The KESQ Fire Was Small. The Building It Hit Makes Five Stations' News.
Last Thursday, October 15, KESQ had been on the air for about 30 seconds when the fire alarm went off. Chief meteorologist Patrick Evans opened a door behind the news studio and found flames in an adjoining equipment room. Cal Fire's Riverside County unit logged the call at 5:03 a.m., firefighters contained it quickly, and nobody was hurt. The station switched to network programming, evacuated, and was back with a modified newscast the same day. By the measures that matter most, it went well. Evans summed it up on Facebook: "As a news team, we much prefer to report the news than to be a part of it." The detail that stayed with me was a different one. Evans said the sprinklers ran for about 45 minutes, soaking cameras and other broadcast equipment, and NewscastStudio reported that the facility produces local news not only for KESQ, the ABC affiliate, but for its sister stations carrying CBS, Fox, CW and Telemundo.
That is not a criticism of News-Press & Gazette, which owns the stations. Sharing one building, one crew and one control room is how a lot of local news stays affordable in a market the size of the Coachella Valley, and I would rather have five stations' news coming out of one building than out of none. But it changes what a small fire means. When one equipment room serves five network affiliates, the building is no longer one station's facility. It is the market's local television news, and the question of what happens when that building is unusable stops being an engineering question and becomes an editorial one.
The best-documented answer I know is Houston, August 27, 2017. Harvey put floodwater into KHOU's Allen Parkway building during live coverage. The anchors moved upstairs, then the building was evacuated, and by the station's own later account the technical center lost power at about 9:47 a.m. and KHOU went off the air in the middle of the storm. A fallback plan to broadcast from a live truck across the street failed when the transmitter did. What kept KHOU's journalism reaching people that day was everything outside the building. Reporter Brandi Smith kept talking for about 45 minutes on a live signal from the field. Sister station WFAA in Dallas streamed coverage on Facebook Live for seven hours. Reporters fed live shots to the website, the app and YouTube. And the station got back on the air from the studios of Houston Public Media, the University of Houston's PBS station, under a relocation plan that already existed before the storm.
That last part is the one to copy. KHOU never went back to Allen Parkway. In a statement afterward, the station said Harvey had "dumped five feet of water on our studios," and it stayed at the public station's facilities until it could move to a permanent home. A second studio inside the same building, which Evans said KESQ was considering on Thursday morning, is a sensible answer to a fire in one room. It is no answer to a flood, a power failure across the whole site, or a fire that takes the control room instead of a camera cage. The backup that saved Houston was a relationship with a different organization across town, set up before anyone needed it, plus a field crew that could get to air without going through the building at all.
So the practical question for any newsroom, and especially one that makes news for more than one station, is short. If the building were closed for a month starting tomorrow, where would the 5 a.m. show come from? Not in general — specifically. Which station, university or production house has agreed to take you, and has anyone tested the path from their room to your transmitter? Can your reporters in the field get a story to air, and to your own website, without touching the building? KESQ was lucky in the way that matters most: a small fire, no injuries, back on the air in hours. The time to answer those questions is while the answer is still a plan and not a scramble.