Fire on the Air: How Local Radio Covered California's Wildfires

FMC Fast Chat takes you inside the news so you can be in the know in 30 minutes. Hosted by Fair Media Council CEO and Executive Director Jaci Clement, Fast Chat features notables in news, media, and business.

Hey everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of FMC Fast Chat. I'm Jaci Clement, and joining me today is an old friend, Alex Silverman. Alex is the news and programming director of KNX 97.1 FM Los Angeles. Alex, thanks so much for joining us today.

Nice to see you, Jaci, and thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Well, I'm thrilled to talk to you, and I'm actually honored you made the time to talk to us today because we know what you've been doing covering the wildfires out there in California, and that's really why I wanted you to join us today is really to give our listeners and our viewers some insight into what it's like to cover something like the wildfires. But I think before we do that, let's step back a little bit. Can you give people who don't work in radio an idea of, you know, what your typical day was like, what your staff is like, and where you actually are in California before we get into the wildfires?

Sure. Well, I'll start by saying there's really no typical day, but I can, I can do my best at that one. We are an all-news radio station, one of maybe a dozen in the country that does, you know, 24/7 local news, you know, no opinion, no talk, all local news. And we're located in Los Angeles. Our studios are in the Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles on Wilshire Boulevard, which is basically, you know, look at a map of Los Angeles almost right in the center. And, you know, if you want some context around, you know, the proximity to the fires, we're about 8 to 10 miles from the edge of where the Palisades Fire ended up in the Brentwood area. So out of the danger zone, but really not that far when you think about it, 15 minutes with no traffic to get to the edge of the fire zone. We have about a total, including our anchors, reporters, producers, editors, production assistants, traffic reporters, about between 50 and 55 people depending on how you count it. All in, which is, you know, fewer, smaller than staffing levels used to be at all news stations. But as, you know, radio news staffs go in America right now, a good-sized staff.

Now, before the fires began, you kind of had a heads up that something may occur, right?

We definitely did. And, and, you know, I've been, I had been working with the National Weather Service for 18 years now. And I thought back, you know, before this happened to Hurricane Sandy, when things were a lot different in terms of how they communicated when I was in New York at that time. And there was kind of an extraordinary warning coming from a gentleman at the Mount Holly office who kind of attached to a very, you know, one of these formal briefings, a personal plea to people saying, please take this seriously. Please evacuate. That was our sense before Hurricane Sandy that we needed to get ourselves in year and amp things up. A lot has changed in terms of how the National Weather Service communicates. They've gotten more freedom to, you know, to go on social media and to be more proactive. And in this case, they did something I'd never seen. They made these graphics that were this big, bold text, extreme fire danger, life-threatening windstorm. And when I saw that, you know, a lot of people were giving them heat for it. I said, the National Weather Service doesn't have any incentive to hype things. government agency. You don't make money by hyping a weather event. If they say that and they're using that kind of language, they mean it. And so that was our cue to put a plan together and say, we need to staff up. We need to have extra anchors on call. We need to have extra producers. We need to make sure all the reporters know that, you know, should things go bad, it's going to be a 24/7 effort. And so we had about 2 to 3 days, warning that this was going to happen. And, you know, when there's something like that, you know, a windstorm that's going on for a period of days, you don't know when something's going to happen. It just so happened this broke out at, it was, I'll never forget, 10:34 AM was the first call about the Palisades Fire breaking out. And I'll never forget that because one of our reporters, when he was asked, when did you know this was going to be bad? His reply was 10:34 AM. Because of where it was, because of how, you know, bad the initial call seemed, and because of all the warnings that we'd had leading up to it.

All right. So how did you handle coverage from that point forward?

Oh, it was basically all hands on deck and everybody knew that. We called everybody in. All of our reporters knew that they were just going to one of these locations to try and gather as much information as they possibly could and go live. We brought in extra, you You know, producers and editors. And we, we went to, for most of our day, with the exception of morning drive, our anchors are, are solo. We basically went with 2 or 3 anchors at any given time for the next 48 hours. So we, we knew that there was gonna be a constant flow of information and in order to, you know, make sure that that is processed correctly and people have a second to breathe and think. You can't really do it by yourself. We needed extra producers to be able to be making phone calls and to be able to, you know, sort through everything that was coming in. My job in that instance was to figure out where I could be best, you know, help, most helpful. Some of that was sitting here listening to the police and fire scanner and being able to translate some of the chaos into some sense of what was happening out there. One of our reporters, Unfortunately lost her family's home, not the home where she lived, but where her parents and her brother and her grandmother who was ill lived. And so she had to obviously go deal with that and help her family. And so we were down a reporter at that point. I, you know, I have a reporting background. I jumped in, went out and, and did some reporting out, you know, at the fires. So my job at that point was to figure out where I could, where I could be helpful because everybody knew, I think, people have covered fire, nothing this big. Everybody now regards this as the standard by which everything else will be measured. But everybody had covered fires for years and knew what to do, what questions to ask, whom to call. And so that wasn't really what I needed to be doing in that moment.

Okay. Well, national media sent in lots of folks to start covering things. I'm curious if they got into, got in the way. Did they get in your hair?

I wouldn't say they got in the way. I would say there was definitely an overwhelming amount of media and it presented issues not with the other media, but in terms of officials really, you know, following the law. The California law says when they set up lines blocking public access for an emergency like a fire, The media is exempt from those lines and they must be let in. There at certain points were so many media that there was perception on the part of first responders that, you know, we'd get in the way. And so we kind of had, there, there were a few struggles of, of convincing officials to let us into places where we needed to be. But that was kind of the main issue and we sorted through a lot of those things. Definitely a lot of, of out-of-town media who were not as familiar with covering fires. And, you know, that makes me nervous as somebody whose job it is to think about the safety of everybody who is out there. You know? Yeah. I hear, you know, Pete Demetrio's been covering fires for KNX for more than 30 years. I hear him driving through a situation where he says the fire's burning on both sides of the highway and I see embers flying over the car. Obviously I'm concerned, but I know that he has had training about that. He knows what situations to be in. He's been in those situations before and he knows when he needs to stop and get out. There are a lot of people who were coming into these situations who, you know, may not have had that, that kind of background. So that, that concerned me. Fortunately, we didn't have any, you know, bad outcomes there.

Okay, good.

And, uh, working with the public officials, We, it, what was interesting in this case is we, and, and actually it is something that I've seen in a lot of emergencies, particularly here, public officials just started calling us.

Yeah.

And because they knew that, A, there were hundreds of thousands of people who had no power. And one of the only ways that they were getting information was through us. And so they knew that they could reach huge numbers of people by calling the county supervisors who are, you know, I think a lot of people have now learned that Altadena in particular is not a, it's not a city. It's not, it's an unincorporated area of LA County. There's really no government. The county supervisors who are each responsible for 2.5 million people in their district, they're the ones who are responsible for that area. And so, you know, they started calling us. The city of LA was a little bit of a different story because the mayor was out of town, but we did have her on. And I think it was that first day on our air that people realized when she said, we asked, we asked, where are you? And she said, West Africa, that people realized that that was the situation. So, you know, that was a, you know, but, but that said, all the public officials knew that they, you know, could reach huge numbers of people by calling us. And so it wasn't an issue where we couldn't get people on the air. It was actually pretty much the opposite.

So the coverage that you went through, I mean, I imagine you start out, of course, covering evacuations. Yeah. And is that rather orderly or does that get crazy too?

Well, we hadn't had them on this scale and the ability, it wasn't just at first because the boundaries for the evacuation zones were changing, not just by the hour, but they kept changing as the So trying to sort through all of the alerts we were getting about where the evacuations were and getting some conflicting information from officials, and we had to point that out. And at a certain point, we basically had to tell people, you know, if you're in one of these warning areas, which may become an order, or you're anywhere near it, you should think about getting out because these things are changing so quickly. We had an issue with the The alerts about evacuations, the wireless emergency alerts. There was one instance where one went out to the entire county, 10 million people. Imagine, you know, everybody in the state of Michigan getting an alert saying that they needed to be preparing to evacuate. That's what LA— that's what happened here. And that for a period of time made the whole system less credible. And so that became a story that we had to deal with and get answers on. And, you know, that was another complication to the whole thing. So it was, it was very interesting trying to sort through all that. We had people calling us and that was a through line through this whole thing. We were hearing from so many people about everything. Can you tell me whether my house burned? Can you tell me whether my particular area is in the evacuation zone? People felt that level of connection with us. You know, I'd love to be able to answer all of those. voicemails and deal with all those people individually. We obviously don't have the staffing for that. We can just do our best by sorting through all of those and trying to answer as many questions as we could.

And then when it came to covering the fire itself, you said your staff is accustomed to covering fires. They have experience, but do they push it? Do they go too far? How do you handle that?

Well, one of my roles in those kinds of situations, and it really goes for any sort of intense breaking news coverage, is to just make sure that the people out in the field I'm calling and checking on regularly and making sure that they are, you know, doing okay. Because, you know, when you're out covering something, and I know from being a reporter that when you're out there, you just do it and you go and you give it your all and you're exhausted, but you don't care. And you're, you know, at a certain point it can kind of hit you. So I was in touch with all our reporters at various points, just making sure they were okay. And I knew, even though I trusted, excuse me, I trusted that they had been trained and knew to follow their training and knew what to do, that I still had to say, just remember, you know, this is, you're just talking on the radio here. It's important, but it's not more important. And at one point, Pete Demetrios said something to me like that he had said before, which is, you know, I learned years ago that I'm of no value to you if I'm injured or dead. So I'm not getting injured or dead. And I said, well, good. Thanks for reassuring me of that. But you know, when you hear people talk, talking about driving down Pacific Coast Highway, when all the houses are burning down on one side and the fire's on the hill on the other side, obviously you get concerned.

Yeah. Okay. And we're talking radio, but now should we actually be talking multimedia?

Well, I would say that in this instance, social media was extremely important for getting the message out. In particular, we had 17 million views in the first couple of days of the videos we were posting on social media. That's more impressions than we had on the radio. Obviously, the people listening on the radio were the people who were tuning in explicitly for that information, but we were reaching a whole new audience with information, with confirmed and valid information amid all of the chaos that was going on on social media. You know, you had things out there like the Hollywood sign is on fire, which never happened. You know, who knows why people start to come up with things just to try and take advantage of the situation. But that was in that it was We expanded our reach dramatically. I'll put it this way. We expanded our social following by roughly 5 times the amount we expanded it by in the entire year 2024 in one week.

Wow.

We, we get, and put another way, we gained as many, we gained 5 times as many followers in that week as we did in all of 2024. And that was because we were putting out information that people needed and wanted to consume and, you know, was actually Valid. And we were putting out, a lot of what we were putting out is the, some of the evacuation maps where people didn't know initially. I think after a few days people started to get accustomed to the resources that where you could find those things. But we, we were putting them out before anybody knew to use the WatchDuty app or any of those types of, types of resources. We were also using push alerts that we sent to all of the listeners to any station in Southern California on the Odyssey app, which You know, we have our listeners who have subscribed to push alerts for our station and want to get news, but this is an instance where, you know, we saw it as a public safety issue. And so we had no, no problem with, you know, making sure that we blasted out those things to people beyond the audience that had, you know, they'd opted into push alerts, maybe not for news, but we didn't think in this instance they would be bothered by the fact that they were getting potentially Lifesaving information.

Right. Okay. Now you've got a huge signal, right? You're 50,000.

50,000 watts on AM. On FM, the signal is, is slightly, you know, it's not as, as widespread coverage in Southern California, but it still covers all of LA and Orange Counties and a little bit further. So it's a, it's a full market signal, you know, plus the app, which obviously is, is wherever.

Yeah. Okay. But now, did you have any issues with the signal at all during the course of the fire?

Well, there was a 2-hour period. I'll say, I'll say whether it was, I can't remember what day it was, Wednesday or Thursday, where we thought everything on Mount Wilson, which is where all of the main transmitters for all of the radio and TV stations was gonna burn. And in fact, the fire singed the edges of the transmitter building before they were able to, to knock it back. Now we have a backup transmitter site that we could have switched to. Some of the stations up there did not have a backup site. Some of the TV stations may have gone off the air. That was a really intense period of time because we thought it was all, we thought it was all going to burn. It was very, very close. But fortunately it didn't. We were on generator power on our transmitter, at our transmitter sites for more than a week. Fortunately, we were able to get fuel deliveries up there so that we could replenish it and wouldn't have to go off the air for a period of time. But it was not a given. And I don't think listeners a lot of times think about those types of things. Had the same situation in Hurricane Sandy when, you know, I was working at WCBS and we came within 6 feet of being off the air. 1010 WINS was knocked off the air for a period of some, something like 18 hours. Because the transmitter site was flooded. And there's an engineering team who is, you know, doing everything they can to make sure those things don't happen. And they did a great job in this case, but at the end of the day, it was, is the, is the fire gonna hit the building or not?

Right. Yeah.

Yeah.

I think most listeners just think radio happens by magic. It comes to you magically. Right.

Uh, it does seem that way. And, you know, that's, that's one of the reasons I've always been fascinated by it and I've always loved it. But, you know, that magic is definitely assisted by a lot of technology and a lot of experienced people.

Yeah. So what are we into? Is it what, week 3 of covering the devastation there?

Week 4. It's, it'll be exactly a month on Friday. So this is week 4.

Okay. So is, is all of the fire out and you're now looking at recovery stories? Is that where you are?

Yeah, the fires are now 100% contained as of yesterday or the day before. And we are now well into the period of time where we're figuring out what the stories are going to be. We know what some of them are. People dealing with insurance. Insurance was already a crisis in Southern California because insurance companies were pulling out. Rates were going up astronomically and a lot of people in these areas weren't even able to get insurance and had to use the state's insurer of last resort, which is now essentially bankrupt. So that's a big question going forward. The question of rebuilding, which again, I go back to covering Hurricane Sandy and we remember how long it took for the government to get its butt in gear and get all of that organized in such a way that people could take advantage of the resources that were available. All of the agencies around here are vowing that that's not going to be the case, but the fact is people don't know. And the first thing people have to do is get all of the toxic debris cleared out of there. And that even is becoming a challenge because nobody wants— they need staging areas when they take the debris and they put it somewhere before they are able to process and deal with it. There's fights now over where those things are going to be located because obviously no one wants a a bunch of, you know, Tesla batteries that are burning, sitting in their neighborhood. So all of those stories from the cleanup to the rebuilding to the, what do we do going forward about what we build and where and how we insure it? All of that is coming into focus now.

Okay. Any idea how many hours you've logged?

Oh God, I don't even want to think about it. It, I mean, the first few days were basically, you know, 20-hour days with a few hours sleep. And, you know, then, and I started to tell everyone, you know, you can't maintain that covering breaking news for 6 or 8 hours is a huge challenge doing it for basically 12 days straight, which is what we did. We didn't feel like we're out of the, you emergency period for about 12 days. And I remember that moment where it sort of felt like, okay, we're now lifting the evacuations. We're now moving into a different phase of this. And that's when we did a special because we said, okay, what do we do now? We were, we've been doing nothing but nonstop emergency information. We, by the way, I don't think I mentioned this. We didn't play commercials for almost 48 hours. At the, in the initial phase of it. We got back to that and we were still, you know, not doing a lot because we needed to make sure that we got all the live briefings on and all of that. But, and also the other element of that is the fatigue. When people are on the air constantly without any breaks, that's incredibly fatiguing. You can't sustain that for longer than a couple of days. You can't sustain Constant breaking news coverage without giving people time to, to, to rest, recover, and get back to it.

Yeah. No, I imagine that's incredibly draining. But now, out of all of it now, because you have a little bit of time where you can look back and see what you did, you can see what you did well, obviously, you know, where, where all of your management expertise came into play. What kind of stories were you surprised to find out of all of this?

That's a good question. I think one thing that was surprising was, and not necessarily surprising, but sort of helped me understand the way government is set up in Southern California is very different than other parts of the country in that it's very decentralized. There are 88 cities in LA County and there are unincorporated areas like Altadena that burn. So there was no one leader who was able to step up and come out of this. It wasn't like, you know, even the mayor of Los Angeles is not a, the kind of powerful figure that the mayor of New York is and has historically been. And so there was this coordination of governments and there was a period of time where we were having 2 separate press conferences, one with the city, one with the county. And nobody knew who was really in charge. And even to this day, it's, there's kind of a divide between what's going on with the Eaton Fire in Altadena and what's going on with the Palisades Fire, which is in the city's jurisdiction. The city fire department and the county fire department were kind of 2 separate entities, although they worked together in joint command. So I think those stories about the, the sort of lack of communication within government were, it was one thing that like. Maybe we should have thought about this a little bit more clearly before, you know, before having an actual emergency.

Yeah, got it. Okay. And then the governor came in and then did Trump. How was covering that situation?

It, by that time, we were, I think, out of the kind of real emergency period and, you know, covering It was more like covering President Trump's visit was really like covering any presidential visit. It was, by that time we kind of knew what the issues were and you kind of have to go there and listen to everybody, gather reaction from all sides and kind of analyze, you know, why people are saying what they're saying around it. Uh, it's pretty much what we do when any, when any, you know, president comes in. But it was, I think the difference here was that President Trump had just taken office. And so it was, you know, there was a, there were some, you know, questions about what he would do and things he said regarding disaster aid in particular for California. I think, you know, it has yet to be seen what's going to happen with that, with federal aid going forward, but it wasn't, you know, an overly political situation where there were fights over that while he was here. Although there, you know, there were some things said. So it was, I mean, I, I would say that it wasn't really out of the ordinary when he, when, you know, a president comes to visit a disaster site.

Well, it's good. You have what, about 20 years experience?

Yeah, pretty much. Almost. Yep. I, I started in professional radio in 2007. So, yeah.

Okay. Well, it sounds like they haven't thrown anything at you that you didn't already anticipate. Did New York train you well for that? Yeah.

And I, and I think the biggest disaster that I covered prior to this, which I keep coming back to, is Hurricane Sandy, because that was something that was so unwieldy to wrap your head around at first because of the wide, huge scale. I mean, in that there were 600,000 homes either damaged or destroyed. And just the wide geographic scale of it. Interestingly, the difference here is that, and this occurred to me a couple days in, it feels much closer to everyone in the metro area. It feels here like everybody knows somebody who lost everything. And there wasn't necessarily, there were a lot of people who lost everything in Hurricane Sandy, but when I would go back to Manhattan at night, I didn't necessarily constantly run into people who were in that situation. It feels like I, and I'm not really sure how to explain why this is, but it feels like everybody here is one degree away from somebody who lost everything. And we're talking about 10,000 people who have, and fire's a little bit different. There's a lot more that's completely devastated than when fire hits something, it's going to be destroyed. Not, you know, damage that's, you know, difficult but recoverable. In this case, you have a lot of people who have thousands and thousands of people who've just completely lost everything, and it feels very close to everybody in the area.

Right now, if you guys weren't on the air 24 hours doing news, who would people have turned to?

That's a good question. I don't know. We've seen We, for the first Nielsen Weekly ever, KNX was the overall number one in the market. And, you know, we know people turn to us when there are disasters. We see big spikes when there's an earthquake. We see big spikes when there is a fire, but we've never seen a, we've never seen it to this degree. Our streaming was up between 200 and 400% for A week straight, basically. That never, it never went below 200% of normal. Who would people have turned to? I don't know. They, they, I, and a lot of people did turn, a lot of the TV stations in town did excellent work. And I've heard a lot of people in the national media and in the entertainment world say things like, well, we, a lot of people really recognize the value of local And that certainly goes for what the TV stations did. And it also goes for what we did. But again, to the point that a lot of people didn't have power and were not able to watch TV and there was no cell service in a lot of these areas. That's another thing we've learned in previous disasters, that that situation can keep getting worse because initially cell towers are destroyed. But then those that aren't, that are on generator power, and not all of them are, but the larger sites are, after a few days, generator runs out of fuel and then more cell tower sites go down and then connectivity is even worse of a problem than it was before. And then more people have to depend on things like radio. So I don't really know who they would've depended on. It was local broadcast media. That was depended on like no other in, in this situation.

All right. So what do you say to people, and I'm sure you hear it all the time, when people say to you, radio is dead?

Well, I would say, look at what happened here. I would say when people needed it, they knew where to turn. They knew that they were gonna get accurate, confirmed, verified information from people they could trust. And there's really no other source of that. And we saw that in huge numbers. We had 1.4 million people listening to us over the course of that week. And I don't know that 1.4 million people would listen to something that they think is dead.

Anything you want to say before we wrap up? Because believe it or not, we're at time.

Just that I was in awe of the job that the team here did. I kind of alluded to this, but I didn't really need to give much direction. They knew what to do and they knew, you know, how to make sure that people were getting the best information possible. And my job was to make sure that they had the ability to do that and also, you know, make sure they were getting what they needed while doing it. So my hat's off to them. The Fair Media Council is a 501 nonprofit organization advocating For quality news and working to create a media-savvy society. For more information about the Fair Media Council and upcoming Fast Chat shows, check out fairmediacouncil.org. Thank you.