Windstorm caught KPBX in the middle of its move

Verne Windham had an extra, important duty while on the air Friday morning at Spokane Public Radio’s old studio on North Monroe Street.

But first, he needed to choose a longer piece of music for listeners who might be on edge because of the lack of electricity or working hard for windstorm recovery.

“I was trying to decide between gentle and smooth or exuberant and encouraging,” said Windham, the program manager of Spokane Public Radio.

In the end, he chose “Sextet for Piano and Wind” by Francis Poulenc, which he believes is all those things.

And it’s 18 minutes long – long enough for Windham to walk down the creaky back staircase and fill up the generator out back with gasoline.

“I’m converting gasoline into radio,” Windham said, remembering his thoughts as he poured.

Spokane Public Radio was in its first day of broadcasting from its new studio, a remodeled historic fire station a bit to the south on Monroe Street, when the power went out just after 6 p.m. Tuesday. Although radio station staff were broadcasting from the new station, it’s not completely ready and the signals for Spokane Public Radio’s three stations to transmitters on Mica Peak and northwest of Spokane still must go through the old station.

The windstorm was bad timing. Spokane Public Radio has a backup generator to stay on the air when the power goes out, but the generator had been moved to the new site, and it’s too big to move back on a temporary basis.

“The storm hit while we are in this relatively precarious position,” said Cary Boyce, Spokane Public Radio’s general manager.

So the station stayed off the air until midday Wednesday, until a station engineer brought in a home generator to the old studios. But the generator doesn’t have enough power for both broadcasting and heat. There was enough to spare for just one light in the studio.

“He had to selectively find just the essential features that we need,” Windham said.

Since then, Spokane Public Radio’s three stations have merged programming and have been on the air from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. (though some of the stations went off temporarily when generators at the transmitters ran out of fuel).

The stations can’t get many of the shows they normally air that arrive via computer like “Fresh Air” and “Prairie Home Companion,” but they can use National Public Radio and BBC live broadcasts that come over satellite. They’ve added more local programming to fill in holes.

For public radio listeners, one potential bonus of the outage was that it forced the end of a on-air pledge drive several days early. But that’s left the stations with extra budget concerns. And funding shortfalls could be blamed for the outage.

Spokane Public Radio had planned to be fully moved to its new digs by July 1, Windham said. But the project was about $90,000 short.

“It’s unfortunate that it hit us while we were in transition,” Boyce said. “It’s nature’s way of saying hurry up.”