Wildfires Test Overhaul of Crisis Response

WILDFIRES TEST OVERHAUL OF CRISIS RESPONSE
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Jonathan Karp jonathan.karp@wsj.com and Rhonda L. Rundle ]
Wildfires raging across Southern California are testing whether emergency-response systems have improved in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and Hurricane Katrina. Emergency responders nationwide have invested a lot of time and money in recent years to plan improvements to systems that didn't function well in recent disasters such as 2005's Hurricane Katrina. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who declared a state of emergency yesterday in the seven affected counties, said progress has been made in coordinating efforts to contain the fires, which are being driven by the gale-force desert gusts known as the Santa Ana winds. Arthur Ellis, a Los Angeles County fire battalion chief, said that better communication with other county, state and federal agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service, had enabled him to speed as many as 1,000 firefighters to battle blazes near the upscale coastal town of Malibu and in the northern part of the county.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119310424756367957.html?mod=todays_us_pa...
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LOCAL TV DIALS INTO FIRE NEWS
[SOURCE: Los Angeles Times, AUTHOR: Martin Miller and Greg Braxton]
Local television news devoted nearly continuous live coverage throughout much of Monday to the fires raging across seven Southern California counties as the crisis led to the cancellation of most regular daytime programming, cut into advertising revenues and pushed newsrooms to their limits. In a massive news effort not seen since a similarly devastating series of blazes four years ago, local TV stations broadcast a grimly familiar roll call of scenes and vowed to continue to do so as long as events dictated it. Beginning midmorning Sunday, most TV screens were filled with images of homes burning, hillside infernos, scrambling evacuees, Super Scooper airplane water drops and impromptu news conferences with officials including local fire personnel and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. With such widespread attention from the local channels, much of the challenge for news stations was making their coverage distinctive. News anchors provided the most obvious separation, but some stations tried to emphasize certain elements more than their competitors. Even more than the 2003 fires, the Internet has taken on a greater role in this blaze, with the stations offering live streaming video of their newscasts online. The Internet's ability to deliver specific information quickly about road or school closures has greatly enhanced the efficiency of their coverage, news directors say. The fire coverage demands that advertising be shelved. Stations did not comment on how great their losses might be.
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-et-tvfire23oct23,1,...
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* California fires disrupt TV shoots
The raging wildfires that forced the evacuations of a quarter-million people in southern California are disrupting the production of several TV shows and prompting local TV stations to pre-empt network programming for continuous coverage of the disaster.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=entertainmentNews&st...