KTLA on Top of Inferno

Renowned for its on-the-spot live coverage of nearly every fire, flood, earthquake or aviation disaster to befall Los Angeles since the Kathy Fiscus well tragedy in 1949, KTLA-TV Channel 5 once again provided the only continuous play-by-play of the fire that raged out of control in a downtown skyscraper late Wednesday night.

With anchorman Hal Fishman calling the shots from the station’s Hollywood studios, and with Steve Lentz and Stan Chambers reporting from the blazing First Interstate Bank Building, Channel 5 stayed on the air until fire officials announced that the fire had been contained at 1 a.m. Thursday morning.

During that coverage, KTLA also broadcast the closest and most dramatic TV pictures available on local television of the flames whipping through five floors of the 62-story building.

The three network-owned stations--KCBS-TV Channel 2, KNBC-TV Channel 4 and KABC-TV Channel 7--rushed reporters to the scene and aired live reports toward the end of their 11 p.m. newscasts. All three, along with KTTV Channel 11 and KCOP Channel 13, occasionally interrupted regular late-night programming to provide short updates live from the scene.

KHJ-TV Channel 9 and the two Spanish-language stations, KMEX-TV Channel 34 and KVEA-TV Channel 52, were at a disadvantage because they regularly air the bulk of their news earlier in the evening--and most of their news staffs had already gone home before the fire began.

Though KMEX did air several two-minute special reports late Wednesday night using tape it got from an independent news agency, and KVEA reported the fire without video in its regular 11 p.m. news break, all three stations dispatched camera crews to gather material for their regular news programs the following day.

The fire, described by officials as the worst skyscraper fire in the history of Los Angeles, broke out on the 12th floor of the building at 10:37 p.m., consumed five stories of L.A.’s tallest structure in an intensely hot fire storm and killed one person who was trapped in an elevator.

During its regular 10 p.m. newscast, Channel 5 dispatched Chambers to the scene and he provided a live report just as the newscast was scheduled to go off the air at 11 p.m. In a phone interview Thursday, Fishman said that because the fire had broken out in the tallest building in Los Angeles and because high-rise fires are notoriously difficult to fight, the station decided to continue its coverage for a few minutes past 11 p.m. It also sent a second reporter and crew to the scene.

KTLA did switch over to its regularly scheduled program, “Cheers,” for about 10 minutes when it appeared that the fire was only a small one, but then dumped the sitcom when the blaze erupted out of control.

“It’s been a tradition throughout all the years KTLA has been on the air,” Fishman said of his station’s decision to eschew its regular programming and commercials in favor of continuous coverage of the disaster. “This is what we’re known for, and I think it works because we have people (like Chambers) who have been there before, are highly experienced at this kind of coverage and highly credible.”

Lentz, who apparently arrived shortly before the blaze erupted in full force and before burning debris began falling from the building, seemed to have more access to fire officials and to the area around the building than any of the other stations’ reporters. While Channel 2’s Jim Moret did his stand-up report from an off-ramp on the Harbor Freeway, and Channel 4’s Phil Shuman set up several blocks down the street from the blaze, Lentz and his cameraman wandered all the way around the building, broadcasting tight, up-close pictures of the flames above from several vantage points and recording the shattering sounds of huge window panes and debris crashing onto the streets below.

The continuous coverage also afforded Lentz the opportunity to interview fire officials, who described the fire-fighting strategy and action as it was happening.

At one point, streams of water were seen shooting through the flames and out the side of the building, and a fire official excitedly explained that a team of firemen must have made it up the stairs from the ground and were beginning to fight the blaze from the inside.

Cable News Network also borrowed KTLA’s feed and broadcast the coverage nationwide for minutes at a time. While the screen was filled with a scene right out of “The Towering Inferno,” Fishman quickly recapped the situation for the national audience, explaining how many injuries had been reported and that helicopters on the roof were rescuing people who had been trapped in the building.

With its continuous coverage of the fire between 11:30 p.m. and 1 a.m., Channel 5 captured 32% of the people watching TV then, dwarfing even ABC’s “Nightline” and NBC’s rerun of Johnny Carson in the ratings.

During its 11 p.m. newscast, Channel 4 sent its own news helicopter to the scene and subsequently provided viewers of “The Tonight Show” and “Late Night With David Letterman” with eight short reports. Reporters Shuman and Patrick Healy narrated the action seen in the videotape from their vantage points a few blocks down the road.

With all the fire-fighting helicopters in the air, it seemed that KNBC’s helicopter was forced to keep a safe distance away, though at one point it did beam back some close-up, eye-level video of the fire completely gutting one floor of offices.

KNBC also aired a live, half-hour special report on the fire at 1:30 a.m. and repeated it again at 4:30 a.m.

Channel 2 also dispatched two crews and a chopper to the scene, but a station spokeswoman said that initially they had trouble getting close to the building because of traffic tie-ups and rescue activity. The station provided brief updates approximately every 15 minutes between midnight and its final report at 2 a.m.

“It seemed that there wasn’t a lot of news forthcoming,” the spokeswoman said Thursday. “So we were trying to come in when there was something new, some police or fire report, rather than sit there and wonder or speculate about the number of injuries or what was going on.”

KABC also sent its helicopter to the scene. In addition to the report during its 11 p.m. newscast, the station interrupted a “Nightline” show about the last day of the amnesty program to present one special report live from the scene, but Terry Crofoot, Channel 7’s news director, said Thursday that he did not believe there was enough definitive information to warrant further coverage.

“When we signed off from our special report,” Crofoot said, “the fire department had told us that it would be several hours before there would be anything definitive. ‘Nightline’ had a special program about amnesty going at the same time, and we thought that was also a compelling story for our viewers.”

In a way, coverage of the fire graphically illustrated both the beauty and the hazards of TV news. The live pictures of the inferno blasting its way through the steel and glass structure were as mesmerizing, wild and dramatic as any ever created for a Hollywood movie. And reports of people trapped in elevators and trying to make their way up the stairwells to rescue choppers on the roof offered at least as much drama as any of television’s regular late-night dramatic fare.

But the difficulties of live coverage of a changing situation were ever present Wednesday night as each station broadcast the latest information regarding numbers of injuries and the status of the fire. At one point, Channel 5 reported that the sprinkler system that would have snuffed the fire out before it became too hot to handle may have been turned off for maintenance earlier in the day--though Fishman did stress that the sprinkler report was unconfirmed. Several minutes later, Channel 4 reported correctly that the high-rise had been built before sprinkler systems were required by law and therefore didn’t have any.

The injury count also varied and changed on each station and none of them was able to report that one person had died in the fire before they signed off for the night.

“The toughest part of covering a rapidly developing story like this is trying to sort out facts from fiction,” Fishman said. “If I were to report all the things I’m handed from viewers calling in with what they see, I would probably be giving out a lot of incorrect information. When you don’t know, you have to say you don’t know, and when you know, you report it.”