No matter how careful we are, no matter how much we threaten grave consequences, and no matter how stringent the rules, eventually it’s going to happen. At WIYY-FM (Rock 98, Baltimore, MD), it happened at about 6 AM on Friday, May 4. During the station’s unruly morning show, one of the hosts slipped the console a Mickey.

No, really. The jock’s name is Mickey Cucchiella, part of the morning team of Mickey, Amelia & Spiegel, and he managed to spill a fairly large quantity of coffee directly into the station’s Wheatstone A-6000 console. Listeners heard it happen live on the air as a loud “clink” marked the impact of the coffee mug on the console surface. (Audio here.) (Also here.)

The effects were immediate and dramatic. The audio began to crackle as the engineers were called in. Broadcast technician Bryan Harz and Director of Engineering Jeff Halapin were first on the scene and looked the situation over grimly. The team speculated aloud about what would happen next, and they didn’t have to wonder for long. Just as preparations were being made to move to an alternate control room, smoke began to pour from the console and everyone became audibly uneasy about having a fire in the studio. Then there were loud buzzing sounds, and then silence. Twenty minutes of it. The broadcast resumed via an Audioarts D-75 console in a production room.

Mickey’s contrition was heartfelt and genuine, but as the other members of the morning team did their best to reassure him, Chief Engineer Kerry Plackmeyer, joining the other two engineers, had to assess the damage. They powered down the console and disassembled it to discover that there had indeed been a fire. The coffee, heavily laden with sugar and therefore highly conductive, had shorted out a main power supply bus on the motherboard. This produced tremendous heat and actually fried the motherboard. Once dried, the sugar actually ignited, causing yet more damage. (Photos, via the Rock 98 Facebook page.)

Two of the three motherboard sections were destroyed, and six modules were soaked with coffee. To Plackmeyer, it looked bad. “We actually called Wheatstone with every expectation of having to purchase a new console — quickly.”

Luckily, due to a similar but less incendiary incident a few years earlier, Plackmeyer had a spare for one of the two motherboards, and Wheatstone support engineer Jerry Jacobson quickly made arrangements to prepare and ship a second one from the factory for Saturday delivery. The earlier incident had also left WIYY with six spare console modules, allowing the six soaked ones to be replaced immediately.

The engineering crew worked quickly to clean up the mess and prepare the console for reassembly. The parts arrived just before noon on Saturday, and the console was back in operation by 2:00 PM that same day — a time frame that Plackmeyer called “miraculous.” However, it’s not at all unusual for Wheatstone to stock parts for consoles even older than this one, which is of 1995 vintage.

Plackmeyer has released a short video that shows the damage to the console. “There will never be food or drink in this room again,” he says at the end, in a tone that does not brook argument.