News Media Make Do With Flickering Power and Lots of Ingenuity

In the hours after the power went out in the San Francisco Bay Area on Tuesday, residents of Los Angeles and other cities across the nation were often better informed about the region-wide destruction than Bay Area residents who experienced swatches of the horror first-hand.

Live feeds from radio station KCBS in San Francisco were broadcast on KNX in Los Angeles and other radio stations. Similar feeds were beamed nationwide from KGO-TV, the ABC affiliate in San Francisco.

Meanwhile, with normal lines of communications cut off, information was at a premium for many Bay Area residents.

In San Francisco, Michael O’Loughlin switched on his transistor radio for up-to-the-minute news. But those who were not as prepared were forced to pay a stiff price, he added.

“People were selling batteries on the streets for new and improved prices. It brought out the entrepreneurial instincts in some.”

Others went to their car radios to determine the extent of the destruction.

Radio and TV stations flickered on and off the air for hours as broadcast engineers scurried to switch to emergency power supplies. Once on, the signals could be picked up only by those with battery power.

No newspapers hit the street until the wee hours of morning.

“A lot of what we did during the night probably didn’t reach San Franciscans,” said Chapin Day, assignment editor at KGO-TV. “But it reached many people in surrounding areas and elsewhere in the nation.”

At KGO, Day said, emergency power was in place within about 10 minutes of the earthquake. The station stayed on the air all night, broadcasting news about the disaster nonstop with no commercials, he said.

KCBS Radio, a San Francisco all-news station, served at times as a conduit for San Francisco authorities seeking to communicate with city employees and the populace at large. At one point in the evening, the head of the city’s Board of Public Works asked that all city building inspectors report to their offices for emergency duty. Later, a telephone company spokesman instructed listeners to turn to the front pages of their phone books for emergency preparedness advice.

Tom J. Goldstein, dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, called the broadcast coverage “uneven, but it was a terrible situation for them.

“Certain reporters were calm, a couple reporters almost lost it,” said Goldstein, who was able to monitor broadcasts because electric power remained on through the night at his Berkeley residence. “You’ve got to remain calm in a situation like this. But it’s easier to say than to do.”

The San Jose Mercury News and the Oakland Tribune were able to keep to their normal publishing schedules because they had power.

Both papers shipped tens of thousands of extra copies to newsstands and news racks in San Francisco in the wee hours of the morning. Out of town newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, were also transported to the Bay Area by trucks and airplanes.

The two San Francisco newspapers were hard hit.

The Chronicle was reportedly not on the streets until almost 7 a.m. and an abbreviated edition of the Examiner appeared about three hours later.

The front page of the 16-page, no-advertisements edition of the Chronicle included a seven-paragraph box.

“This special edition of the Chronicle was produced despite a complete power outage,” it began. “The earthquake brought the newspaper’s computer and main printing facility to a halt.”

The box concluded with a statement from executive editor William German. “The Chronicle of Oct. 18, 1989, is a newspaper produced with a heavy heart,” he wrote. “The fact that it was produced at all was a mighty feat. This awful blow wiped out the tools of modern journalism. No magic of computers, no push-button presses, not even lights to see by. All that was left to us was the energy and the wit of our dedicated staff.”