The Kincade wildfire, the largest of more than a dozen wildfires scorching California, is in the heart of Northern California wine country. Farmworkers and immigrant families make up a third of the population that speaks a language other than English. KBBF-FM, a small community radio station in Santa Rosa, has been going above and beyond to provide updated information on the fire.
The 2017 North Bay fire showed station volunteer Xulio Soriano the need for fire information translated into indigenous languages. Triqui and Mixteco languages are widely spoken, so Soriano and several other volunteers are on the air broadcasting lifesaving information to a significant number of the population in their native languages.
“We saw this lack of resource in the last North Bay fire complex two years ago in a big way, said Soriano, on The Bay podcast from KQED. “Most people were just trying to get Spanish information translated, which was an issue. Now we actually have some of the solutions to translate not everything, but as much as we can.”
