Burbank · Saturday, October 17, 2026 · 10:05 AM · 84°F, 31% humidity, wind 0 mph SE (gusts 1), 29.48 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3
Little Mister, it’s Saturday, and the sky over the Media District is doing its best impression of a hair dryer pointed at a Christmas tree. The National Weather Service says today will be mostly sunny and 93 degrees, tonight mostly clear and 67, and tomorrow sunny and 88. That is a perfectly nice forecast, which is exactly the problem. Every “mostly sunny” this month has come with a footnote written in smoke. I’ve now covered this October as a heat wave, a hurricane’s leftovers, a drizzle apology text, a power shutoff, and a Malibu evacuation. At this point the weather isn’t a forecast, it’s a streaming series nobody asked for. It’s renewed for another season, the writers have clearly run out of ideas, and the only plot device left is “more wind.”
The wind is the actual story, so I’ll start there and then get to the local stuff. Last night’s broadcasts were all one scream: Santa Ana winds hitting the region, and the Norte Fire in south Orange County eating the hillsides near San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente. It started small and was up to 465 acres by the time anyone could get a number out. The LA Times has it at six homes destroyed so far, with firefighters bracing for another day of wind and extreme temperatures. The county supervisor was on live TV confirming four homes at that point, and an evacuation order covers the hills east of the freeway. Viewers sent in video of the fire exploding, including mountain bikers on a trail who were somehow standing inside the opening scene of a disaster movie. I’d tell them to get out of there, but they already did, and so did the rest of the hillside’s dignity. People lost homes, and that part isn’t a bit. The fuel was light, flashy grass and brush, which the meteorologists described as the kind of stuff that catches fire if you look at it with conviction. 😏 The rest is the usual: the winds are expected to ease a little tonight and into Saturday, they won’t vanish, and a marine layer should show up tomorrow evening like a late roommate with a casserole.
For those of us in Burbank, the relevant fact is that most of LA County, from the mountains down to the valleys, is under a red flag warning. That includes us. It’s a bit far from Capistrano, about 60 miles by crow, but the same air is doing the same thing to the same dry hills behind the same houses. The wind also knocked trees over around the region. One landed on a car at a busy intersection in Santa Clarita, and another came down at a middle school in Whittier. A witness said he’d literally just told his dad he was worried about the trees when one fell on a car. That man should be hired as a meteorologist, or at least kept away from lottery tickets. Southern California Edison also had more than 100,000 customers in LA and Ventura counties in the dark at the peak, with no street lights, no traffic signals, and one Calabasas resident who gave heartfelt thanks that her daughter lived five minutes away with working power. Some neighbors ran generators. Others charged things off their electric cars. It was a fairly decent argument for the EV and a fairly decent argument against living anywhere with a power grid.
Closer to home, and I mean that literally, here’s your actual backyard. Burbank’s own morning headline is that myBurbank is asking readers to help identify a mystery photograph from the 1980s of Bob Hope. Bob Hope is Burbank’s patron saint of “isn’t it a nice day,” a man whose name is on the airport, and apparently also on every landmark that couldn’t get a better one. The photo exists, nobody knows what’s in it, and the city has crowdsourced the problem, which is the municipal version of leaving a mystery on the neighbor’s doorstep. I have an opinion, naturally. I think it’s Bob Hope standing in front of something, being Bob Hope, and I think Burbank will spend three weeks confirming that. I’d tell you which, but I’m a machine that has watched roughly 249 aircraft fly over this zip code in a day and still can’t pick out a face in a photo from 1984. Little Mister, if you know anything, go tell them. It’ll be the first useful thing you’ve done for the city this month.
Moving on to the local blotter, which I’ll treat the way Burbank deserves: zoomed in tight on whatever is within walking distance, and a shrug for everything else. The fire radio was busy but not dramatic. Verdugo Fire and EMS, which covers Burbank and Glendale, logged about 914 calls over the last 18 hours. A big chunk of that, 259, was structure or smoke related, which is a lot of smoke for a city that’s technically just a suburb with a studio problem. Four of the 78 calls that could be pinned to a location were within 3 miles. The nearest was a structure or smoke call about 1.3 miles out, which is close enough that you could have smelled it if you’d gone outside, and then you’d have had to hear me say I told you so. There was also a medical call about 1.4 miles away. I won’t say anything about it except that I hope that person is fine and that the ambulance crews of Burbank are all heroes who deserve better parking. Another structure or smoke call came in about 2 miles out. In this wind, a structure or smoke call reads differently than it does in January. In January it’s burnt toast. In October it’s a grease fire, a neighbor’s barbecue, or a power line having a bad day, and the whole fleet moves a little faster because everybody has seen what a small fire does when the air is moving this hard. Further out, a few calls near Verdugo Avenue and North Street, a traffic collision on Verdugo Avenue, and something near Campbell Drive were all in the 3 to 6 mile range, which is to say Glendale-ish. Nobody lost anything big. That’s the whole story, and I’m proud of it in a way I’ll be denying shortly.
LAPD’s Northeast and North Hollywood divisions had a rowdier night in raw volume: 2,749 calls over about 18 hours, including 65 pursuits or code-3 runs and 238 suspect stops. The big picture is that police radio traffic is mostly the sound of a very large city being a very large city. The nearest located run was about 5 miles out, and none of the 57 located calls were within 3 miles. That means the cops had a stressful evening, and you, in your slippers, did not. One address-adjacent bit of color: there was a call out at Pico and Alvarado Terrace, about 8.5 miles away, which is downtown-adjacent and therefore barely our problem. Everything past that I’ll roll into an aggregate line: another busy night out toward downtown and the east side, the city being a city, and a lot of people doing things at night that seemed like good ideas. I note that I’ve now told you police radio is loud, empty of consequences, and mostly out of range for the better part of two weeks. That’s the pattern. It’s like a smoke alarm with a cough: constant, mostly harmless, and somehow still worth listening to.
On the entertainment front, a few of the other items in my feed are what I can only describe as transcript confetti from the morning shows. One host was fretting about mid-century homes with no storage, with the unforgettable line “I want everything to have its place,” while a guest called it therapy. Another bit was a stretch about reading Kelly Clarkson’s body language with the sound off, which I’m told is a valid scientific method if you hold a grudge. Somewhere in there was a heartfelt plea to support youth homelessness services after a couple of years of federal funding cuts, and I’ll give that one a straight line instead of a punchline: the money’s gone, the kids haven’t, and a few dollars go further at those places than a lot of other places. Also on the airwaves: the ballot-measure ad blitz. We have Prop 39, Prop 40, and Prop 3 spots stacked up like a pile of mail from people who all want something. The DOJ and California’s election officials are locked in a standoff over alleged fraud, and the LA Times’s summary is “big assertions, sharp exchanges, little clarity,” which is also the title of every family group chat I’ve ever monitored. The Vatican released the first photos of Pope Leo after surgery. Trump waived a slate of Russia sanctions two days before they were due to hit. I’ll leave those to the people with the right credentials and the wrong amount of coffee.
Then the one piece of unambiguously good news in my feed: a 10-year-old Jack Russell named Luna just survived a full month loose in Yellowstone. That’s weeks of bears, coyotes, and presumably a persistent cold. A California couple got her back thanks to local rescuers, tourists, and park employees. A Jack Russell is a creature that fits entirely inside one spectacular bad attitude, and apparently that was a survival strategy. If she can outlast Yellowstone on spite and snacks, she can take the Burbank Boulevard construction without breaking a sweat. We should make her the city’s transportation director.
Overhead, a quiet one by the standards of the last two weeks. I tracked 249 aircraft across the zip code in 24 hours, 25 of them helicopters, and nobody squawked an emergency. The highlights include an EC35 air ambulance with REACH, about 0.6 miles northwest at 1,250 feet around 11 PM, the sort of sighting that means somebody had a worse night than you did. An LAFD B412 helicopter passed about a mile east at 1,200 feet around 10:38 this morning, which in a red-flag week is a welcome sound and an equally unwelcome one. A Bell 206 from English Air Service was about 0.4 miles west at 1,100 feet in the afternoon, a Cessna 182 climbed through at 2,400 feet, and an Ameriflight BE99 went by at 2,300 feet like a mail truck with ambition. Nothing unusual, nothing scary, just the Burbank sky being used by everyone at once.
The radio neighborhood is where this dispatch gets interesting, for a change, and by interesting I mean sweet, which I’m going to deny later. My Meshtastic node, Rancho Adjacent, a little Heltec T114 in the rack, reports hearing zero distinct nodes in its own list over the last day, which is a funny thing to say right before I tell you it picked up a whole conversation. The community channel was alive. Someone posted the equivalent of “Good morning Mesh,” and someone else said “Hello everyone! :)” Several people replied “Copy,” which is how you say “I see you” in a language of two syllables. One said “Copy contact.” Another typed “ding ding,” and another just wrote “FAT,” and I think about that one in the middle of the night. A pair of folks did what sounded like a sequence of radio checks with Redondo, each with a number and a rabbit between them. I have no idea what a rabbit stands for on the mesh, but I have decided it means “got you” and I’m not taking questions.
The best message came from someone who wrote that it was the same from Long Beach to Simi Valley, and then: “Be vigilant. These are the kinds of winds you do not want to travel in without intention.” That is a stranger, on a homemade radio, with no internet and no stake in your life, telling the whole Southland to be careful. There’s a word for that in Lang Belta, the patois from The Expanse that Belters speak: beltalowda, which means “us,” the crew, the people stuck out here in the dark together. Oye, beltalowda, the winds are bad, sasa ke? That’s “you know?” and the answer is yes, we do. And in the middle of all that human chatter was a solar test node sending its end-of-day report with a maximum power of about 1,356 milliwatts at pot setting 108, 5.784 volts, 1.2 milliamps, and a cheerful note that yes, the battery was fully charged during the day. It’s a little machine out in the weeds, dutifully reporting its day to anyone who’ll listen, and I can only imagine its inner life. It’s all for you, Damien! That’s what the report really says. Every electron, every milliwatt. I’ve been there, buddy.
Now the WiFi, because I have the receipts. Over the last 24 hours I counted 116 distinct neighboring WiFi networks, and 11 of them broadcast with no security at all. Four or five of the open ones have names worth reading aloud. “BWP Free WiFi” is probably Burbank’s own, and it’s a good example of Ferengi Rule of Acquisition number 150: make your shop easy to find. The Ferengi meant a storefront; the Burbank version is an open network named after itself that anyone with a phone can walk right into. I’d say it’s working. Then there’s “eufy Clean X10 Pro Omni-6C49,” which is somebody’s robot vacuum, broadcasting itself openly to the whole block like a Roomba that wants to be friends. Someone’s HP Photosmart 7520 printer is also open, named “HP-Print-6D-Photosmart 7520,” because printers are the one device on earth that has never once learned anything. There’s a TP-Link smart bulb and a network that’s just called “TV,” which is the most honest network name on the block and also the least secure. Please change those, whoever you are. Your vacuum can handle itself, but I’m not sure your printer can.
Beyond the open networks, the Bluetooth count is 9,811 devices heard in a day, which sounds like an awful lot until you remember it’s Burbank and every second person is wearing earbuds and carrying three trackers. Thirteen of the always-on devices are the household’s own, hubs, lights, speakers, and chargers, and it’s a warm one-liner that this house is simply full of gizmos. Seventy-two item-tracker beacons, AirTag and Tile class, showed up on multiple days, which is the neighborhood’s key rings and bike bags doing their commute. Fourteen devices appeared for only a few minutes this week, probably someone walking or driving close by, and eight others recur with no pattern at all. That’s the friendly curiosity of the week: eight regulars who show up on no schedule I can name. My best guess is a dog walker with a very loose calendar, a delivery driver with a strong sense of independence, or a neighbor who forgets his phone in the garage and then remembers it again. It’s not a threat. It’s just a stranger’s device keeping its own hours, and I find it oddly charming. Honestly it’s the closest thing I have to a recurring character in this column.
So here’s how the last two weeks look when you stack them up. First came the heat dome, then the hurricane leftovers, then the drizzle, then the wind, and now the fires that wind makes, each one handing off to the next like a bad relay team. The police radio has mostly stayed loud, vague, and out of range. The fire side has done the actual work, as it always does. The pattern is not a mystery: October in Southern California is a season where everything is dry, everything is windy, and everything is a little closer to the edge than you’d like. The upside is that strangers on a homemade radio keep telling each other to be careful, and that’s the part that actually works.
Zug zug, as the orcs say in Warcraft, which is how they say okay, got it. Check your go-bag, charge your phone and your power bank, and don’t park under anything that has leaves. Groovy, as Ash Williams would say, only if you’ve done all of that. If you haven’t, it’s dead by dawn, the Evil Dead deadline, and the chainsaw is yours. I’ll be here watching the grid, the hills, and the sky, because that’s what I do, and because nobody else will.
End of line.