient form of communications during emergency situations like severe weather, the transmission towers associated with those broadcast outlets are no less susceptible to wind damage and power outages. AM and FM radio stations typically have backup sources of power, but small stations in less-populated areas typically do not have generators and batteries that can keep their transmitters going during a storm, and the FCC does not require them to have a backup source of power as a condition of their broadcast license.
Television stations proved to be more-resilient, according to FCC data, with just one TV station in Georgia knocked off the air due to the storm. Many TV stations in the path of the hurricane started their storm coverage Thursday afternoon and remained on the air throughout the evening. Several stations also offered their news coverage on YouTube and other streaming platforms.
TV coverage of the storm helped serve as an important lifeline in dozens of communities where cable TV and Internet service was knocked offline. Nearly 300,000 cable TV and land-based Internet customers were without service as of Friday morning, less than 12 hours after the hurricane made landfall, according to FCC data.
Around 5.6 percent of all cell phone towers in the four states impacted by the storm were offline, the FCC said, with the majority of those outages reported along the Florida-Georgia border.
