Hey! I just realized I’d started this post in the Blogsy app on my iPad, but had stopped using Blogsy, so I never actually got around to using the app.
Dang.
Oh well, for your blogging pleasure, here’s what I was doing at my first big fire of the year.
My day had been pretty slow. It was getting close to the end of my shift– (Gee, I just realized that happens to me a lot. It’s almost time for me to go home and I catch some breaking news that keeps me at work longer than I had anticipated.)
Where was I? Woodland Hills? Maybe. Sorry, I get those areas North and West of the 405 mixed up, but anyway, that’s where I found myself with only the small comfort of a couple hours of overtime to keep my mind off the time at home I’d be missing (we’re talking sleep here, people).
I was the first of our crews to arrive on the scene. It might seem trivial, but a difficult part of covering fires is often just where to put the microwave truck.You want to be close to the action so folks at home can get a sense of what’s happening, but you don’t want to be so close that you run the risk of interfering with the efforts to put out the fire.You also don’t want to be so close that the truck catches on fire. Don’t laugh, it’s happened before.
It varies greatly how much cooperation and help we get.We might not get any direction from the firemen initially, but you can bet they’ll let us know if we get in the way. Woo-hoo, they will.
On this particular night, it was very cool that their P.I.O. (public information officer) actually directed me to a spot that gave us a good view of the structures threatened and of the fire activity.
I parked the the truck, fired up the generator and turned on the racks. Sometimes I need to shoot ground level footage of whatever is going on, but not this night. We were minutes from the opening of the 11pm newscast, so the station wanted me to link in right away.Another crew was almost on scene and the station wanted us live ASAP.
Because of the terrain, I knew I was in a marginal area for our microwave signal. I dreaded the thought of having to move the truck or worse, not being able to establish a signal at all.
Well, I’ll never know until I try.I popped the mast, called our technical operations center (T.O.C.) and with their direction, managed to establish a signal (one that didn’t interfere with our helicopter which was covering the fire from overhead).
Reporter Suraya Fadel and Photog Nick Mercado arrived on scene. Nick and I threw cables together for the live shot. (Hey, come on, when does our job go full wireless like in the movies?) Suraya gathered information and we managed to get the story on TV during the 11pm newscast.
Property damage is always preferable to lives being lost. I’m happy that nobody got hurt in the blaze, but still sorry for the damage the fire caused.
Even though it was the first big fire of the year, most of the details are lost to me. I almost have to go back and look up the story at this point just to blog post about it. It’s not that I have a particularly bad memory, it’s just that I know this was the year’s first fire, but lord knows, it certainly won’t be the last.
