I guess they've let the media folk into my parents' neighbourhood now. They're hyperparanoid about letting residents in to see their stuff, but apparently anyone with a press pass can go poke around the wreckage with no problem. Which would be fine if they actually got some decent footage and showed it right away -- how hard would it be to start at the bottom of Viewcrest Road, drive slowly up with the camera rolling, then across Okaview and up Lark? It would take three minutes to give everyone the information they want. Instead we get a pathetic trickle of photos with no context (what addresses? how about a wider shot of the entire street?), and residents are forced to peer through telescopes and binoculars from the other side of the freakin' lake to find out the status of their houses! I think this chimney might be all that's left of the house directly behind my parents' place. It could be their roof below and to the right.
There has been an obvious old-school/digital split in the media coverage of this fire. Castanet has been great for updates on the fire itself, evacuation info and photos submitted by readers -- it's become the public clearinghouse, clearly illustrating the power of the web to let people help each other with information. On Saturday, my parents and others were entirely dependant on a couple of the photos they posted like this one from Friday night to help them figure out the risk of losing their home. Then last night, on CBC's National news, they showed crystal-clear video footage of the same scene from Friday...which means someone was willfully withholding those images for at least three days. But why? It's maddening to know that the information exists, but the media/authorities are intentially not showing it. Trying to "protect" people from the reality?
The limitation of the online stuff is that they lack video or interviews for the more personal, experiential stuff. That's where TV should be picking up that slack, and the CBC National coverage last night was decent for the human-interest angle -- the feature was much better than most of the stuff we've seen locally. CHBC did manage to sneak someone into Crawford Estates on Saturday afternoon to show the devastation, but meanwhile, they've been doing these "official" media tours of damaged areas for days, and the footage has been mostly ambiguous. Quickly panning past burned-out homes with no reference to their location, lingering shots of bits of standing brick and charred stuff with no context...it's no wonder people are sneaking behind the barricades to go find out for themselves. At least they might be able to protect their stuff -- I hope there's a special place in hell for people who would steal from evacuated houses.
Some of the frustration must be due to changing expectations of news coverage and information dissemination. In an age where it seems that you can get almost any information about anything immediately online, and reporters actually join soldiers on the front lines of war, we expect to see and know exactly what is happening in a crisis like this fire. And we expect it NOW, not three days later.
