News Media Fire Safety Class is 10 Years Old

Ten years ago, the CAL FIRE San Bernardino Unit rolled out a specially created program to provide fire safety training to the news media. The program evolved from the practice of having news media days at fire facilities where a few news media people would receive training to the current program. The current program was designed to take real training to the news media in order to actually provide safety training to the maximum number of news personnel possible.

The first location that the class was provided was at Los Angeles television station KTLA, channel 5. From that time, the class has been taught at least once at nearly every television station, news radio station and news paper in the Los Angeles news market. To date more than 1,000 members of the news media, reporters, videographers, news editors, producers and news management have participated in the training.

This year, the CAL FIRE San Bernardino Unit has provided first time and refresher training to Fox News Channel, NBC4 and ABC7. In these training classes, more than 300 news professionals have received the training. The training at ABC7 was conducted this week and more than 150 members of the news staff participated in the three days of fire safety training.

This training is not only important from a safety standpoint which is paramount, but is also provides education that allows the reporters to provide better and more accurate information in their news reports regarding fires and what they can do.