My first radio station was KMUN in Astoria, Oregon, a fishing town shrouded in fog and perched on a ledge where the Columbia River pours into the sea. It's a community station, where everyone on air is a volunteer. The schedule ranged through blues, punk, folk, classical, bluegrass and jazz, with home-brewed talk shows and a nightly children's story time that parents throughout northwest Oregon and southwest Washington relied on to get their kids into bed.

At a station like that, the voices on the air are personal; they're everyone's friends and neighbors talking between cuts of music about whatever's happening. 

When the Kincade Fire broke out in Sonoma County, local radio stations turned themselves into grassroots community radio, dumping their standard programming and becoming the friends and neighbors people could rely on to talk about what was happening and how to get through it.

In the midst of disaster, it isn't going to be cell phones or the internet that can move critical information across the landscape to help people survive and care for one another. It's going to be radio.

Danielle Venton's story this week brings you some of these moments from the front lines of radio during the fire.