Congressman Bob Filner 'Confused' about San Diego fire

By Kelley Dupuis | Oct. 31, 2003 | The Star-News

Congressman Bob Filner was at his Chula Vista home near Southwestern College last weekend when the huge fires that have devastated southern California exploded in San Diego County, and he isnšt happy with the way information about the emergency was managed.

Filner said the media's coverage of the fires was so uneven and inconsistent that he didn't know what he should do, or where he should go.

Filner was scheduled for a speaking engagement in Phoenix on Sunday, but after he went to Lindbergh Field and found that the planes were not flying, he couldn't get reliable information from any single source.

"There was really no way to figure out what was happening," Filner said.

"When [San Diego Mayor] Dick Murphy and the city council had their press conferences, they were wearing emergency jackets with embroidered names on them, but they didnšt pay any attention to what information we needed."

Filner said his confusion began before he tried to catch his cancelled flight to Phoenix, and continued after he returned home.

"I went back home and the first thing I heard on TV was that they had evacuated parts of Eastlake and the rest of Chula Vista should be prepared to leave," Filner said. "I was trying to get more information, but each channel was different. If I werenšt watching that one channel, I wouldn't even have known whether I was supposed to get ready to evacuate. They gave a phone number, but I could never reach it because it was always busy. I didn't know how to figure out where I was supposed to go."

Filner said that when he decided he should get ready to evacuate, he called his wife back in Washington to check with her about what he should take out of the house.

"I knew that she would be more calm, given the fact that she didn't even know what was happening," he said. "On the east coast, CNN wasn't reporting this. It was like L.A. was on fire, but not San Diego. So I asked her for a list of things to pack up. I packed the car with photos and her grandmother's tea set and those kinds of things, and I was trying to figure out what to do. Finally I just went to sleep with my clothes on. For all I knew, I was supposed to evacuate, but I didn't hear that."

Filner said he plans to do some checking, after the fires are out, on how the county might act to better coordinate what the various news media are doing in an emergency.

"I'm going to make some proposals," Filner said. "The media need to be reporting some standard information every half hour in the same way, so that people will get the same information. Where are the evacuation centers? What numbers do you call? What's going on at the airport? This is standard information that everyone needs to get, but we couldn't get it in a standard way. Channel 8 did their thing, Channel 9 did their thing; they may have gotten the same information, but you were hearing different things on different channels. One channel was covering the Otay reservoir every three minutes, another was paying no attention to it."

Filner said his trip to the airport only increased the confusion.

"I was part of a group that went to return our rental cars to Hertz," he said. "Nobody knew if their planes were flying. Nobody knew anything, and every employee gave a different answer. We got there and everyone was on line, looking at their screens, and I could tell my plane was not going out, but it took me an hour to get that established. Meanwhile, I went back to get another car. On the bus going back to Hertz, 20 or 30 people were getting off not knowing that the airport was closed. So they've turned their cars in and are going out, and we're going back to get more cars. That's just stupid."

Filner said that while he was at the airport, everyone he spoke to or overheard seemed to have a different sense of what was going on.

"Every employee, whether of the airlines, or the car rental agencies, or McDonald's, everybody had a different speculation. Nobody knew anything, and I found that very unsettling," he said.

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