In the aftermath of recent fires that charred thousands of acres on Southwest County's doorstep, local cable and satellite television subscribers have peppered city halls, newspaper blogs and the letters to the editor page with a single question: "Why was there little or no coverage of the fires in this area on television stations here?"

There is no simple answer, but Temecula officials have vowed to start asking questions beginning next week.

Cable and satellite providers in western and central Riverside County are considered part of the huge Los Angeles television market.

For years, transplants to this area, many from San Diego, have squawked that providers of local cable and satellite services did not carry Padres baseball, Chargers football or other programming from south of the nearby county line.

Those complaints left the sports arena last week when the massive wildfires burning in Fallbrook and on Palomar Mountain in San Diego County blew heavy smoke, ash and a good dose of fear upon residents of Southwest County.

San Diego television stations sent reporting crews into the northern regions of their county to cover the fires burning just across the line from Riverside County. Meanwhile, Los Angeles stations dispatched reporters to the far reaches of their coverage area to bring viewers news of blazes burning there.

"People were concerned that with fires burning 10 miles to our south, the news they were getting was about fires in Malibu," said Phyllis Ruse, Temecula's deputy director of community services who has been fielding complaints.

The issue, Ruse said, has become a matter of health and safety, not just the sports teams locals can watch.

On Tuesday night, the City Council is scheduled to discuss what can be done to provide residents here with better emergency information.

"I've been working for the past few days to put together a subcommittee to look into this," said City Councilman Jeff Comerchero. "The charge will be to work on the possibility of getting San Diego stations available here. But the broader question is to find ways to make information more available to people in times of emergency."

Comerchero said he has heard compliments for both city staff who continually updated the city's Web site to provide fire information as well as for The Californian, which did the same on its site.

"However in an emergency, people's prime source for news is still radio and television," he said. "Here, the local radio stations did a poor job and the television stations were focused on Los Angeles. We want to really roll up our sleeves and see what can be done."

It's in your DMA

Designated Market Areas - established by Nielsen Media Research, a firm better known for its television program rating service - are geographic designations that determine each television market based on measured viewing patterns.

Nielsen determines those market boundaries based on surveys they conduct on channels the majority of over-the-air viewers in a region, typically a county, watch.

There are 210 DMAs across the country.

According to Nielsen, Southwest County belongs with the Los Angeles DMA.

"Nielsen currently defines the San Diego DMA as all of San Diego County and only San Diego County," said Robert Mercer, director of public relations for El Segundo-based satellite provider DirectTV. "Therefore, we cannot legally provide San Diego stations … outside of San Diego County."

Satellite providers are governed by The Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999, which was updated by Congress in 2004 with the The Satellite Home Viewer Extension and Reauthorization Act.

Neither act requires satellite companies to offer local channels, but does give the companies - the two major providers being DISH Network and DirectTV - the option of providing the local stations. However, if the company chooses to provide local stations it must provide subscribers with all of the local broadcast stations assigned to the area's DMA.

Locally, that means stations based primarily in Los Angeles.

Mercer said his company is sympathetic to concerns of Southwest County viewers.

"(However) we have no legal options under current federal legislation governing local channels to provide any San Diego stations outside of San Diego County," he said. "Nielsen determines which areas belong to which DMA, which in turn limits where we can provide local channels. Any change in the rules would have to come from Congress, since the underlying laws and require that we use the Nielsen definitions."

Not so fast

The folks at Nielsen would disagree.

Although efforts to reach a spokesman for the firm were unsuccessful, Nielsen has obviously heard this all before and has posted a lengthy statement on the subject on the "Frequently Asked Questions" portion of its Web site.

"On occasion, satellite subscribers have been led to believe that Nielsen Media Research is responsible for determining which stations are available to satellite subscribers under federal legislation," the site states. "However, this is not the case."

DMAs are used solely to measure who is watching what on television within a given area, the company insists.

"DMAs were never intended to be used for the purposes that other companies are now using them," the site states.

The cable side

The rules that apply to satellite companies are generally the same for cable service providers, said Patti Rockenwagner, a spokeswoman for Time-Warner Cable, which services several communities in Southwest County.

Cable companies also use the Nielsen information to determine the stations available to local subscribers.

In Southwest County, that means a large dose of Los Angeles-based stations, although Time Warner also carries the signal from San Diego-based KUSI-Channel 51 to some customers here.

Cable companies, like satellite companies, follow the "must-carry" rule. In the past, that meant little room for cable providers to offer stations outside of the designated DMA.

Comerchero argued that, given technological advances, that's probably not the case anymore.

"We heard from cable channels here for years that they didn't have the space to carry San Diego stations because of 'must-carry' rules," Comerchero said. "It's different now with all the fiber-optics available."

The local alternative

When fires broke out in Southwest Riverside County early last week - the Roca fire in Aguanga and the Rosa fire in the De Luz area - the region's only locally based television station, KZSW-TV, began what veteran news broadcaster Bill Loren called "wall-to-wall" coverage of the blazes.

Regular programming was interrupted, reporters were sent into the field to cover the fires and city and fire officials from both Temecula and Murrieta were interviewed on the air.

"For a little tiny station, I thought we did a lot of stuff," Loren said.

"Stuff" cable customers in the city of Riverside, the county of San Bernardino and the communities of Sun City and Menifee were able to view.

But Temecula and Murrieta cable customers were not able to watch the coverage because Time-Warner currently does not provide the Temecula-based station to its customers in those cities.

However, Rockenwagner said Friday a deal had just been inked between the cable company and the television station to make KZSW's daily local newscast available to customers on Time Warner's "video on demand" service.

"We're still working out some equipment challenges," Rockenwagner said. "But the agreement has been signed and we hope to have (the newscast) available by the end of the year."

KZSW is available on the relatively new Verizon FiOS fiber-optic cable network, which is in place in several areas of Southwest County, including Temecula, Murrieta and Lake Elsinore.

Then there's the old fashioned way - rabbit ears. An old-fashioned antenna on a television picks up the station's over-the-air signal, which comes from a hilltop tower on Clinton Keith Road, just north of Murrieta.

Determined to get it done

Temecula city manager Shawn Nelson said his staff has made efforts in the past to add San Diego stations to the local television mix.

Given the recent fires, and the lack of what potentially could have been life-saving information available to area residents, there is a renewed determination to find a way to get it done.

"We're not asking to get rid of the Los Angeles stations and replace them with the San Diego stations," Nelson said. "What we'd like is to have just a few of the San Diego stations that provide news … to people here."

Nelson expects the City Council will take a firm stand on the issue.

"We're going to press this as hard as we can," he said. "We're not just going to take 'no' for an answer."

Still, given the all the red tape and government bureaucracy, Nelson admitted it won't be easy.

"There are a lot of federal regulations," he said. "It's complicated."

Contact staff writer John Hunneman at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2603, or hunneman@californian.com.