Well, yeah, if you’re watching much of Los Angeles burn down on TV from a few thousand miles away, it is surreal. But for stations like KFI, KNX, and KABC, it was real life.
The fires did not get down to where we used to live, but they absolutely devastated areas with which we were very familiar, where friends lived and we shopped and dined and drove around gawking at the sights. It’s hard to watch, hard to imagine even though it’s right there on TV and one of the reasons we moved was the fear of wildfires (not that moving to Hurricane Alley is much better).
You don’t know the terror of wildfires until you get the dreaded evacuation order and the flames are in your neighborhood. Everyone who’s lived in the L.A. area, including us, has had the experience of looking out the window and seeing flames on a hillside, or smelling the smoke from a fire many miles distant, blown in your direction by the Santa Ana winds.
And everyone from L.A. also knows the weird feeling far away from the fires, business going on as usual while entire neighborhoods burn down. “Hey,” you think, as the entire area smells like an ashtray, “it’s the Palisades and I’m in Palos Verdes. It’s safe to go get Starbucks.”
You can’t imagine what it feels like when the wildfires start unless you’ve been through it.
And, once again, it’s radio’s time to shine, and, from all accounts, it did. KFI and KNX were on it around the clock, they had boots on the ground, and they had all the information residents needed to survive. So did television, with incredible visuals as well, but if you’re in the process of evacuating your home, you’re not toting your 85-inch OLED; you’re racing to get out of Dodge in your car.
Television can’t help you there, and nor can social media, especially when cell phone signals are spotty and your mind is split between losing your home and possessions and where the hell you’re going, because no matter how prepared you are, circumstances get in the way and a simple question like “where do you go if you have to leave your house” gets complicated by traffic and no-vacancy hotels and not knowing where it’s safe. Radio’s there for you. X and Facebook aren’t. Spotify isn’t.
All of this raises some points we’ve made here before. Emergency planning is essential for all broadcast stations, including not just staffing and getting practical (and accurate) information on the air, but setting up alternate studio and transmission and STL facilities. You can’t assume your regular studio or transmitter will be available.
For a time, the main TV and FM antenna farm on Mount Wilson/Mount Harvard was threatened by fire, and stations without auxiliary facilities on other mountains faced going dark at the worst possible time. (Television can still pump out programming to cable systems through fiber, but radio doesn’t have that option.)
Fires, hurricanes, tornadoes – if your station’s in the path of the storm, you need to be ready to broadcast from someplace else and through some other antenna, and the importance of being on the scene means that switching to the studio of a sister station in another market hours away won’t cut it.
This costs real money. Good luck getting radio operators to spend for that. And that’s the biggest concern for radio: the one thing it can do that can’t be done better by any other medium — emergency information in a ubiquitous, uninterrupted manner — is dependent on budgets that a lot of stations just don’t have. What happens if a disaster happens in a smaller market on which the station owners don’t think it’s worth spending?
I don’t want to think about that. I also don’t want to think about the fires, and the friends and others who are losing all their possessions and homes. Can’t help it, though, and at least radio’s coming through for them. We can put the “radio is dead” argument aside for the moment and appreciate its service in this emergency, can’t we?
Barrett Media produces daily content on the music, news, and sports media industries. To stay updated, sign up for our newsletters and get the latest information delivered straight to your inbox.
Perry Michael Simon is a weekly news media columnist for Barrett Media. He previously served as VP and Editor/News-Talk-Sports/Podcast for AllAccess.com. Prior to joining the industry trade publication, Perry spent years in radio working as a Program Director and Operations Manager for KLSX and KLYY in Los Angeles and New Jersey 101.5 in Trenton. He can be found on X (formerly Twitter) @PMSimon.
You are so right, Perry. Homes near me are still okay, but we’re in an evacuation warning zone, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. What’s strange is figuring out what to pack in a suitcase and a few more bags, knowing that when you leave you may have nothing to come home to. All these existential questions to answer when your brain has to be focused elsewhere. And in the warning zones where people are still in place, it’s eerily quiet with everyone on pins and needles. We can’t drink or cook with tap water because it’s contaminated, so local officials are loading us up with free bottled water to use until it’s safe or we have to leave forever. I’ve had KFI on in the car. They’ve been great, as has local TV when I can watch. You are so spot on. I was prepared for earthquakes, but not this.
Now’s not the time to bring up the KFI newsroom decimation of a few weeks ago, and kudos to KFI and KNX for keeping us up-to-date on the airwaves, especially in areas where cell/internet service was down. KNX has done an awesome job in their coverage, while KFI-largely understaffed these days did their best to keep up. We don’t get a lot of the FM stations here in San Diego but it seems like the music stations (some of them) utilized the information available from their AM counterparts while keeping the format running. In 2003 when we were floored by wildfires, the Clear Channel stations (at the time) all went wall-to-wall coverage through our (then) fully staffed KOGO. We’re in a similar boat today with horrendous conditions predicted – but the KOGO newsroom mostly resides in Los Angeles. Is it time for operators to get back to being community resources for information again? The public has drifted away from broadcast AM/FM to their digital devices to get the information. When (as in Southern California) these services fail, there are still AM/FM towers sending out the information. I heard of one listener who had to rummage through their garage to “find a radio”. If most of us are like that, radio should be ashamed. Thanks to the hard working journalists and hosts at KFI and KNX for keeping us up to date -even 120 miles away from the devastation. By the way, Corrine -we have all of the evacuation information you need at http://www.srfiresafe.org.