Covering big disaster stories like floods and fires always has presented extra challenges to us local journalists. We not only have to report on the disaster — but we have to live through it, too.
Just like our readers, local journalists have our own family to watch over and our own homes to protect.
This week’s Tubbs Fire was another one of those stories. Besides risking moments of safety to get close to the action, some of our reporters and other employees had to evacuate out of harm’s way.
This time, we faced new challenges because of our over-dependence on technology, the internet and cellular communications.
In past times, we covered Russian River floods and other fast-breaking news stories with film cameras, ink pens and landline telephones. This time, when our Comcast and internet connections “went down” our smart phones and office-to-office computer network became almost useless.
But, like the firefighters and volunteers responding to the wildfire disasters, we had no room to make excuses; we all had real deadlines to meet.
With what spotty cell phone reception we could manage, our reporters were able to take photos and conduct interviews all over the county with their smart phones. Managing Editor Ray Holley, myself and other reporters woke up in the middle of the night on Sunday and started monitoring the news. Before daybreak, just by smelling the amount of smoke, we knew we were facing several days of fast-breaking news.
We expected the electric power to go out in most places, but it did not. That meant our printer, Healdsburg Printing Company, might actually have something to print from us this week.
Early Monday, almost before we got started, we lost some connections with each other.
None of us could connect with one of our reporters who lives on Chalk Hill Road. We needed to make sure she was safe and not try to do any reporting. (Her house was threatened by the Tubbs flames that encircled her property.)
Another reporter had to evacuate from the smoke with her two very young daughters. She managed to file reports and photos from her cell phone as she escaped. Later, she monitored Congressman Mike Thompson’s press conference and filed a dispatch.
Our webmaster left her Forestville home to put in a long, long shift posting news updates and fire disaster photos on our websites. Because we had no internet access in most places, we had to drive to our Sebastopol office to upload all our website updates.
All of us visited the various evacuation centers in Cloverdale, Healdsburg, Windsor and Sebastopol. With schools and regular government routines shut down most of this week, our reporters had to leave half-finished news assignments undone. We had no access to file our weekly police and sheriff logs. We couldn’t retrieve all press releases or readers’ letters because our offices’ internet network was down.
During a “normal” week our news team works from three different offices for our four newspapers. We stay inter-connected via internet-based project-sharing utilities and our own VPN network that connects all of our computers to a server in Healdsburg. That system didn’t work so well for us this week. We do have backup systems but they were down this week, too.
As we zig-zagged around the county trying to avoid the many roadblocks set up on the northern outskirts of Santa Rosa, on Highway 101 and elsewhere, we were reminded of similar detours we once made covering all the Russian River floods.
We had reporters and other employees stranded by the floods. Back then — just a few short years ago — internet access wasn’t our problem. Electric outages, falling trees and lack of clean water were the older challenges.
During the 1995 flood, our Russian River News office in Guerneville was isolated by high water that flooded Main Street. Then, a water heater caught fire and our office had to be evacuated. We managed to get enough reporters together at our Sebastopol Times offices, but when we lost electricity there, too, we ended up making photographs using a flash light as a darkroom enlarger.
We made our deadline and had lots of great “first person” images and stories to share.
Someone asked us this week, which disaster is worse — flood or fire? We would obviously chose neither, but for some reason the indiscriminate power of a wild fire seems much more fearful and potentially devastating than a rising flood. You can get to high ground with a little warning in a flood.
There is no high ground in a fire, especially with the kinds of winds that whipped the Tubbs Fire almost 20 miles across a mountain from Calistoga to Highway 101.
Rollie Atkinson is the owner and publisher of the Healdsburg Tribune.
