Tahoe Mountain News -- Angora media

This is the unedited version of what appeared in the July Tahoe Mountain News:

No escaping media coverage of fire


By Kathryn Reed

It’s hard to know if the adage “there is no such thing as bad publicity” is applicable to a tourist town when the news is all about a wildfire.
Despite tourism officials trying to get out the word that the fire was not in the heart of town, burned out houses, scared forests and crying victims dominated the coverage.
The Angora Fire brought out national and international news hounds, as well as regional television and radio stations. Reuters, Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and CNN – they were all reporting on the blaze.
Julie Regan, spokeswoman for the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, did a segment on San Francisco’s KGO-radio. Neither she nor the ABC affiliate had a copy of the June 29 interview with talk show host Gene Burns.
El Dorado County Superior Court Judge Suzanne Kingsbury is the focus of a two-part story for AOC-TV CCN. The first aired July 10, the second will be Aug. 14. The following is the dialog from Part I:
This is the Tahoe we all know and love. Pristine air, fragrant green pines, crystal clear lake. This is what it turned into on the last Sunday of June. The fire swept through residential neighborhoods in the forest, devouring 254 houses --- and vehicles --- and more than 31-hundred acres. Including El Dorado Presiding Judge Suzanne
Kingsbury's neighborhood. She heard the news from a friend who'd been on the fire lines.
"About 7 o'clock at night he called the house and said 'I've been by your Neighborhood, your house is still standing, you don't have any more neighbors."
But of course, Judge Kingsbury couldn't go home, so she spent Sunday night in her chambers.
"They turn off the heating and cooling system over the weekend so it was a little nippy in here, I had my pillows and my little blankie."
Yet during a surreal event, reality intruded.
"In fact I was still on call, still getting calls from the sheriff's department on the west end of our county with probable cause declarations they forgot to make. My town is burning to the ground and you're worried about whether some drunk is going to get out jail - aargh! It was very, very hard to focus on real life but real life marches on."
So that was what Sunday brought. Monday promised a whole new set of challenges with court business to take care of. Monday is preliminary hearing day.
"I've got a calendar, I've got prisoners, I have people showing up."
Fortunately, only 41 cases were scheduled. But law enforcement personnel were unavailable -- on the front lines of the fire zone, so no security, and no prisoner transport.
"Virtually every officer that was scheduled to testify was out in the field doing emergency duties. So I have to make a choice. Do we call these people off the disaster lines? Do we let people out of custody that perhaps present a danger to the community?"
So Judge Kingsbury's first order of business was to get the Chief Justice to issue an emergency order suspending time lines for five court days. Then they struggled to get through as much of the calendar as they could in the coming days. They closed down at 3 Monday.
"We contacted our court administration down in Placerville, got it posted on the website, contacted local media so they could let people know on the radio and in the newspaper what they should do if they had a court case. Then we started planning for succeeding calendars."
Another challenge: just a skeleton staff showed up for work. Many court personnel were evacuated from their homes, or were poised to run for their lives. Many couldn't get in. Angela Ann Phillips-Brown called in Monday, but came to work Tuesday.
Angela: "I need to be here, I need to be around people I can't just sit and watch the news, it doesn't help, it just hurts."
But then Tuesday afternoon, when the wind shifted, she and other court staff were told to evacuate.
Angela "It was just an amazing scene, I'd never seen anything like it. Scared to death. The smoke was so thick, it was so thick, and the embers that were falling were huge."
Fortunately, firefighters kept the flames away from town, and the court, but the effects of the fire on the community will be felt for a long time to come. And there are thoughts about lessons learned.
"Plan, plan, plan is all I can say. And I say even with that you're going to meet up with a lot of unexpected issues that you never contemplated in the planning process."
Next month on CCN, we'll tell you more about the personal elements of this story, as Judge Kingsbury takes us on a tour of her neighborhood.
That's Tuesday, August 14, our next CCN.
On June 25, Tahoe Daily Tribune reporter Susan Wood could be heard on CBS radio reliving her experience of being in the inferno the first day and running from flames with full turnout gear, goggles and notebook in hand.
The day the fire started Jordan Morgenstern, who operates www.webtvlaketahoe.com and has a law firm in South Lake Tahoe, was heard bragging at the Lake Tahoe Airport incident command center that he sold video coverage of the fire to NBC for a few hundred dollars.
His name was listed in the arrest reports at El Dorado County Jail the following day for felony spousal abuse. Morgenstern has since posted bail.
Two weeks after the blaze started, YouTube listed 89 entries for videos under the subject line “Angora Fire”, MySpace.com had 627 references to the fire and flickr.com had 557 photos posted.
Angora Fire is even listed in Wikipedia.