KVPR, the valley’s public radio station, will soon no longer have to worry about being interrupted in the event of a natural disaster.

The station received a grant of up to $38,607 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to construct an emergency auxiliary transmitter site as a backup to its transmitter in Meadow Lakes, near Auberry.

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 was essential to broadcasting emergency alerts to other radio and television stations in the area. KVPR and KMJ are the two San Joaquin Valley stations handling that responsibility, he told GV Wire on Thursday.

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

“The problem is that the same disasters that often require emergency notifications increasingly threaten our broadcast infrastructure and our ability to deliver those notifications,” he said in an email.

KVPR has been forced to go off the air twice in the past four years due to emergencies in Meadow Lakes, starting with the Creek Fire in 2020 and record snowfall in February and March 2023, said Moore.

And KVPR isn’t the only state-funded station at risk: Valley PBS went dark after a June fire destroyed the station’s transmission facilities in Bear Mountain. Several months later, it was able to resume live-only broadcasting on its digital channel 18.1 thanks to a deal with Cocola Broadcasting in Fresno.

Related story: Valley PBS is back on the air. But you will have to rescan your TV channels

The new transmitter will be near you

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

“This will allow us to stay on the air in the immediate metropolitan area,” he said. “This not only improves the reliability of our programming, but also the reliability of our ability to transmit 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 $40 million in funding approved by Congress in fiscal year 2022.

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