HILO, Hawaii – Hawaii County emergency officials can now broadcast over local cable whenever they deem it necessary.

In an agreement with Hawaii County Civil Defense, Nā Leo TV has provided the county the ability to broadcast live directly on NLTV’s Cable Channel 55 and to the Emergency Broadcast feed available on the naleo.tv web site. The web broadcast “allows any non-cable subscriber the opportunity to access this very important resource in times of emergency,” the community access station says.

NLTV has provided all the equipment and technology to make this happen. Civil Defense provides the bandwidth needed to broadcast. Civil Defense has the ability to also add a crawl with needed information on all three of our channels. Civil Defense has access to this resource 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It allows Civil Defense an opportunity to reach people via another avenue during times of emergency.

We spoke to Nā Leo TV general manager Stacy Higa about the new capability.

The announcement is timely as Hawaii Island is now under a Hurricane Warning due to the approach of Hurricane Madeline. Civil Defense still needs to do some training on the newly installed equipment, so they may not be utilizing the resource during this current severe weather event.

DISCLOURE: Nā Leo TV supports one and a half hours of daily programming on its access channels provided by Big Island Video News.