Enrique Chiabra was anchoring coverage of the Los Angeles fires for Telemundo’s KVEA-TV (Channel 52) on Wednesday night when a new blaze erupted in Hollywood’s Runyon Canyon. As he announced evacuation orders on air, he realized his house was inside the zone.
“He literally walked off, went off set and drove home,” said KNBC/KVEA president and general manager Todd Mokhtari. “I knew our employees were going to get calls to evacuate. You want to tell them to go, even if it’s your anchor on the air.”
It’s been a demanding and emotional week for Los Angeles’ local TV stations, which went wall-to-wall with non-stop, commercial-free news coverage starting Tuesday afternoon and continuing through Friday. As the Palisades and Eaton fires caused mass destruction, thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed and at least 10 are confirmed dead. Making things even more overwhelming for reporters, photographers and news department staffers was how much they have been personally affected by the tragedy unfolding in their own neighborhoods across Southern California.
“We’ve had many instances where staff, in a moment’s notice, had to evacuate their families,” said KABC-TV Channel 7 president/general manager Wendy Granato. “And we said, ‘Get out of here. Take care of your family.’” Granato admitted it was hard to watch her staffers on-air as they processed what was happening to their neighborhoods while reporting on the fires.
“It’s agonizing to see them covering either the neighborhoods they grew up in, they live in,” Granato said. “They’re journalists, but they’re humans. I know how hard it is on them, but we don’t have a choice. This is what we signed up for. We know we’re in this for the long haul. You give yourself a minute, and then you just get back in the ring.”
That was especially true of KABC’s Josh Haskell, who was covering the evacuation on Tuesday night while simultaneously trying to get his parents out of Pacific Palisades.
“That was one of the craziest things, because I’m doing all this while I’m on air,” Haskell said. “I’m trying to tell our viewers about what’s happening and trying to get important information. Where the fire is, why people need to evacuate. And meanwhile, I’m texting with my parents, and they’re calling me, ‘What do we do?’ I said: ‘Pack up the car. You really need to leave within the next 30 minutes, this is coming towards you.’ I needed them to be scared, because in an evacuation situation, you may be told to do something, but if you don’t see it, you don’t really realize how dire it is.”
Luckily, Haskell’s parents got out, and he said he breathed a sigh of relief as they drove by his live remote on Sunset Blvd. and waved. But for a Palisades native like him, what happened to his community remains devastating.
“I found it, in a way, kind of therapeutic to talk about my community and the Palisades,” he said. “The July 4th parade and the 5k/10k run in the morning, which I still do every year. This community that I love so much is hurting so much right now, and some of it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m just thinking about my childhood friends. Were their parents still living in that house that isn’t there anymore? Part of my elementary school burned. Even the supermarket that my mom went to, which was a huge part of her life, and where she’d run into old friends and parents, is gone. The community is missing. You don’t know what it will look like future. And so processing all that is extremely difficult.”
Like most of the TV reporters out there, Haskell has been working 15 hour days or more in the field. “Every morning I’m like, can my lungs take another day in the Palisades? It’s a terrible thought,” he said. “My family’s worried about that, and I’m worried about that, and wearing masks and being as safe as I can, but I feel this responsibility to be there regardless of the situation.”
KTTV Fox 11’s Gigi Graciette knows the danger firsthand: She was injured in 2008 while covering the Sayre fire, when a propane tank exploded and sent a sliver of metal into her eye. “As much as we were protected and wearing our gear and stuff, sometimes the elements win,” Graciette said. “But we do try to stay safe. We have protective gear, we have goggles, we have helmets. Firefighters really like it when we wear our fire gear, because that’s one less person they have to worry about rescuing. Firefighters, by the way, are amazing with media. I covered fires for 24 years, and I’ve never had an incident with a firefighter. They will let you stand right next to them, as long as you stay out of their way, wear protective gear and don’t step on their hoses.”
Graciette said she likes to move from location to location for every live shot, which is challenging. “It’s a lot of extra work for us,” she said. “I think I was at 12 to 15 locations today alone, and that means moving every 15 minutes. And that’s 13 hours non-stop. There is nowhere to go to the bathroom in Pacific Palisades, there is no coffee shop open. There is no power from Pacific Palisades to Malibu, so there are no breaks for anything. We just move from one location to another location.
“But I want to show the viewer at home who’s locked out of their neighborhood,” she added. “These people are evacuated and don’t know what’s going on. They’re not allowed back in. So, I’m very detailed in that. I want to give people the block number that I’m on. I want to tell them where I’m standing, because it matters to the people who call Pacific Palisades or Altadena home.”
During the height of the fires, reporters also found themselves suddenly in the story and helping where they could. KCAL reporter Jasmine Viel, who lives near the Altadena destruction (her house is thankfully still standing), was covering a house on fire Wednesday when a homeowner came over in tears. The woman had swiftly evacuated the night before and left her chickens and ducks behind. That’s when Viel and her photographer, John Schreiber, swooped into action.
Schreiber set down his camera and began grabbing the chickens (he had learned how to do so from his wife, who grew up on a farm) while Viel placed them in a recycling bin.
“As a human being, I said to my photographer, John, ‘We got to go back there,’” Viel said. “We have fire gear on. We’ve been trained in these situations. By the time we get to the backyard, the chicken coop is beginning to catch fire. Another freelance camera guy shows up, and he starts herding the chickens with us. We get them all out, maybe seven or eight chickens, and I wheel the trash can down to the sidewalk. She is just crying and hugging her chickens. And then she says, ‘There are still ducks.’ So John runs back there and grabs at least two of the ducks, and she loads him up in her car, and she’s able to just at least drive away with some of her pets.
“I don’t even know if the home is standing at this point,” Viel added. Minutes later, outside a gas station, Viel and Schreiber helped an elderly woman to safety. “It was just one thing after another. It feels like a nightmare I can’t wake up from. This is a community. My grandparents built a home in Altadena. My mom grew up in Altadena. I came back to buy a home here in Pasadena. There are so many generations of my family that have lived here. Then to see the entire landscape changed, I’m tearing up right now. I don’t know how they come back from this, but I know they have to.”
Stations began preparing for the disaster last weekend, after forecasts warned of unusually fierce Santa Ana winds. With dry brush and gusts approaching 80 mph, the fire threat was very real.
“I have a friend who works over in Century City, and he sent me a picture of the very beginning of the Palisades fire,” said KTTV/KCOP senior VP/general manager Steve Carlston. “It was a big puff of white smoke. And so that was when we began. We were all prepared for it, because we’d all gotten for two or three days the wind predictions from our weather person, Adam Krueger, and we were in that mode. But I always look at news like an option quarterback in football. You have your game plan, and that quarterback gets up to the line, and he says, ‘OK, this is what we’re going to do.’ But it’s not until the play begins that he actually has to make decisions. That’s what it’s like every day.”
The local stations went wall-to-wall with commercial-free coverage on Tuesday night. Between the overtime and lost inventory on commercials, station execs say they’re probably taking a six-figure hit or more from this week’s coverage. “I just put it in a different compartment for now, and not think about the revenue impact, because I know we’re doing the right thing,” Mokhtari said.
Granato, who joined KABC last year after previously running KTRK in Houston, noted that her station there went commercial-free for eight days during Hurricane Harvey in 2017. “The financial aspect of it can’t matter,” she said. “I’m going to worry about that later. You will find a way to regroup and recapture.”
Carlston said moments like this are usually baked into a station’s year-long financial model. “We’ll make it up,” he said. “Will we lose X percentage of our revenue for the month? Yeah, but over a 12-month period of time, I found all of these things kind of work themselves out. So you worry less about the money, and put all your focus on coverage. In this kind of an event, it becomes very clear that clients don’t even necessarily want to have their spots running. It’s going to be fine, the company’s ready for that.”
By Thursday, some stations were beginning to bring back some ad breaks — but the unpredictability of the stories, and the addition of new fires, has complicated plans.
“It’s a judgment call every hour,” said KTLA news director Erica Hill-Rodriguez. “What does today look like? What do we have to be prepared for? You can’t predict. [Wednesday] night, we were thinking, it’s kind of dying down. And then all of a sudden the Sunset Fire popped. When we walk into a breaking news situation, we make sure we have a plan of the ability to get on, stay on and have the resources here in order to do that.”
Things also got dicey at KTLA itself, when the station found itself within the evacuation warning zone during the Runyon fire. Had KTLA evacuated, the station has a full production truck on standby to shift production. “We have a plan in place, and the plan is to stay on TV the best way we can, not in this building, but we’re going to be there for our viewers,” said senior producer Marcus Smith.
Carlston noted that in a market as large as Los Angeles, you have to be aware of things like traffic as you find ways to disperse staffers all around the city. Technology helps: Besides live trucks, stations can rely on cell service for spot coverage. At KTTV, the station bought several Starlink kits directly from Best Buy to rely on low-level satellites to feed coverage.
But as the days wear on, L.A. stations have also been calling in reinforcements from sister stations in California and around the country in order to support their teams. At KABC, that has included crews from KFSN Fresno, KGO San Francisco and KTRK Houston. ABC-owned stations in Chicago and New York are also planning to send crews.
“We take them up on it,” Granato said. “You’re sort of in this mode of, ‘We got this.’ But when they ask, ‘Can we help?,’ we have to say yes. It’s amazing and necessary, because come this weekend, we have to force people to take down time. They’re operating on such adrenaline, especially the field crews, and they don’t want to come down. You sometimes have to force them to. With so many of them seeing their own neighborhoods burn, you need a break. So by this weekend, it’s nice to have those sister stations that say, ‘let us carry the load.’”
At KNBC, Mokhtari also said back-up will be necessary by this weekend. “The fatigue is setting in,” he said. “Even with all the resource help we have. I think the fatigue sits in for the viewers too. There’s only so much you can take. We’re trying to support our staff as much as possible. One of our staff lost their home, and we let them go and said, go deal with your family. I saw another staff member this morning who lost his home, and I’m like, ‘Are you sure you want to be here?’ And he’s like, ‘I need to be here. I don’t have a house to go to. I’m in a hotel, and this is a great distraction for me.’ So we’re really trying to let them dictate how they want to handle this grief.”
The stations are also now starting to look at the long term, as the impact of the fires will be something that they’ll be covering over the next weeks, months and even years.
“It’s going to go quickly from insurance coverage to, when disaster strikes, who’s in charge, like who called the evacuations and when? We have a list of those types of stories that are more short term, more immediate and then the impact of it going forward,” Mokhtari said. “There’s no shortage of stories. We just want to hit the right the right tone at the right time, and at the same time recognize, are we still in this grief, mourning loss, or have people reached anger and want some answers? “
Granato said KABC is prepping various task forces to cover the aftermath. “We’re wrapping our head around how this is going to become our new normal,” she said. “It is going to become the fabric of how we cover news in L.A., whether your house burned or not. L.A. is permanently changed, and so we adapt. We may need a beat reporter who covers nothing but insurance. We may need a beat reporter who covers nothing but arsonists. We are changed, and right now it’s up to us to figure out how we’re going to adapt in the weeks and months to come. But we will.”
(Marc Malkin contributed to this report.)
