ORLANDO, Fla. – As Tropical Storm Erin churns across the Atlantic, there is now another source for emergency information around the clock – on the radio and on the internet.
But it’s not just weather alerts – it’s everything from your commute to your health.
WUCF, a Public Media station in Central Florida known for its jazz and affiliations with PBS and NPR, is broadcasting 24/7 “BEACON” - Broadcast Emergency Alerts and Communications Operations Network.
WUCF Executive Director Jen Cook said there’s nothing like it in the country right now.
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“BEACON really started as a project to see if this was viable,” Cook said. “It is investment from the Florida Department of Emergency Management (FDEM) which helped develop this technology with Public Media stations. And there are other states now looking to see, is this something viable? We should be rolling out to other places because it is something that can really help reach everyone where they are.”
Cook said BEACON is similar to a weather radio but different.
“BEACON broadcasts everything related to an emergency or things even that you would need to know about on a daily basis,” Cook said. “So BEACON serves a nine-county area for us in our Central Florida market, and emergency managers put in everything. It can be a rabies alert. It can be a road closure. It can be police doing something in a neighborhood shut down. It can be a hurricane. It could be tolls lifted.”
BEACON takes the alerts directly from the Emergency Managers in Central Florida and in Tallahassee, prioritizes the most important ones to play the most and then uses an AI voice to broadcast them.
“So it is running on the broadcast technology that will not go down in the event of a storm,” Cook said. “So for a lot of us, we’ll lose power. We’ll lose internet. We’re not going to lose the radio signal. That’s why radio is so important in Florida.”
Public Media across the country has lost its federal funding after President Trump and Congress cut taxpayer dollars.
At WUCF, that’s $2 million from Washington, D.C. and another $370,000 from Tallahassee which WUCF has tried to supplement through donations.
But Cook said BEACON is a not a response to the funding cut.
“BEACON has actually been something we’ve been working on for years,” Cook said. “Beacon itself has been in development for five plus years, probably longer. We’ve been talking about adding it for at least the last two years.”
Cook said emergency information is what Public Media does, among other services to the public.
“Most people think of PBS and NPR, Public Media, as the broadcast, as what we air on TV,” Cook said. “It’s PBS kids, it’s the Downton Abbey’s of the world. We are so much more. We have years and years and years of education, of public service. And so this is a great reminder to people. This is why we were created it [BEACON] and I think the argument for federal funding can be made. At the end of the day, we are here to serve our community, and how we do that is based on community funding, wherever that comes from. Government, private industry, donors. Right now we need more of the community to step up to help pay for these public services. But it’s just one of the many things that we do that people on the surface don’t necessarily see.”
You can listen to BEACON over the radio, with the BEACON app or WUCF’s website:
- WUCF FM 89.9 HD3 Radio Channel (for listeners with HD radio receivers)
- Live streaming at wucf.org/listen (Select WUCF-HD3)
- The BEACON mobile app, available nationwide for free on iOS and Android. Search for “BEACON 24/7 Local Alerts”