LOS ANGELES — Hundreds of thousands of people are impacted by multiple Los Angeles wildfires, which have prompted evacuations, destroyed homes and businesses, and has now reached broadcast towers offering signal for radio and televisions in the area.
The fire crawled up Mt. Wilson in the San Gabriel Mountains Thursday afternoon. The mountain hosts broadcast towers which transmit the feeds of many local news companies and radios.
The towers provide coverage to Pasadena, Los Angeles, San Gabriel Valley, Southern San Fernando Valley and Orange County, according to Mobile Relay, an airtime provider specializing in two-way radio communications.
According to a representative from Mobile Relay, “it’s a possibility, not a probability” that the towers or signals go down, but if they do, it could impact anyone from semi-truck drivers and ambulances using radios to broadcast stations and more.
These buildings are made to withstand the elements, the representative added, oftentimes made up of cinderblocks and metal instead of flammable resources.
The towers are made of metal which makes them likelier to withstand the fires, but “the feed lines, which are the transmission medium the signal goes through, could be destroyed due to the heat.”
Power is out for many in the region, but these towers often have generators and shouldn’t be impacted negatively by that alone.
Television transmitters for the Los Angeles Metropolitan area are located on Mount Wilson or the nearby Mt. Harvard. While stations oftentimes have their own broadcast towers near their building, the mountain towers help expand the signal.
The fire traveled through Mt. Harvard Wednesday and Mobile Relay could not confirm any outages. There have been no reported outages to radio or broadcast signals from either tower as of publishing.
The mountain also hosts the historic Mount Wilson Observatory.
“There are firefighters on the grounds but the power is out at the Observatory so communication is limited,” the Mount Wilson Observatory said in a social media post Thursday afternoon.
Most of the staff at the mountain-top observatory had already evacuated, it said in an earlier post. Their website and cameras are down.