When Jerry Canning, a former firefighter, read the Union-Tribune’s Nov. 2 summary of the October fires, an error jumped out at him. The article that began on the front page said air tankers made drops on the Cedar fire for the first time on Oct. 27 two days after the fire began.
Not true, Canning wrote in an angry letter. He and neighbors stood on his Poway street the day before and watched California Department of Forestry air tankers make “repeated fire retardant drops on our portion of the Cedar fire.”
If you’ve listened to the second guessing of what went wrong, you understand why the misinformation is so significant. While it’s true no air tankers were dispatched Oct. 25 when the Cedar fire was first detected, California Department of Forestry officials said the two tankers stationed at Ramona were airborne at 6 a.m. Oct. 26 and as the day progressed, were supplemented by nine more air tankers from bases in Northern California.
Unfortunately, word that drops did not begin until Oct. 27 was based on what the media were told by fire officials; those who may have known better either didn’t know about the erroneous information or were too busy and too overwhelmed to correct it.
“It’s bad enough now that we have certain local radio talk-show hosts with a bad case of diarrhea of the mouth spouting out junk without verifying their stories,” Canning wrote. “Don’t let the Union-Tribune fall into the same low-life gutter of journalism.”
As Canning pointed out, a story the day before the summary appeared correctly reported that on Oct. 26, “at least 10 planes” were making round trips to the Cedar fire from sunup to sunset. A story last Friday also correctly described what had taken place. But the Nov. 2 summary was based on earlier articles that had the misinformation from uninformed fire officials.
Mike Padilla, chief of aviation for the California Department of Forestry, said that when the Cedar fire was in its infancy, perhaps 20 acres, the two air tankers at the Ramona facility were prohibited by conditions and regulations from dropping retardant on the fire. The sun was setting, there was smoke in the air and visibility was hampered, he said.
Tankers began flying at sunup the next day, he said. Together, the 11 air tankers dropped 226,000 gallons of retardant on the Paradise and Cedar fires. They flew 240 sorties, Padilla said, for a cumulative total of 95 hours. “That equates to an aircraft taking off out of Ramona every two and a half minutes.” About 8,000 gallons of retardant came from Hemet, but the rest was pumped in Ramona. “To put that in perspective, on the average, Ramona drops 800,000 gallons per fire season,” Padilla said. “So, in one day, they dropped a quarter of that.”
Canning also pointed out the summary said it had not rained for months. That may be true for Lindbergh Field, but records kept by the National Weather Service document measurable rain in other areas even in September.
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Some Harbison Canyon residents and their friends were stung by a story Nov. 9 they say painted an unflattering picture of the community that suffered such devastating losses.
The reporter’s assignment was to write about those with no insurance or inadequate coverage who lost their homes. His research took him to Harbison Canyon. His story included vivid descriptions of the community and the people he interviewed. Those people didn’t complain about the story. Complaints came from others who said the article was unfair to the community.
Cari Caldwell, a teacher, was concerned with what she said was the lack of media attention to her community during the fires and then with stereotypes she saw in the insurance article. Among those interviewed by the reporter were residents who sat in plastic chairs drinking beer. That didn’t describe her, she said.
Caldwell sees her community as unique “rather than a series of identical white stucco homes with neatly manicured lawns.”
She questioned the reporter’s description of the community as a “lower-income enclave.” The article also said its residents “tend to be too poor to relocate.”
While the reporter may have accurately described what he saw and what he was told, his research didn’t go deep enough. And that led to conclusions that were wrong. His mistake was in not looking beyond what his eyes and interviews told him.
Statistics collected in the 2000 Census listed the median household income for Harbison Canyon in 1999 at $66,875. For the county, it was $47,067. Of the Harbison Canyon households, 4.9 percent had an annual income of $200,000 or more; for the county it was 3 percent. On the opposite end, 4 percent of the Harbison households had incomes of less than $10,000 a year, while for the county, the figure was 7.2 percent. Also, the median value of a home in Harbison Canyon was $257,000 compared to $227,000 for the county.
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Gina Lubrano’s column commenting on the media appears Mondays. It is the policy of The San Diego Union-Tribune to correct all errors. To discuss accuracy or fairness in the news, please write to Gina Lubrano, readers representative, Box 120191, San Diego, CA 92112-0191, or telephone (619) 293-1525. Send e-mail to: readers.rep@uniontrib.com.
Copyright 2003 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
