Media coverage of the six-alarm fire Tuesday at a Fairfield plastics manufacturing plant hints that Solano and Napa counties residents will be in trouble if a real disaster ever strikes the region.
The community newspapers that cover Vacaville, Fairfield, Vallejo and Napa were slow to keep pace with the fire that sent a huge cloud of black smoke toward highly-populated areas. They didn't get quickly changing, breaking news to residents living close to the the site of the fire.
It's not that hard these days to give readers up-to-the-second news. A Twitter account gives those newspapers, and reporters on the scene, the opportunity to hear news now and post it for residents and readers seconds later. Without a social networking site readers and residents could follow, newspapers slowly updated stories on their websites. The process of updating posted stories takes time that, eventually, a disaster in the area will not allow us to waste.
Sacramento and San Francisco television coverage was atrocious.
Anchors blabbered on and on about live video of the awe-inspiring inferno in Fairfield. Based on the locations from which they provided live remote updates, reporters couldn't have had access to decision-makers. News filters very slowly from a fire at a plastic plants near Travis Air Force Base and a safe, smoke-free spot along Air Base Parkway. One TV reporter couldn't even explain how far she was from the fire that, shown in the background, was 4, 5 miles to her east.
Residents and viewers know that fires burn really hot and that a fire so hot that it creates a mini-weather pattern of its own is really awesome. However, they need to know things like how the dark plume of smoke would affect air quality. TV anchors talked to environmental protection agencies, explaining only that the air was being tested.
By 4 p.m., 2 1/2 hours after the fire started and as the smoke began to hover over my Rolling Hills neighborhood (west of I-80) in Fairfield, there was still no word on whether the smoke presented a health risk. Viewers and residents were simply told to stay inside, with windows closed and air conditioners off, if they lived within a mile or two of the blaze.
Anchors let folks who should know the danger of smoke from a fire at a plastics plant off the hook, never pressing them to use what they do know about the smoke from burning plastic to give us some hint of what we should expect.
The TV coverage, instead, let the wrong folks talk too much about things that led us to expect the worst. KOVR Channel 13 in Sacramento had an interview with a man who owned a plastics plant that had a large fire some years back. Good idea, right?
Well, the interview aired around 2:30 p.m. and the man said a plastics fire "would burn and burn forever ... they might as well just let it burn itself out."
The fire was contained by 4 p.m.
The plastics guy said there are different kinds of chemicals that present in plastic that provide different levels of danger in a fire. He guessed that the region would be facing a toxic hazard for some time.
There was no toxic hazard reported, at any point, on Tuesday. Twenty-six hours after the fire started, there was still no toxic hazard.
To be fair, the environmental protection agencies were as slow and out of focus as media coverage.
Does it really take 2, 3, 4 hours to get a report from a hazardous materials crew? If so, what are we going to do if there's a poisonous chemical spill or worse in these parts?
The media missed even the obvious things that residents near the fire would need to know. TV coverage included worded that traffic was backing up on Air Base Parkway during rush hours because people were driving toward the fire to take photographs and shoot video. At that point, it would've been a public service to remind people that the last thing area residents and firefighters needed was to have a traffic jam caused by morons who found a potentially tragic fire a simple curiosity.
The media missed what people in my neighborhood could see. The smoke, all TV stations insisted, was headed to the south and southeast over Vacaville. There was no mention of the growing black smoke cloud that was headed west toward Fairfield's Rolling Hills and Rancho Solano ... or that the smoke cloud was potentially going to reach the Napa Valley if the fire continued out of control.
People in the Napa Valley likely had no idea that the black smoke was going to reach them, or could have reached them. Fortunately, the fire was contained and the smoke began to disappear.
If there's a disaster in San Francisco or in Sacramento, fine. The media will cover it and folks will be able to respond accordingly. If a disaster strikes Solano, Napa, Yolo or any other county without a strong media presence ... residents will be on their own.
It would've been nice to have put the fire's location to all neighborhoods in the area in some perspective.
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