Posted Oct. 23, 2007

Carol Goodhue of the San Diego Union Tribune planned to spend Monday doing last minute checks on AV, food, registrations for APME NewsTrain number 45.

Instead, Carol and her husband started their day with news of fast-spreading wildfires in San Diego County. They prepared for possible evacuation of their neighborhood outside the city – packing up photos and Carol's treasured quilts; sweeping pine needles to avoid kindling near their house; bringing their dog along as they commuted to their jobs.

By early afternoon, Carol, readers representative and training editor at the Union Tribune, learned she was among the hundreds of thousands of evacuees in Southern California. She spent Monday watching maps to follow the paths of wind-blown fires and working with a NewsTrain team across the country to cancel the workshop and quickly notify more than 50 participants.

As of this morning, news was still good for Carol. The fires had not reached her neighborhood and the winds were still blowing away from the area. More than 30 other Union Tribune staffers were also among the evacuees by this morning. One good outcome of the unhappy news for NewsTrain was that Carol and her family could use a hotel room original reserved for a trainer. She said she was "deeply grateful" this morning for her soft bed and hot shower.

A sign of the speed and surprise with which the San Diego fire crisis, and news of it, traveled was the experience of Ryan Pitts, assistant managing editor for interactive news at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash. He boarded a plane in Spokane Monday morning confidently headed to teach at San Diego NewsTrain. At the airport in San Diego, Teresa Cooper, administrative assistant for NewsTrain, reached his cell phone. He managed to find a flight to return home later the same day.

The effort to cancel the workshop in an orderly way turned into a cross-country cooperative effort. The registration list reflected the names of institutions and areas that are in the midst of the fire story. Working from Philadelphia, Teresa Cooper sent a mass e-mail; she reached one person on a Blackberry at the airport. Trainers Michael Roberts in Phoenix and Mark Briggs in Tacoma quickly cancelled flights and saved the investment to use later. Casey Frechette at the Poynter Institute in Florida, which donates NewsTrain's online registration, began planning for registration refunds. Carol Goodhue in San Diego notified her own staffers and joined me in follow-up phone calls to people who did not respond to e-mail. Becky Day of the California Society of Newspaper Editors, another key organizer of San Diego NewsTrain, got the cancellation word just outside the Oakland airport. She turned back to a friend's nearby house and helped with the phone calls.

At the hotel near the Union Tribune building where NewsTrain teachers were booked, the scene was a reflection of the fires' disruption of a glorious fall.

Monday the lobby was packed with refugees – those banned from their homes or travelers who could not use roads to leave the city. Even those lucky enough to find rooms were amid reminders of the crisis. The sky was hazy, and leaves of the blooming rose bushes were coated with gray soot.

Plans are to get past the all-hands-on-deck situation for editors in Southern California and consider rescheduling San Diego NewsTrain. Even amid the turmoil Monday, editors asked to be notified for new dates for the workshop.