Keeping the Last Mile on Air: Community Radio as Emergency Communications Infrastructure

When emergency alerts go out, power grids fail, or cellular networks congest, local community radio stations can serve as a critical “last mile” infrastructure—providing street-by-street updates, evacuation directions, and multilingual information directly to impacted residents. However, many of Canada’s non-profit stations operate with significant technical vulnerabilities, from single points of failure in the signal chain to limited backup power and aging hardware. This presentation introduces the National Campus and Community Radio Association (NCRA/ANREC), representing over 120 campus, community, and Indigenous broadcasters across Canada. It outlines the national Emergency Broadcasting and Community Media Resilience Plan and examines how WABE’s engineering community can actively participate in building network resilience.