A fledgling radio station that just made its debut this year suffered a huge loss on Monday when the building it is housed in burned in a fire that destroyed 90 percent of the building and all of the station’s equipment.

WXGR 101.5 was located at Littlebrook Air Park in Eliot, Maine, in a building that also housed the airport’s office and a downstairs mechanic shop that had a fully fueled plane in it at the time of the fire. Fortunately, firefighters were able to contain the fire before it reached the shop, but could not save the rest of the building.

Eliot, Maine firefighters battle Monday's blaze at Littebrook Air Park, home of the fledgling radio station WXGR. Photo by Rebekah Brooks

The low-powered station was owned and operated by New Hampshire-based organization Gritty, a non-profit dedicated to educating the public about global media production.

Gritty founders and Dover residents Michael Wadleigh, producer of the Academy award-winning film “Woodstock,” and Cleo Huggins, a Web site designer, started the station out of the desire to present information in a more powerful way.

In an interview with the Dover Community News conducted last Friday, Wadleigh said that when it comes to television news, the image always dominates the news, making the information less of a priority. Radio cuts out a lot of the waste.

“In other words, radio programs can be way more trash compacting and efficient when it comes to conveying ideas,” Wadleigh said.

Wadleigh’s station itself was compact and efficient. It consisted literally of two computers on a table inside a room with a view of the airport runway. There was no soundproof booth, no DJs, no announcers; just cables and wires and a long distance connection to London, where long-time friend Rob Connelly, of the radio station The Shark, was programming the station’s play list from a remote desktop.

“It’s only the robots here,” Wadleigh said Friday of the computers broadcasting the station through an antenna on the roof.

Jean Hardy, owner of the airport, donated the studio space to Wadleigh for free. The antenna was already there when Wadleigh set up the station, which saved a lot of money in start-up costs, and the computers and equipment all cost about $15,000.

WXGR was going to be the first radio station in New Hampshire to carry the popular radio program “Democracy Now” as well as other programs such as “Free Speech Radio News” and speeches by long-time friends of Wadleigh’s, such as political satirist Jim Hightower and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

The idea for the station came up about nine years ago when Connelly suggested to Wadleigh that he and Huggins apply for a low-powered radio station under Gritty’s name, as the FCC requires that only educational non-profit organizations can own such stations.

“You can only get (operate) these stations if you’re purely educational programming,” Wadleigh said. “In America, most low-powered stations are snatched up by Christian radio.”

The station, inspired by the BBC in Britain, was designed to educate the public just as Gritty does on issues such as capitalism, world politics, the environment, etc.

Wadleigh had hoped to expand the station’s Web site, www.wxgr.org, which was still up and running at press time, to include MP3 files of speeches and lectures by politicians, activists and professors, which he hoped would become something like an “audio library in the sky.”

WXGR had only been playing music since its debut in recent weeks, as it was still in developing stages and was not yet playing its full program.

Wadleigh had hoped to be running at full capacity by this summer and had been planning a free concert of local musicians and artists on the airport grounds this summer to celebrate.

Wadleigh said he has no insurance and does not know yet what he is going to do about the station. As of press time the fate of the concert is also unknown.

Portsmouth Herald writers Darlene M. Valliere and Karen Dandurant contributed to this report.

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