to the WVII studios, allowing the station to resume normal operations for Bangor cable viewers; however, until a temporary transmitter was activated on February 19, cable systems in areas outside of Bangor were forced to carry distant affiliates for programming (WVII was supplemented by WMTW in the Augusta and Waterville areas (which are considered to be part of the Portland area), while Miami affiliate WPLG was carried in the Presque Isle market in place of WVII) and over-the-air viewers outside of the Bangor market's extreme western fringes lost ABC programming completely during that time. WVII would not return to full-power broadcasting until April 1995; at that time, it became the second station in Bangor to broadcast in stereo. The cause of the fire was determined by the station's chief engineer to have been a snake crawling into the final on the transmitter causing an electrical short. Seaway Broadcasting merged with current owner Rockfleet Broadcasting in 1998. Under Rockfleet, WVII ventured into low-power broadcasting in Bangor; it signed a local marketing agreement with James McLeod, owner of W30BF (the former Bangor transmitter for Maine Public Television Plus) and WBGR-LP (channel 33), in 2000, and relaunched channel 30 as UPN affiliate WCKD-LP, which also carried some Fox Sports programming (in the 1990s, WVII itself carried some sports programming from Fox on a secondary basis), in 2001. WCKD tried to become a full Fox affiliate that October after Portland's WPXT announced that it would switch to The WB, but was blocked from doing so by UPN; this did not stop the station from continuing its existing relationship with Fox Sports. As a result, from October 2001 to April 2003, Fox's primetime and children's programming in the Bangor and Portland areas was carried by Foxnet, which served as the network's affiliate for the entire state of Maine during that time. After Rockfleet Broadcasting acquired W22BU (channel 22) from MS Communications in 2003, it changed that station's call letters to WFVX-LP and, on April 13, affiliated it with Fox. Rockfleet moved all of WCKD's syndicated and local programming, but not the UPN affiliation, to WFVX. That August, Rockfleet and James McLeod agreed to end the LMA with WCKD. WVII made national news in a New York Times article on October 30, 2006, quoting General Manager Michael Palmer saying "when Bar Harbor is underwater, then we can do global warming stories. Until then," he added, "no