KVPR, the Valley’s public radio station, soon won’t have to worry about being knocked off the air if a natural disaster strikes.

The station was awarded a grant of up to $38,607 by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to build an emergency auxiliary transmitter site as backup to its transmitter at Meadow Lakes near Auberry.

The funding is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency through the Next Generation Warning System grant program.

Joe Moore, the station’s general manager, said staying on the air is critical for distributing emergency alerts to other area radio and TV stations. KVPR and KMJ are the two stations in the San Joaquin Valley with that responsibility, he told GV Wire on Thursday.

The system is designed to work even when the internet and cell phone service goes down, Moore said.

“The problem has been that the same disasters that often necessitate emergency notifications are increasingly threatening our broadcast infrastructure and our ability to deliver those notifications,” he said in an email.

KVPR has been forced off-air twice over the past four years because of emergencies at Meadow Lakes, starting with the Creek Fire in 2020 and the record snowfall in February and March of 2023, Moore said.

And KVPR isn’t the only publicly funded station at risk — Valley PBS went dark after a fire in June destroyed the station’s transmission facility on Bear Mountain. Several months later, it was able to resume over-the-air broadcast only on its 18.1 digital channel through an arrangement with Cocola Broadcasting in Fresno.

Related Story: Valley PBS Is Back on the Air. But You’ll Need to Rescan Your TV Channels

New Transmitter Will Be Close to Home

KVPR will use the grant to install a low-power transmitter, a spare that the station already owns, at the Clovis studios on Alluvial Avenue at Temperance Avenue, Moore said.

“This will allow us to stay on-air in the immediate metro area,” he said. “It not only improves the reliability of our programming, it also improves the reliability of our ability to serve emergency alerts to listeners/viewers of all other broadcast operations locally.”

KVPR’s grant is one of two awarded in California and one of 38 awarded in the first round of funding from $40 million approved by Congress in fiscal year 2022.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received 170 station applications requesting more than $109 million in the second round, for which Congress approved $56 million in fiscal year 2023. FEMA recently announced that the corporation will administer a third round of funding from the $40 million approved by Congress in fiscal year 2024.