While agonizing over Trumpian excesses and related media blind spots, some of us Angelenos are still reeling from the LA fires and how they were reported.
A week ago, PBS posted a documentary about the firestorms that swept through three major LA communities beginning January 7:
“Weathered: Inside the LA Firestorm,” Season 6, Episode 4.
https://www.pbs.org/video/weathered-inside-the-la-firestorm-l31r0b
Some of the issues, lessons and tragedies highlighted by the documentary may seem parochial to viewers outside the immediate disaster areas. But revisiting the horrors through PBS’ lens has caused many of us who experienced them first-hand to reflect on the larger ramifications of what took place and what might have been.
Credit this in large measure to PBS’ enterprising journalism.
But part of it is also due to gaps in PBS’ coverage and its once-over-lightly treatment of certain political hotspots.
The documentary also suffers from journalistic tics typical of much of the television coverage of these events – like failing to identify the geographic locations of horrifying images, burning buildings and incinerated neighborhoods, as they flash on screen.
The following comments, based on my own real-time exposure to the firestorms in one LA community, Pacific Palisades, were originally posted to the PBS website.
A few edits have been made for clarity.
Here goes, for what it’s worth:
As a Palisades evacuee and long-time television journalist, I applaud this effort [the documentary] to make the complexities and lessons of the LA fires accessible to general viewers.
But the intermingling of footage from various fire sites without tagging the locations ultimately numbed this viewer and made the lessons difficult to absorb, particularly since the different sites, the Palisades and sections of Altadena and Pasadena, posed different challenges.
Moreover, having established the uniqueness of current fire “constants” – cyclonic winds, roaming embers, closely packed neighborhoods, simultaneous multi-community firestorms, excessive dryness due to global warming – the producers kept harkening to firefighting strategies from yesteryear that don’t work any longer.
I wanted to know, first and simply, how and why the recent fires were unique and so destructive, and secondly and simply, what’s now needed to prevent replays.
It would also have been helpful to hear from survivors of each afflicted community about what site-specific problems they encountered.
Evacuation challenges, for instance, were unique to each of the three communities and the failure of local authorities in each one to plan adequately for evacuations deserves to be a story unto itself, or at least a segment unto itself.
Finally, it was disheartening to hear one interviewed fire chief trying to hedge his judgments in deference to climate-change deniers about the role of global warming in what took place and what is likely to happen next.
Ultimately the reason that no previous lessons or precautions suffice is that global warming due to human excess and indifference is accelerating off the charts.
Though other interviewees and a set of on-screen bar graphs pinged the seriousness of rising temperatures everywhere every year, PBS’ reporters/producers failed to bear in on the causes and full impact when canvassing expert opinion, possibly out of concern for “balance.” They thus allowed climate-change denialism to mute what is obvious from the evidence.
There are one or two other observations that I would presume to offer at risk of wearing out my welcome.
At one point in the documentary, the producers included a brief soundbite from mega-developer Rick Caruso. His patch of highly commercialized property in the very center of Palisades Village is one of the few places there still standing, untouched by the fire for all practical purposes.
As has been widely reported in other media, Mr. Caruso hired his own private team of firefighters to protect this real estate, possibly with water drawn from public hydrants and other public sources.
As has also been widely reported, many hydrants in the Palisades lost water pressure during the first night of the fires because of heavy usage everywhere in the community and because elevation issues require extra pressure in Palisades hydrants and fire hoses.
Mr. Caruso, who ran unsuccessfully for Major against Karen Bass, has publicly criticized her handling of the fires, including the water problems.
If, as a documentary maker, you are going to interview Mr. Caruso, who is bidding to help redevelop the fire-ravaged Palisades, surely you owe it to him, your audience and Mayor Bass herself to ask whether his private firefighting effort contributed to the water shortages he has blamed on city managers.
He might have good answers, and all power to him.
Also, since several of the fire professionals featured in the documentary explained that their first priority was to save lives, not property, it would be fair to ask Mr. Caruso what his own private fire teams prioritized – saving his property or helping save lives.
This is not a trick question but merely a tough one that should be asked of any advocate of privatized fire fighters.
Finally, at another point in the documentary there was an interview or voice-over narrative about whether high-wind warnings the night before the fires should have prompted the pre-positioning of extra fire equipment in the high-risk Palisades, the inference being that this could have saved much of the community.
It is an excellent question and a hugely newsworthy one since the publisher of the LA Times and other critics of Mayor Bass and her administration have savaged them for failing to take such a precaution.
The documentary producers, however, didn’t do more than brush-kiss the “pre-positioning” issue and that’s too bad because implicit in it are public policy questions that we should all address.
Here’s why: preemptively fire-proofing the Palisades — dumping a lot of additional fire equipment and personnel there based simply on rising winds and a presumptive fear of fire — would have meant leaving less affluent and less influential communities under-protected because there are not enough fire trucks and personnel on hand, even across multiple jurisdictions, to cover all areas of LA equally on a contingency basis.
So, despite what some argue, the disposition of fire-fighting assets prior to the multiple conflagrations last January was about as good as civic equity and affordable resources allowed.
Whether I am right or wrong about that, I missed seeing it addressed in the documentary since the producers only nudged up to the edge.