OCTOBER 30, 2007, Oceanside, CA  

Fires, Reverse 911, and New Brooms for Halloween

We’ve just endured our fourth day of wildfires here in San Diego County. Even here in Oceanside, many miles from the epicenter of the fires, the air reeks with acrid smoke and fly ash flutters down outside our windows. The sun is a blood red, the full moon a fierce pumpkin orange. Houses and hillsides are swirling smudges of black and gray. Formerly lush avocado groves are left a charred moonscape. These could be no better backdrops for a horror film and, as if to complement the Halloween season, one of the major fires is named Witch.

    The statistics are staggering: well over 500,000 people evacuated – more than the entire population of Wyoming – over 1,500 homes destroyed, many more damaged; a billion dollars in property damage alone, firefighting costs will exceed that; over 500 square miles of burn zone, larger than the city of Los Angeles.

    Aggressive Santa Ana winds drove the fires westward at speeds up to 80 mph,  one gust registered 110 mph, so fast that fire fighting pilots were unable to fly aircraft, even to monitor fires, let alone drop water and retardant. Only a few 2-ton remote control ‘Predator’ drones were able to fly over and survey the blazes, even as the company that designed and built them had to evacuate employees from offices below. The National Guard’s C-130 transports, potentially the best fire suppressors, are yet to be outfitted with the tanks that were promised after the 2003 Cedar fires in this area. Politicians point fingers, even as they vie for media attention.

Threatened by two separate fires was the Camp Pendleton Marine Base, the largest in the country, with a daytime population of about 60,000, immediately to our north. Estimates suggest that 2,500 cars countywide have been totaled, and many more will need major refinish work.

    Unlike the 2003 fires, which burned large areas of mostly rural terrain, these fires took a swath through suburban areas, including some of the most affluent properties in the country, taking out houses here and there as though by precision airstrike while leaving others nearby untouched. Coastal communities were left choking downwind but generally spared the real damage. Inevitably, the capricious and random damage left people asking ‘why me?’ and ‘why not me’?

    Many businesses were affected.  Ours is lucky. Local body shops report disruptions due to employee dislocations. Air quality has been a problem for some shops, and others experienced power and communication failures. Officials have asked the public to minimize cell phone usage, leaving channels for emergency personnel.

    Huge rebuilding efforts will be needed, and in other areas, major cleanup. As expected, attention is already turning from the politicians to the insurers. Allstate had already stopped writing new homeowner policies in California, calling the state “catastrophe-prone.”     

    At least 1,500 families are devastated at the loss of home and major property, but what matters is that very few people have died as a result of the fire. Why so few? Communication is the key.  

    San Diego, unlike New Orleans, was able to warn and persuade. Most people listened. What many credit with a life saving middle-of-the-night warning is a $300,000 automated phone system, known as Reverse 911, which persistently sends a recorded message, in this case from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, to land line numbers – listed and unlisted – in a geographical area. If the system gets a busy signal, it can keep calling until someone answers or it trips an answering machine. By mid-day on Oct. 23, 394,915 calls had been made to San Diego County households, the most extensive use of the system to date. Phone notification led to TV and radio warnings to the afflicted areas and, for the most part, evacuation was orderly.    

    So with all this devastation and disruption, how does a business function?  It’s challenging to run a business when conditions are normal, let alone in times of turmoil. Even something as simple as cable internet outage can bring some businesses to a grinding halt.

    We’ve been lucky at Autobody News. Despite employees needing to attend to priority matters and help parents, kids, and cats, we’ve been able to get this issue out in time for NACE.

Changes to Come in the Paper 

    My partner – Barbara Davies – and I  bought Autobody News in August from the Neubauer family who have run it so successfully for the past eight years. “New brooms sweep clean,” the old saying goes, and we’re somewhat like new brooms, sweeping up a little here and there. Unlike businesses in the fires’ path, and thanks to the Neubauers’ long term management, we don’t have major cleanup to do. Instead we’re remodeling a solid foundation – the paper and the website – to provide a little more to you, our readers, without whom there wouldn’t be any point doing anything at all.

    Regular readers will already have noticed some design changes which we think makes the paper more accessible and reader friendly, but the important thing is the content on these pages. The news should be about events that matter the most to the most. We know you’re busy running your businesses and aren’t glued to this or any other news source, so we want to make sure that your time with the paper is well spent.

    We’re going to use the web more and we’re building a next generation website this Spring. You’ll see a new balance of what’s in the paper and what’s online in the future. We want them to complement each other usefully, but not always redundantly.

    We want a paper designed to help you find what you’re looking for. See our Web Window in this issue for a quick start in this direction. You can scan this section for what interests you and then search autobodynews.com for more details. The web is inherently transient though. Articles of lasting interest will be archived as usual.

    We’ve launched a new feature called Consumer Callout, which we hope will focus attention on experiences of the real customer, the vehicle owners, who are sometimes lost in the shuffle. Shops are encourged to tell tales and give feedback.  We’re going to be bringing you more “news you can use” in future, including articles from the general media that show how the industry is being portrayed, for better or worse. These articles will be published under the banner "Mainstream Media."

    We’re going to bring you more practical content and reliable technical information when it’s relevant.  You already see technical articles from I-CAR in the paper. In the spring we'll be starting a new series of articles on Waterborne Paint Transition.

    We’re going to bring you some new guest columnists, in addition to those you’ve come to expect and appreciate. Some of them may surprise you. Some of them may be your customers. We’re actively looking for at least one new columnist for our Southwest region. We’re going to support and court those advertisers that are bringing the best product, at whatever price point, and most satisfy their customers. We’ll do product placement that provides useful information. We want to know from you what the best products are and we’ll be featuring that kind of feedback where appropriate.

    Above all we’re here to amplify what you in the industry have to say. It’s your industry and we’re proud to be a part of it. We’re not here to change the message, or even provide a message. We want to know from you what matters in your industry. We can help by providing a conduit, a channel, to help sort information from noise.

    Autobody News has been around for 26 years, about the same length of time I’ve been a publisher and Barbara has been in advertising and marketing, and we’re not about to tarnish the paper’s reputation for fair play. As for sweeping up, a media company like ours can make some things less messy, sort some good from some bad, and dispense a lot of information.  Communication is the key. Hopefully it’ll be reliable communication that can alert you to something important. We see our role as something like that Reverse 911 call, letting you know about events that are interesting, important, relevant, and sometimes dangerous, in time to take action. Communication is a loop and we need you to help close it.

    We’ve also heard murmurs about protecting the image of the industry. Obviously there’s concern when we hear about major fraud investigations in body shops. Some think that we should not publicize wrongdoing, but to gloss over these events is to implicate the vast majority of conscientious shops, owners, and managers in the same deeds. Nor is it right to infer that even a widespread investigation implies that anyone is actually guilty.

    “Overcharging,” for example, often implies that there’s somehow a “correct” price for everything, but charging more than the competition is not fraudulent. Claiming compensation for material work not done, and billing for parts when none are replaced is fraud, and should be called out as such. One of our jobs is to try to remind readers of the difference.

    Many know at least part of the quotation attributed to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: “Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

    A good newspaper could do worse than such a motto.