The Offline Report

A letter to the editor in today's San Francisco Chronicle ( link-> ). This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License .

  Every time a home or any fire fuel burns, CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The culture is slowly catching onto the counter-intuitive fact that tiny fire embers coupled with small twigs start more fires than do large old-growth trees. This was illustrated for the slacker general public in 2003 via the infamous tie-breaking challenge from "Survivor: Cook Islands": A later, more serious 60 Minutes segment from 2017 called "In the Path of Fire" reported the specific small measures that made an enormous difference determining which homes withstood fires unscathed . It took well over a year to distribute the information through the confusion silo that is Facebook before "embers" were reported on more widely in mainstream media. We Californians and other fire-prone state residents need to repeatedly spread this information. The L.A. Times this week reported the state legislature just stripped a program that funded loans to fire-proof homes : Meanwhile, t...

Here's a news story from Dec. 13th this reader only discovered in the paper edition. The SF Chronicle home page is lovely, but it's difficult to discern which stories are from today's paper, yesterday's paper, or last month's paper. In the paper edition AND the e-edition, however, the reader can flip through that day's edition and scan headlines of every story in every section. The story titled " 911 call logs reveal terrifying moments at onset of Camp Fire " covers both which residents received evacuation calls from regional authorities, and which residents placed calls. Particularly heart-breaking is the story of one 11-year-old who called 9-1-1 and remains unaccounted for. "Hundreds of calls rolled in throughout the day" the story says. "In Magalia, an 11-year-old child had stayed home from school, and her parents couldn’t get home to get her out." Evacuation call procedures, and their failures, have been covered by othe...

A 60 Minutes segment called In the Path of Fire that ran just last year in May 2017, but many wildfires ago, described and showed the enormous difference fire-proofing a home can make. Just clearing a home's perimeter of debris goes a long way, as does installing ember-proof vents. Circled in the photo above is the unscathed California home of retired firefighter Fred Roach. Fred Roach: This house here was prepared. And did not need ... the air tanker full of retardant ... or the helicopter full of water ... or all the engines to protect it. It, it was, it protects itself. Voiceover: Fred Roach thought about fire when improving his home. And says anyone can do what he did. FR: The house was stuccoed about five years ago. And we stuccoed everything under the eaves, the entire thing. Steve Inskeep: Stucco's basically fireproof? FR: Uh basically. Close to it. And then we took all the redwood decking off the deck and replaced it with synthetic. SI: Which doesn't...

Newer tech and more channels of communication brings people together and grows distance between them. The transcript below shows one of many communication breakdowns in the deadly Northern California wildfires last fall. But first, a quote from one resident shows how news expectations have changed dramatically in the last decade. Jason Meek, who  lost his Santa Rosa home to the fires, told Reveal reporters : “Like, we get all these text messages from CNN and Washington Post, or, you know, all the media that’s telling us what’s going on, on a minute-by-minute basis, in the world. But here – my world was burning, and I heard nothing,” he said. “We deserved to know that there was a fire.” NPR's California Report partnered with Reveal News for an investigation of last fall's fires. They probed communiques between county operators, first responders, electric companies and residents. Reporters from NPR and Reveal culled hundreds of 9-1-1 recordings. A section of the   "My...