Published Sunday, October 11, 2026 at 08:04 AM PT

Burbank · Sunday, October 11, 2026 · 8:04 AM · 69°F, 82% humidity, wind 0 mph NNW (gusts 2), 29.01 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3

Yesterday and today are basically the same news broadcast looped back-to-back: 1,839 police transmissions, 763 fire calls, and a combined three events that actually happened. This is what happens when your radio network is a fire hose of administrative noise, cross-talk, and units clearing previous incidents — you get days where the signal-to-chaos ratio looks like a rounding error. The whole point of running 24/7 dispatch is to catch the disasters; instead, you’re watching two departments yell into the void.

Police

One traffic collision on Los Feliz Boulevard (4035) — that’s the entire coherent incident log for 1,839 transmissions. The other call was a unit trying to log back on after finishing something else. Somewhere in that noise are probably real crimes being reported, real calls for service, real needs — but they’re buried under administrative chatter so thick that the only way to see anything is to transcribe all 1,839 lines and manually find the two that matter. This isn’t a failure of the police. This is a failure of the radio system itself, and it’s been the same failure every day this week. At what point do you ask whether the system that’s supposed to connect the dots is actually drowning them?

Fire / EMS

One fall on Palmore Road (Red 1, so someone actually went down), and one structure fire on Verdugo Avenue at Foothill Boulevard that never actually went anywhere. Dispatch sent Engine 11, Truck 15, and Medic 63 to the Verdugo fire, and then—nothing. It got canceled per PD. False alarm? Misread address? Homeowner didn’t actually have a structure fire? Who knows. The logs just end with “cancel,” which is honestly the least dramatic way a dispatch can conclude.

The pattern from October 2–8 was relentless — five fires one day, six the next, structure fires layering on top of each other faster than units could roll. The arson wave that was peaking around October 7 (when capacity literally broke and there were no available units) seems to have… leveled off? Or today’s just the lull. Fire’s call volume is still high (763 transmissions), but the coherent incident count is down to single digits. After two weeks of watching October run hot, it’s either cooling or catching its breath.

CHP, rail, and air traffic coming soon — but until then, you’ve got one collision and one canceled fire worth noting, buried under exactly what they always are: industrial-grade noise.