DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL!

AS CARMAKERS LOBBY TO YANK AM RADIO FROM NEW MODELS, BROADCASTERS ARGUE THAT THE TRUSTY 105-YEAR-OLD MEDIUM IS AN IRREPLACEABLE LIFELINE FOR MILLIONS OF AMERICANS. BUT IS ANYBODY LISTENING?

- ASHLEY STIMPSON

WHEN MARK STARLING, on-air host for 570 WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina, sat down behind the microphone at 5 p.m. on Thursday, September 26, 2024, he knew he was in for a long shift. In a few hours, Helene would slam into Florida as a Category 4 hurricane before barreling toward the region as a powerful tropical storm, and meteorologists warned things could get dicey. So Starling, along with his producer Tank Spencer, had decided to hunker down at the station, keeping listeners up to speed on road closures and power outages. Helene would certainly cause some disruptions, Starling thought, but he'd be home by Saturday—Sunday at the latest.

That's not what happened.

At first, the storm seemed severe but not catastrophic. Though the power was gone, the generator was humming; and while the internet and TV were glitchy, they remained accessible. By the time dawn broke on Saturday morning, however, the situation had turned bleak. Overnight, more than 100 of the 80-foot pine trees that lined the station's long driveway had collapsed, blocking the way out. Worse, the TV signal was MIA, and the LTE icon on their phones had been replaced, ominously, by one that read “SOS.” As the storm raged and rivers broke their banks, the region was all but cut off from the world.

“Radio was literally all that was left,” Starling tells me on a Zoom call from his pickup truck seven months later. “We were it: two men and a little 5,000-watt station.”