Print news is alive.
After California’s violent Carr Fire jumped over the Sacramento River Thursday night and entered the west part of Redding, home to over 90,000 inhabitants, the tempestuous fire took out a significant portion’s of the city’s electrical grid — even toppling transmission towers.
But the local newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight, was able to get its paper out — amid approaching flames and without power.
“I think what they did was hugely heroic,” David Little, editor of the Chico-Enterprise Record which ended up printing the paper, said in an interview. “They knew they couldn’t deliver to half their readership, and knew homes were burning down and roads were closed.”
SEE ALSO: Violent wildfire jumps a major river, enters California city home to over 90,000
Yet, apparently by lantern or camp lights, Record Searchlight reporters got the job done.
“It looked like a campground in their newsroom,” said Little.
On Friday, Record Searchlight reporter Damon Arthur tweeted that the paper’s office had lost all power, similar to other parts of the city, including evacuation centers.
In fact, power in some areas had been lost even earlier, meaning that Friday’s edition of the Record Searchlight had to be printed 70 miles south of Redding, in Chico. Little tweeted out a picture of the July 27 issue of the paper on Friday.
Here’s today’s Redding Record Searchlight, assembled in the dark and printed at the Chico Enterprise-Record because they had no power in Redding. Great work in awful circumstances. pic.twitter.com/wBom3z3wd8
— David Little (@ER_DavidLittle) July 27, 2018
As the paper reads, “Carr Fire explodes to more than 20,000 acres.” As of Friday morning, the fire had expanded to more than 44,000 acres. And by Saturday, it covered more than 80,000 acres.
Little noted that the Record Searchlight did the brunt of the work, under duress, and that the Chico-Enterprise Record simply printed pages that were sent to them electronically.
“Obviously, we were glad to help,” said Little.
Reporters at the Redding Record Searchlight were understandably quite busy Saturday — reporting the unfolding, and dramatic, local news — but Mashable will update this story if we hear back.
On Friday, U.S. Forest Service lead meteorologist Brenda Belongie, who lives and works in Redding, described the fire as “dramatic — just like you would see in the Hollywood movies, if you will.”
California’s forests are ripe for fire, said Belongie. The vegetation there, dried out by long periods of heat and dryness, have been turned to tinder.
It’s well understood that wildfires are caused by a confluence of events — including strong winds, often human behavior, and the whims of weather; but large fires need bounties of dry fuel, and an accelerated rise in global temperatures dries out the land and produces more extreme heatwaves, further enabling violent events like the now-deadly Carr Fire.
