U.S. & World

by Dan Shelley, Executive Editor of Digital Media, WCBS-TV and wcbstv.com
LOS ANGELES (CBS) ― The first thing you notice as you fly into Southern California is the color of the flames.

When you see wildfires on TV, there's a little orange and a lot of yellow. But when you see them at night, from your window seat in a jetliner 36,000 feet in the air, the flame is a deep, dark, orange.

Crayola® calls the color "burnt orange."

There I was flying into Los Angeles Monday evening, the second day of the October 2007 wildfires. It was a clear night, so I noticed the glow from what must have been 100 miles away or more. It was faint at first, but it was there.

As we got closer, the pilot announced that people on the left side of the plane, as I was, could see the San Diego fires. People on the right side of the plane could see the Los Angeles fires.

People jumped out of their aisle and middle seats to lean toward the nearest window, trying to catch a glimpse. A flight attendant got on the PA and asked passengers to turn off their reading lights so the flames could be seen better.

It was then that I noticed there wasn't one San Diego fire at that time. There were five. Some bigger than others. But there clearly were five areas where some invisible monster with a burnt orange crayon was coloring out the homes and livelihoods of God knows how many people.

Just before we landed at LAX, the plane made a big turn to the right. Suddenly, the Los Angeles fires came into view. Perhaps because we were on approach and, therefore, closer to the ground, they looked much bigger and much more ferocious than the ones I had seen a few minutes before.

The elderly woman sitting next to me told me she had friends whose home had been evacuated Sunday. She was worried because she hadn't been able to get ahold of them.

I would hear that more than once during the next 72 hours.

The second thing you notice -- after you land and get your rental car and start driving north on the 405 headed toward your hotel -- is the smell of smoke. It's not overpowering, but it's there.

I came to Los Angeles to help conduct training for sister station KCBS's digital media team. But when I arrived Tuesday morning at the Studio City compound where KCBS is located, and where "Big Brother" and a number of other TV shows originate, it seemed as if there wasn't a wildfire, or other care, in the world.

That's because someone was filming in the parking lot between the station and the garage where I parked my rental car. And right there in front of the camera was Jimmy Smits. They were shooting an exterior scene for CBS's hit Tuesday night drama "Cane."

So, I had to wait a few minutes (Action!) while the fictional Alex Vega stormed out of a building, stomped across the parking lot, threw a file folder into the window of his black Cadillac, then got inside and peeled out (Cut!).

Only then could I walk to KCBS, right past Smits, who was using grand gestures to explain something to the man I assumed was the director, presumably about how to improve the next take.

I am in LA, I remind myself. The show must go on.

I was jolted back to reality shortly after I walked into the KCBS building. My friend Erik Oginski, managing editor of cbs2.com, KCBS's Web site, is a friendly, positive person. He was friendly and positive, all right. But there was something else in his eyes.

Fatigue. The bone-deep kind you get when the adrenaline on which you've been living for hour after hour finally wears off.

He had been working, with only a few hours off to sleep, since early Sunday morning. He introduced me and my fellow trainer -- Matt Stanton, senior producer at the CBS Television Stations Digital Media group in New York -- to some members of his staff. As we met one Web producer, a young woman, her cell phone rang.

"I'm sorry, this is my brother," she said, looking at the caller ID screen. "He's been evacuated and I haven't been able to talk to him." She answered the phone and left the room. Her brother and his family, she later reported, were just fine.

Erik showed us through the newsroom. Bleary-eyed people everywhere. But there was still that palpable sense of energy that you feel in newsrooms that are in "breaking news" mode.

We stopped by to pay our respects to the news director, but she wasn't there. Her assistant said that she was at home because her neighborhood had just been placed under an evacuation order.

That one really got to me. I've been in the news business for 27 years. Not being able to cover a huge story in your community -- even though it's for a very good reason, e.g., the fact your house might burn down -- tears into your gut. You feel an almost indescribable commingling of anger, regret and remorse.

Matt and I offered to suspend the training. We offered to help. I said I felt like we were imposing. Erik said no, no and no. I told you he was friendly and positive.

It turned out that the Web producer who heard from her evacuated brother when we arrived at the station, had been evacuated herself. She'd been staying with relatives. The evacuation order had been lifted, she explained, but she wasn't going back home just yet. As a Southern California wildfire veteran, she knew that the wind could change, and the threat return, on a moment's notice.

Another of Erik's Web producers noted that her parents had been evacuated, too. It did not escape me that during our training session she kept sneaking peeks at the live KCBS site to get the latest information on the fires.

The news director came to work a few hours later, and we came to learn that a number of people at the station were also facing the dual stress-inducers of covering a huge story and dealing with a personal crisis.

Erik remarked that the long hours he was putting in reminded him of when Katrina hit two years ago.

That was the first time I heard the "K" word used in reference to the fires.

The comparison hadn't even occurred to me because from my vantage point -- my conversations with KCBS folks excepted -- life was pretty much normal here.

Planes took off and landed. The freeways and streets were crowded. The tourists were wandering up and down Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards. There was a crowd gathered around the footprints and hand prints outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre. There was a line waiting to get into Whisky A Go Go. The Hollywood sign still peered down from the hills.

Our hotel was hosting an event for the Hollywood Film Festival. Celebrities (mostly B-listers, from what I could see) were coming and going in their Rolls Royces and their Bentleys and their Maseratis and their Lamborghinis and their Cayennes and their stretch limos. Paparazzi were there. Fans were waiting behind a rope in hopes of getting autographs they could later sell on eBay, no doubt.

This was no Katrina.

The destruction, horrible as it was, did not keep the Hollywood hotlisters from their highfalutin high jinks.

The destruction, horrible as it was, was confined to specific areas, many of which are remote and isolated and uninhabitable, and was not so widespread that it completely shut down an entire region of the country.

The destruction, horrible as it was, to a large degree affected people well off enough to have homes in well off neighborhoods. And, one imagines, well off enough to rebuild their homes in new well off neighborhoods.

Without question, there was suffering. There was fear. There was anger. There were personal tragedies. There were rampant acts of selflessness. There were flagrant acts of heroism. There were all of the things that happen every time there is a disaster of near Biblical proportions anywhere in the world.

But the overwhelming majority of Southern California acted as if nothing unusual was occurring. And LA was pretty much as I had experienced it on every previous visit. Until, that is, we finished our first day of training and walked outside the KCBS building to get our car.

The sky that had been blue when Erik took us on a walking tour of the Studio City lot during our lunch break was now an overcast grey. I hoped it was going to start raining so the firefighters could get a little help.

Then I realized the grey overcast wasn't made up of clouds. It was smoke, everywhere overhead. The well-defined edges hung low over the tops of the hills. It really did look like the leading edge of an approaching thunderstorm.

As my eyes followed the smoke cloud toward the light of the sun, which was on the western horizon, the smoke's color gradually changed hue and became more of a brownish-grey.

"This looks like a tornado day," Matt, a native Midwesterner, remarked.

"Absolutely," I, another native Midwesterner, agreed.

Speaking of the sun: It was obscured by the smoke just enough that you could look at it briefly. And it was obscured by the smoke in such a way that it was incredibly beautiful. I noticed the same thing the next afternoon while Matt and I were killing time on the Santa Monica Pier before he had to go to the airport.

That's an odd thing about wildfires, some locals told me. The smoke makes sunrises and sunsets look incredibly stunning.

Yeah, I thought. Kind of like the rainbow that illuminates the path of death and destruction moments after a tornado passes by. It reminds us that all is not lost, because even in the darkest moments there can be awe-inspiring beauty.

And you know what? Now that I think about it, the wildfire-kaleidoscoped sunrises and sunsets, and the rainbows spawned in the wakes of tornadoes, each contain a particular color.

Crayola® calls it "burnt orange."

 E-Mail Dan Shelley.

(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)