Investing in redundancy at your transmitter site makes a difference when you need it most. Just ask Sommer Frisk, vice president and market manager of Cumulus’ Oxnard-Ventura-Santa Barbara cluster. The southernmost county on California’s central coast has run the gamut of scenarios that disrupt “normal” operations.
Frisk is in her 12th year leading the stations and is a longtime Ventura County resident. She has experienced multiple instances of fires, mudslides and the Borderline Bar and Grill mass shooting.
The Thomas Fire of 2017 and the mudslides that followed in Montecito in 2018 in particular left a devastating impact on the area. But Frisk witnessed the power of being prepared. “We learned a lot from the fire and mudslides,” she told Radio World. “The biggest lesson we took away was the importance of creating a communications infrastructure both internally and externally.”
She said the communication plan formulated at her Ventura County stations has assisted neighboring counties when tragedy strikes.
Tower site maintenance and preparation
Frisk said she has learned valuable lessons from each event she’s been through.
“Maintaining your tower sites is an expense where cutting corners is not an option,” Frisk said. She is proud of the fact that while other stations in the area have been forced to operate from auxiliary sites, 95.1 KBBY(FM) and 100.7 KHAY(FM) have continued operations from their primary sites.
KHAY is a grandfathered Class B FM signal that runs 39 kW ERP at approximately 1,200 feet HAAT. The Laguna Fire in the January wildfires reached close enough to evacuate the campus of California State University’s Channel Islands, where Class B FM KBBY’s Laguna Peak tower is located. Frisk said the station was unharmed.
Cumulus’ Class A 106.3 KVYB(FM), licensed to Oak View, Calif., has had disruptions due to California Edison’s public safety power shutoffs.
Frisk also oversees 103.3 KRUZ(FM) in Santa Barbara, one of the most powerful FM signals in North America running 105 kW ERP.
Frisk said that while the recent wildfires have been tragic, she feels the communications transmitted across southern California’s radio stations have performed optimally. “The infrastructure has worked the way it is supposed to in most cases,” she said. KHAY and KBBY are LP-1 (local primary) EAS stations for Ventura County, while KRUZ is an LP-1 in Santa Barbara County.
Advertisers, she says, respect that her stations have stayed on the air. “When it all hit, we were able to broadcast announcements on where to obtain air scrubbers for poor air quality and had the full support of the county with where to go for a food bank,” she said. The stations in the cluster also provided information about where to find services for fire victims and evacuees. From a revenue standpoint, she said the redundancy helped ensure any losses were temporary in nature.
Frisk says her stations maintain and invest in STLs via point-to-point microwave. “We’ve seen wireless, internet, cell go down but RF is always there,” she said. Internet connectivity was disrupted during the recent Palisades fire, for example. Ventura County is situated west of the L.A. County fires but was at times in the crosshairs between those fires and its own.
Engineering assistance
When there is an emergency at a tower site, Frisk is often the first line of defense but then can contact a regional engineer from Cumulus or a closer engineer available by contract. She lauded the efforts of Cumulus Regional Engineer John Phelan and All Wave Broadcast’s contract services, whom Frisk described as exceptional, as well as Cumulus Oxnard-Ventura Operations Manager Dave Daniels.
She said she’s fought “tooth and nail” to keep a contract engineer available on retainer.
Frisk is proud of what her stations have been able to do to serve the Oxnard-Ventura market during times of need. Her cluster features a team of 15 people. Cumulus’ studios are located in Ventura but she said her team has the ability to conduct operations remotely entirely when needed.
Several of her Cumulus team members were still battling power outages into the last week of January. “The flames may be gone, but the embers still glow,” Frisk said of the aftermath.
She says despite being in the 125th-ranked market by Nielsen, her stations have received good support from Cumulus. There are new power generators invested at most of the cluster’s tower sites. Cumulus no longer owns the sites but there is good collaboration with the tower owners, Frisk said. “I feel empowered to make the decisions that are best for our team and that’s very important,” she said.
Lessons learned
What’s the biggest recommendation Frisk could make to another station manager, having been through taxing situations so many times?
“Invest in a portable gas generator,” she said. “When a tragedy hits, it’s the hardest thing to find. You’ll find hoses before you find a generator.”
A staff member is using a 2000-watt generator from KHAY to help power some of their essentials at home, for example.
Frisk knows this surely won’t be the last disaster, natural or otherwise, her territory deals with. But preparation has made her more confident.
“Every time there’s been a significant event here, we’ve taken away lessons learned, and I think it’s helped us grow each time,” she said.
