Busy.  Always busy.  I’m about six weeks in on a long term assignment to work exclusively with our Political Reporter, Dave Bryan.  I want to talk about that! but I’ll have to give you details in another post.  Right now, I just wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

For now, I don’t work general assignment news.

Of course, that can change depending on the needs of the station on any particular day.

Like, on he day the Colby Fire was burning up homes and hillsides around Azusa and Glendora, California.

It was a big fire and even though firefighters were quickly getting a handle on it, the amount of damage it had done early in the morning made most news stations want t throw a lot of resources at it.

That included me.

I was called in early without a specific assignment, just asked to get there ASAP.

Big stories like this, I thought for sure I’d be taking over the SAT truck and operating it as close to the fire as we could get.

Surprisingly, I was wrong.

I got thrown in the mix and sent out with a reporter (Brittney Hopper) to cover the command post.

It kind of felt weird to not be rolling out in the SNG unit.  We usually send it out just to be on the safe side on big stories in remote locations.

When I got there, I had to figure the assignment desk already knew this fire wasn’t going to have legs.  It was still dangerous.  These things have a bad habit of flaring back up, but the fire fighters were making really good progress on getting this thing knocked down.

Another crew was handling the story for the dayside newscasts, even though the early sunset made the 6pm show look a lot like the 10pm.

It got to be a pretty slow evening at the Command Post.

We gathered what we could, but there wasn’t much new information or visuals after sunset.  Our first hit was a VOSOT and they cut the video back at the station.

In fact, the fire officials shuttered that command post and moved it.  We ended up doing live shots from the new command post location.

It was a long day and I never even got close enough to the fire to smell like I’d been covering a fire.  

So, why am I writing about it?

Well, of course, I have to write about something.  Then there’s the whole idea that not every day in news is full of action and adventure (this day was actually full of action and adventure, just not for me).

I guess some people might accuse me of writing about this fire just as a way of trying to sneak in a picture that might raise a few eyebrows.

Whaaaaat?

Come on.  Would I do something like that?