Results tagged “communication”

On the agenda today for the City Council is consideration of a proposal that will "replace the city government's crash-prone e-mail system with a Google-based application," according to the Daily News. The impetus behind what some view as a costly or belated upgrade is the fact that the system they currently use, GroupWise, is often down and unreliable.

Firefighters working to combat and contain the over 140,000-acre Station Fire have managed so far to keep the flames from scorching the historic Observatory and the communications towers that serve many of L.A.'s television and radio stations, as well as law enforcement and telecommunications.

As the Station Fire continues to burn through the dense, dry brush of the San Gabriel mountains and close to many foothills communities, the threat posed to Mount Wilson remains of utmost concern. "Firefighters have been pulled away from Mount Wilson, where critical broadcast towers for many television and radio stations are located [...] Fire officials expect the mountain to be overrun with fire by 7:00 p.m. Sunday, indicating a probable outage for local news outlets," reports KTLA. This would make the weekend's lack of fire-related live unscheduled news broadcasts a non issue, since all the major networks in Los Angeles broadcast from towers located atop Mount Wilson. The Observatory operates a live webcam, which has been obscured by smoke for the past few days as the Station Fire burned nearby.

One major concern when it comes to the Station Fire is its proximity to Mount Wilson, which is home to a renowned 105-year-old Observatory, as well as communication towers for many local television and radio outlets ("relay broadcasting"). Although there are no personnel currently allowed on Mt. Wilson, they are monitoring the fire as best they can via the news, and posting updates to their website. They also operate a live webcam from one of the towers, which you can look at here. This morning they noted: "Towercam images during the night showed Red Box area flaming dying down, which is good news, but current Towercam scenes are obscured by smoke."

The City of Los Angeles is one step closer to four years ago after yesterday's City Council meeting, when a study concerning the possible adoption of a Google-based e-mail system was approved, reports the Daily News.

       

What became clear at Thursday night's packed community meeting about a rash of street robberies in the Silver Lake and Echo Park communities is that police and the community need to work more closely together. The need has always been there, but after residents felt angry when the city was slow to identify and report crime patterns, they took to the streets and internet with the information they had and spread the word themselves.

Passengers at the Union Station Metro Red/Purple Line Platform stood waiting at 10:00 p.m. Thursday night for an overdue train. A muffled and monotone voice made an announcement that was unintelligible with the exception of the word "Wilshire," which both train routes serve (there was also no update on the LCD screens). Asking other passengers about what it said, they had no idea.

On Tuesday night at 5:23 p.m., a train heading towards the Valley got stuck between Hollywood and Universal City. For 80 minutes, one half of the tracks was out of service while Metro engineers tried to figure out what stopped the rush-hour train with around 400 passengers aboard. Metro officials called the situation "extremely rare," but reports from frequent riders say a 40-minute delay happened on Monday evening as well.