Barry Spadoni first bought a battery-powered TV after the Northridge earthquake in 1994, when his Chatsworth home was without electricity for 10 days. He later upgraded to a color model to stay on top of news during power outages -- and follow USC and UCLA football games from high in the stands.
"Having that little TV stuck in the drawer, where you just have to put in batteries . . . that's very important if it's a prolonged outage," said Spadoni, a Wachovia financial advisor.
But come February, Spadoni's hand-held TV and the millions of others in U.S. homes will face their own permanent outage.
Almost all the battery-powered televisions stashed in drawers, closets and garages in case of emergency will be rendered useless when broadcasters switch to digital-only signals.
And right now, there aren't many options for replacing them.
Congress has mandated that all broadcast TV stations transmit only in digital beginning Feb. 18, making old analog sets obsolete. The federal government is offering each household two $40 coupons to buy converter boxes so those sets can pick up the new signals.
But nobody manufactures a battery-powered converter box. And the few battery-powered digital TV models on the market start at about $200 -- a costly option for replacing portable sets that have become increasingly inexpensive in recent years.
The loss of all those analog portable TVs removes an important way to communicate with the public during an emergency, said Keith Harrison, assistant administrator of the Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management.
"When we get information out to people, we like to get it out by every means possible," said Harrison, who also is president of the California Emergency Services Assn. "A lot more people watch TV than listen to AM radio."
But the digital TV transition isn't a major public safety issue because broadcast radio is still available to deliver important messages, he said.
"In preparedness kits, we tell people to have a battery-powered radio," Harrison said. "While some people have battery-powered TV sets -- I know I have one -- not everyone does."
Spadoni and others said there's peace of mind in knowing they can watch TV when the power goes out, particularly in areas such as California, with its wildfires and earthquakes, or the hurricane-prone Southeast.
"We've been hearing a lot of concerns," said Gary McNair, general manager of WECT-TV in Wilmington, N.C.
