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The Santa Ana winds may have abated--allowing thousands of evacuated San Diegans to return to their homes and firefighters to start to contain the dozen-or-so blazes bedeviling southern California. But the networks' coverage of the wildfires continues as strong as ever. For another day all three anchors camped out in San Diego County for newscasts that were virtually as fire dominated (46 min, 77% of the three-network newshole) as yesterday's (47 min, 79%).

As it did yesterday, a logofree NBC (12 min v ABC 15, CBS 19) covered the fires slightly less intensively than its rivals. Anchor Brian Williams handed off to correspondent George Lewis at San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium--where the crowd of evacuees had "diminished somewhat"--for an overview of the region. Lewis showed us video from the International Space Station that showed the extent of the smoke. He checked off the various angles: public health--wear facemasks; law enforcement--a manhunt for arsonists; transportation--Interstate 5 cut off; agricultural--major damage to the avocado crop; firefighting--USNavy helicopters have joined the effort.

Under ABC's California Burning logo, Ryan Owens (subscription required) gave us the good news that "the view from the frontlines has changed dramatically in the last 24 hours" as hot, dry, easterly Santa Ana winds were superseded by moister, onshore air coming off the Pacific Ocean. So "it was finally time to launch a counterattack after three hellish days of losing ground," announced CBS' Katie Couric under her network's Firestorm in California logo. Those three days had seen 1500 homes destroyed and $1bn in property damage. Al Roker, the weathercaster on NBC's Today pointed out to anchor Brian Williams that the onshore winds do have a "downside" because they are weaker than the Santa Ana. "Historically more have been killed because of the onshore winds…they are less predictable; they can switch at any time, switch direction."

Both CBS' Dean Reynolds and ABC anchor Charles Gibson profiled the firefighters based at the central command station in Escondido. They are being deployed in 24 hour on, 24 hour off shifts against San Diego County's largest remaining blaze, the Witch Fire. "If they are lucky they get 18 hours off after they drive in and out of the fire zone," Gibson shrugged. When they get tired, "adrenaline kicks in," a visiting firefighter from Tehama County near Sacramento explained. ABC also sent Laura Marquez to the mountains near Lake Arrowhead. Firefighters told her they had "zero containment" around Running Springs, "not one big fire but hundreds of small ones." She showed us the so-called spot fires that "come out of nowhere and because the terrain is so rugged they race right up the hill, taking everything in their path."

Andrew Tyndall 10/25/07 10:57:10 pm

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