Super Bowl Update

The National Weather Service in Paducah announced Tuesday afternoon that the NOAA Weather Radio transmitter located in McLeansboro, Ill. (KXI52, 162.4 MHz) will be down for maintenance on Wednesday.

KXI52 covers all or parts of Gallatin, Hamilton, Saline and White counties in Southeastern Illinois.  As an alternative, listeners in Saline County can tune to the Marion transmitter (WXM49, 162.425 MHz) and those in White County can use the Evansville transmitter (KIG76, 162.55 MHz).  Unfortunately, there is no second choice for listeners in Gallatin and Hamilton counties.

There is no severe weather expected Wednesday, although a slight chance of storms is in the forecast.

UPDATE #2, 8:30 p.m.:  Both the Gibson County radar and the Evansville NWR transmitter are back in operation.

UPDATE #1, 5:50 p.m.:  The National Weather Service Paducah WFO reports that both the Evansville and McLeansboro NOAA Weather Radio transmitters as well as the Gibson County, Ind. and Fort Campbell, Ky. weather radars will remain down "through tonight."  The outage, which began this morning, is due to the failure of a fiber optic cable.

PREVIOUSLY: The NOAA Weather Radio transmitters in Evansville (KIG76) and McLeansboro (KXI52) are down again, the Paducah weather forecast office reports.

Blame for the outage is being placed on a broken phone line, Eyewitness News meteorologist David Heckard tweeted earlier.  The Paducah office, officially, would only say it was "an apparent communications failure."

In addition, the Gibson County Doppler radar (KVWX) is also down.

A sizable portion of the Tri-State is under a slight risk for severe weather today, making speedy repairs essential.

More updates as they become available.

The National Weather Service office in Paducah reports early this morning that the NOAA Weather Radio stations in McLeansboro, Ill. (KXI-52, 162.4 MHz) and Evansville (KIG-76, 162.55 MHz) are off the air due to a telecommunications failure.

Listeners may hear intermittent broadcasts from the two stations as technicians work to get things back in proper working order.

The McLeansboro transmitter covers Gallatin, Hamilton, Saline and White counties in Southeastern Illinois.

Evansville's transmitter covers all or part of Edwards, Wabash and White counties in Southeastern Illinois; Dubois, Gibson, Perry, Pike, Posey, Spencer, Vanderburgh and Warrick counties in Southwestern Indiana; and Henderson and Union counties in Western Kentucky.