Public broadcasters in Oregon, Texas, California and New York are among the latest to receive federal grant money to improve their emergency alerting infrastructure.
The announcement was made by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which now has awarded 21 grants in the first round of funding for the Next Generation Warning System grant program funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
- Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs/KWSO(FM) in Warm Springs, Ore., will receive up to approximately $159,000 to install and upgrade emergency alert equipment at the radio station and towers and to establish an alternate transmitter site in case of emergency. “The Warm Springs Reservation and the surrounding rural counties in the Cascadia Mountain range are prone to wildfires and earthquakes,” the CPB announcement states.
- Texas A&M University’s KAMU(TV/FM) in College Station, Texas, will receive up to about $486,000 to improve the resiliency of broadcast signal origination and boost redundancy of the station’s transmission and related emergency alerting in the Brazos Valley.
- Northern California Educational TV/KIXE(TV) in Redding, Calif., will receive up to $857,000 to upgrade its transmission signal, increasing emergency alert access. The station covers rural northern California, where the risk of wildfires is increasing.
- And St. Lawrence Valley Educational Television Council/WPBS(TV) in Watertown, N.Y., will receive up to about $276,000 to replace an aging transmitter, making the station ATSC 3.0 ready and providing a stronger signal and reaching more communities with emergency alerting in a rural area from the Adirondack Mountains to the St. Lawrence River.
[Read about other grant recipients.]
FEMA selected CPB in 2022 to establish and administer the grants to help public media stations “create a more resilient and secure public alerting system.” The program is providing $34 million to public stations to upgrade equipment and receive training. The program prioritizes stations serving rural, tribal and underserved communities.
A second round of funding is in process.
