On Wednesday morning this week, KCAL/KCBS reporter Jeff Nguyen was walking the fire-ravaged streets of Altadena once again. As a seasoned reporter,
On Wednesday morning this week, KCAL/KCBS reporter Jeff Nguyen was walking the fire-ravaged streets of Altadena once again. As a seasoned reporter, this is not the first disaster he’s ever covered, but it certainly compares to the absolute worst he’s ever seen.
“I covered the Maui fires,” he says. “I covered the tsunami in Southeast Asia 20 years ago, earlier in my career, and this is on that level. You see rows and rows and rows of homes that have been just devastated.”
Nguyen is on the ground covering the start of the repopulation process, just as he has been on hand from Day 1 of these horrific events. In the past week, he has spoken with countless people on what is perhaps the hardest day of their lives — people whose names and stories he has heard and whose pain he has witnessed. Carlos Perez will stay with him, he says. When they met, Perez was digging through the rubble of what used to be his daughter’s bedroom in Altadena.
“She’s 12 years old,” Nguyen says, “and all this dad wanted to do is try to find some memento, ‘something shiny,’ he said in his own words, to bring at least a little bit of joy and normalcy to his daughter’s life. And I’ll be honest with you, as he spoke those words, my colleague John Schreiber — who was working behind the camera, who’s also a father himself to young children — he got very emotional. It’s just so visceral to see this dad in his Birkenstocks, because that’s what he ran out with, while the gas main at his house was still shooting a flame, trying to find one little thing to comfort his daughter. I don’t think I can ever forget that.”
KCAL’s Jeff Nguyen talks with Carlos Perez in Altadena
KCAL News
Meanwhile, over in Riverside, KCAL’s Joy Benedict was with the residents of a senior apartment intricate. They’ve been without power since last Tuesday when it was turned off due to the potential fire risk. “They’re freezing,” Benedict says. “It’s seniors who’ve now lost their food. It’s low-income people. It’s people who are worried about their insulin going bad, which costs thousands of dollars to replace. There’s so much loss there between those two fires, between the Palisades and up there in Altadena, but people are affected by these severe winds and the weather more often than you see on international news.”
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For Benedict it is Mark Rodriguez who will stick with her always. He, like Perez, was digging through the charred remains of his home. “We did the live interview, and he was telling me he didn’t get the wedding rings,” Benedict says. In the evacuation panic, Rodriguez had left behind his and his wife’s rings. Desperately trying to find words of comfort, Benedict told him: “It’s OK. You’re still married. You’re OK.” But then, Rodriguez explained that his wife had passed away years before. “So we started digging, and we started looking for those rings and we couldn’t find them.” Then he realized his wife’s ashes had been left behind. “We started digging through the ground, looking for her ashes. He found the urn, and it was broken. I said, ‘What do you want to do?’ And he said, ‘You know what? This is her home. This is where she died. Maybe we should just leave her buried here now.’
“I had another guy whose home was completely burned, and he was able to find his wife’s diamond ring that she had left. He said, ‘The gold was all melted, but the stone was still there.’ It was her mother’s. People are literally looking for anything that they can hold, anything at all, because it reminds them of what they had. And when the loss is so great, you are desperate for any scrap or piece of paper, any melted piece of metal, any piece of a picture frame, any photo that’s charred.”
KCAL News reporter Joy Benedict in Altadena with Mark Rodriguez
KCAL News
Nguyen has made it his business to get to the bottom of how this happened the way it did. Were we understaffed and underfunded in our Fire Department? What is the situation with Mayor Karen Bass and her absence in Ghana? Why was it falsely reported that Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had been booted from the job?
He says, “One of the things that I wanted to address with the mayor and the fire chief were some of these memos that I was able to pull up. In May of last year, there was a restoration request from the city administrative officer. And in that memo to the Fire Commission, it states that 89 out of 584 apparatus were out of service, so what we’re talking about is 15% of the fleet just sitting in a maintenance yard collecting dust. And one of the City Council members spoke to us and she had visited that maintenance yard on New Year’s Day. She says there are rows and rows and rows of apparatus or equipment. We’re talking about fire engines, ladders, fire trucks, ladder trucks, ambulances just sitting there collecting dust, and so much so that weeds are sprouting from beneath their wheels. We wanted to address that and ask the mayor whether or not that 15% would’ve made a difference in the early hours, and the mayor was a no-show for that news conference on Friday.
“Also The Daily Mail reported that the mayor had fired Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. So in terms of accountability, we had to vet that out and figure out if the chief still had a job or not. While we were trying to get answers about 15% of the fleet not being in service, we had to figure out whether or not we still had a fire chief in those hours. The fire chief ultimately was not fired. There is certainly a schism between the mayor and the chief. The next day, on Saturday, the mayor did acknowledge that they do have some differences, but they’re going to work through their differences behind closed doors. I don’t know how or why The Daily Mail ran with that. But in terms of accountability, it’s also our job sometimes to vet misreporting as well.”
So, what has Nguyen discovered about Fire Department finding so far? “I think that there is some money set aside in a pool to address salary,” he says, “and I can understand that. Our reporting on Friday was [on] budgeting to keep the entire fleet on the road. And one of the reasons why the entire fleet is not in commission is because you don’t have enough people working on maintenance. So they have cutbacks on maintenance jobs at the yard. Hence you have this 15% of the fleet not in operation. With local reporting, you have to be very streamlined and really dig in on a subject matter.”
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass
Sky News
I point out that this is the inherent value of local news reporting: people on the ground, with local connections and contacts, persistently asking questions and digging through records. Not only because it’s their job, but because they are part of the community themselves, and they care.
Tim Wieland, general manager and president of CBS Los Angeles and Colorado, is thinking about that accountability too. “Some of the responses we’ve had in asking some of these tough questions has been, ‘Well, you just are looking for someone to blame,’” he says. “And that really isn’t the motivation for this kind of journalism. The motivation for this kind of journalism is about making sure we’re learning from this and getting it right. And then some of the other accountability pieces are the rebuild, because in such something like this, you’re talking about billions of dollars floating out there to help people rebuild. Is it being allocated fairly? Are people getting the money that they deserve that they’re promised? And then the housing market is part of the accountability piece too. We’ve already done multiple stories about the problem of price gouging in the market and how people are being priced out and marginalized, and we have a role to play in that situation too, from an accountability standpoint.”
Local reporters often are witnessing devastation involving their own homes and the homes of their relatives and families, while also repeatedly absorbing others’ situations, day after day. And Wieland says support for them is on hand around the clock. “This week we have mental health counselors in the newsroom. We also have someone who is expert at news trauma who has made himself available to our team 24/7 by phone and Zoom. And so, no matter what shift you’re on, you can reach out and have someone to talk to at any time of day. And that’s been very important.” CBS also is providing meals and supplies, protective equipment and respirators for its teams.
For the people of Southern California, CBS has made a commitment to stay with the story and be a continuing resource, Wieland says. They also launched a KCAL Cares initiative with the Red Cross that has already raised $800,000.
Now, as we look to the future for L.A., Benedict says she is really worried about insurance issues for everyone affected. “I think we’re going to struggle a lot with people getting reimbursed,” she says. “I think we’re going to struggle a lot with insurance for everybody long-term when it comes to fire insurance, which California has struggled with for several years now. I do stories all the time on people who lost their fire insurance. And the state plan is ridiculously expensive. I feel like insurers are using any excuse to drop people, and I think this is just an excuse for them to do that again, to cost people so much money to the point that they need to be dependent on a FEMA declaration to save their homes.”
Benedict notes she is fortunate that what she calls her “tiny condo” has remained secure, but she’s also done the math and knows that if needed, she would not be able to rebuild based on what insurance might pay out. “The small business administration offers EIDL loans, which we all got very familiar with during the pandemic, but the EIDL loans themselves to rebuild a home cap at $500,000. Well, the homes in California cost more than $500,000. There’s no grading curve for living in Southern California, so you will not be able to rebuild your home for $500,000 out here. So I don’t think that loan is enough. And I hope that Congress takes a look at those. I’ve always said that in California we need to be graded on a curve. And that’s just another example, because you can’t rebuild for half a million dollars out here. It’s too expensive.”
She’s worried too that there simply won’t be enough construction crews available, and far from enough rental property to house displaced people.
These are very tough times indeed for the people of L.A. But then Benedict seems to gather herself a little. I can hear her smile through the phone as she says, “You know what else has come out of this? A lot of hope and it’s a lot of people coming together. I think it was Mister Rogers who said, ‘When tragedy happens, look for the helpers.’”
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