Enrique Chiabra was anchoring coverage of the Los Angeles fires for Telemundo’s KVEA-TV (Channel 52) on Wednesday night when a new blaze erupted in Hollywood’s Runyon Canyon. As he announced evacuation orders on air, he realized his house was inside the zone.
“He literally walked off, went off set and drove home,” said KNBC/KVEA president and general manager Todd Mokhtari. “I knew our employees were going to get calls to evacuate. You want to tell them to go, even if it’s your anchor on the air.”
It’s been a demanding and emotional week for Los Angeles’ local TV stations, which went wall-to-wall with non-stop, commercial-free news coverage starting Tuesday afternoon and continuing through Friday. As the Palisades and Eaton fires caused mass destruction, thousands of homes and businesses have been destroyed and at least 10 are confirmed dead. Making things even more overwhelming for reporters, photographers and news department staffers was how much they have been personally affected by the tragedy unfolding in their own neighborhoods across Southern California.
“We’ve had many instances where staff, in a moment’s notice, had to evacuate their families,” said KABC-TV Channel 7 president/general manager Wendy Granato. “And we said, ‘Get out of here. Take care of your family.’” Granato admitted it was hard to watch her staffers on-air as they processed what was happening to their neighborhoods while reporting on the fires.
“It’s agonizing to see them covering either the neighborhoods they grew up in, they live in,” Granato said. “They’re journalists, but they’re humans. I know how hard it is on them, but we don’t have a choice. This is what we signed up for. We know we’re in this for the long haul. You give yourself a minute, and then you just get back in the ring.”
That was especially true of KABC’s Josh Haskell, who was covering the evacuation on Tuesday night while simultaneously trying to get his parents out of Pacific Palisades.
“That was one of the craziest things, because I’m doing all this while I’m on air,” Haskell said. “I’m trying to tell our viewers about what’s happening and trying to get important information. Where the fire is, why people need to evacuate. And meanwhile, I’m texting with my parents, and they’re calling me, ‘What do we do?’ I said: ‘Pack up the car. You really need to leave within the next 30 minutes, this is coming towards you.’ I needed them to be scared, because in an evacuation situation, you may be told to do something, but if you don’t see it, you don’t really realize how dire it is.”
Luckily, Haskell’s parents got out, and he said he breathed a sigh of relief as they drove by his live remote on Sunset Blvd. and waved. But for a Palisades native like him, what happened to his community remains devastating.
“I found it, in a way, kind of therapeutic to talk about my community and the Palisades,” he said. “The July 4th parade and the 5k/10k run in the morning, which I still do every year. This community that I love so much is hurting so much right now, and some of it doesn’t exist anymore. I’m just thinking about my childhood friends. Were their parents still living in that house that isn’t there anymore? Part of my elementary school burned. Even the supermarket that my mom went to, which was a huge part of her life, and where she’d run into old friends and parents, is gone. The community is missing. You don’t know what it will look like in the future. And so processing all that is extremely difficult.”
Like most of the TV reporters out there, Haskell has been working 15 hour days or more in the field. “Every morning I’m like, can my lungs take another day in the Palisades? It’s a terrible thought,” he said. “My family’s worried about that, and I’m worried about that, and wearing masks and being as safe as I can, but I feel this responsibility to be there regardless of the situation.”
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