Smoke Blocked TV Emergency Bulletins, Officials Say

Smoke from looters’ fires is being blamed for preventing Los Angeles television viewers from seeing official city emergency rioting bulletins until after the uprisings subsided.

The thick smoke blacked out a City Hall-run TV channel from Wednesday night until midafternoon Friday, silencing official proclamations about curfew hours, gasoline and ammunition sales and emergency information about such things as public bus schedules and school closures, officials said.

The city-operated information channel, L.A. Cityview Channel 35, is beamed by a microwave relay system from City Hall to 14 independent cable television companies around Los Angeles.

From there, the channel is sent by cable to more than 500,000 homes.

Most of the time, the channel televises City Council meetings and routine public service announcements.

During emergencies, however, it is used to broadcast official announcements, warnings and advisories.

Video engineers blamed low-lying smoke from rioters’ fires for blocking Channel 35’s line-of-sight microwave link between a relay station at Century Boulevard and Vermont Avenue and one in Culver City.

That, in turn, halted City Hall transmissions to 12 of Los Angeles’ 14 cable companies, said Susan Herman, telecommunications manager for the city. She said that the signal is passed from cable company to cable company and that if the link breaks at one place, everybody else down the line is blacked out.

The transmissions resumed when the smoke over the Los Angeles Basin finally began clearing about 3 p.m. Friday, Herman said.