Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature currently requires accessing the site using the built-in Safari browser.
The stubborn Beaver Creek wildfire has 1,200 firefighters toiling tirelessly in Idaho to keep it from spreading. The wildfire scorching Sun Valley, Idaho, has already consumed more than 100,000 acres, and threatened 5,000 homes. Sun Valley is home to many pricey spreads, including second homes reportedly owned by actors Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. Lightning ignited the fire more than two weeks ago. Over the weekend, firefighters benefited from cloud cover and higher humidity. But they only managed to establish 9% by early Monday morning. The forecast for the next couple of days brings both good and bad news. The rain from thunderstorms could help quench the flames, while lightning might spark new fires. Gov. Butch Otter had nothing but praise for the crews. "They look the worst for wear but you see that smile come across their face and their attitude about how they're being treated and how they're being supported by our local folks, by the county folks, the city folks (and) the state department of lands," he said.
Idaho under threat from raging wildfires
Academy Award-winning actor Richard Dreyfus was among those expressing gratitude. "The #beavercreekfire is ravaging my family's hometown, Ketchum, ID," Dreyfus posted on his official Twitter account. "Thank you, firefighters, and be safe. Houses aren't worth lives." The fire isn't the only one burning up Idaho. At least nine large fires have scorched 407,883 acres across Idaho, which is experiencing the most wildland fire activity of any state, according to the Boise-based National Interagency Fire Center. Meanwhile, a brush fire in Polk County, Oregon, destroyed a family's private vineyard. Its cause? Fire officials believe the owner hit rocks witha lawn mower sparking it. "That ignited the area around him, and before they could contain it, it started spreading, and as you can tell by the wind up here, it didn't take long for it to spread," Bill Hahn, fire chief of Southwest Polk, told CNN affiliate KOIN.
Soggy South
Meanwhile, a stalled front stretching along the Gulf and Southeast Coasts will bring heavy rain through early this week, fueled by abundant moisture from the Gulf of Mexico. Flood watches and warnings are in place from the Florida panhandle to the Carolinas. Soils in this region are saturated, creating a potential for flash floods. Six inches of rain soaked southern Mississippi Sunday, leaving First United Gospel Assembly church in Gulfport surrounded by waist-deep water. "We were in service and we came out and it was flooded out here," Bishop Otis Rankin who told CNN affiliate WLOX, looking across the church parking lot. The only worse flooding, he said, was Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The flood waters hit William Harold too. "We're in a low lying area, so it floods from time to time, but I got up and there was actually two inches of water in the den," he said. "So we grabbed all the towels we could and started sopping up what we could."
Rip currents
In South Florida, strong onshore winds and choppy surf stirred up rip currents throughout the weekend in South Florida, drowning an elderly couple off Miami Beach. Police said it was one of 50 incidents where swimmers had to rescued from the rough waters. The couple were swimming with a red float, appearing fine one minute and under water the next, witnesses told CNN affiliate WSVN. Beachgoers along with Ocean Rescue guards rushed to pull them from the water, according to WSVN. "They were in cardiac arrest when fire rescue arrived," said Capt. Adonis Garcia, spokesman for Miami Beach Fire Rescue. "We worked them all the way to the hospital at Mount Sinai when they were pronounced dead."
Fires char Idaho, rains flood southern Mississippi - CNN.com
Bill Bunting, forecast operations chief for the Oklahoma-based Storm Prediction Center, said Tuesday the powerful wind gusts that fanned the wildfires in Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas should diminish to about 10 to 20 mph on Tuesday. He said temperatures should top in the 70s, with afternoon humidity low. “These conditions will make it somewhat easier for firefighting efforts, but far from perfect. The fires still will be moving,” Bunting told The Associated Press. “The ideal situation is that it would turn cold and rain, and unfortunately that’s not going to happen.” In addition to those four states, conditions were ripe for fires in Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska. That followed powerful thunderstorms that moved through the middle of the country overnight, spawning dozens of suspected tornadoes, according to the National Weather Service.
Kansas wildfires have burned about 625 square miles of land and killed one person. The Kansas Highway Patrol said Corey Holt, of Oklahoma City, died Monday when his tractor-trailer jackknifed as he tried to back up because of poor visibility on a Kansas highway, and he succumbed to smoke after getting out of his vehicle. Two SUVs crashed into the truck, injuring six people, state trooper Michael Racy said. Most of the state’s charred land is in Clark County, where 30 structures were damaged, said Allison Kuhns, a county emergency management office spokeswoman. About half of those structures are near Englewood, one of two communities evacuated. Kuhns said there also have been significant cattle losses as entire ranches were engulfed.
Flames and smoke envelope a grain elevator in Sitka, Kan.
That fire started in Oklahoma, where it burned an estimated 390 square miles in Beaver County. Officials say a separate blaze scorched more than 155 square miles of land in neighbouring Harper County, Oklahoma, and was a factor in the death of a woman who had a heart attack while trying to keep her farm near Buffalo from burning. The largest evacuations elsewhere were in Reno County, Kansas, where 10,000 to 12,000 people voluntarily left their homes Monday night, said Katie Horner, a state Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman. She said 66 people were in shelters Tuesday in Hutchinson, 40 miles northwest of Wichita.
Among them was Shelley Wilson, who fled Monday with her disabled son and pets from a blaze encircling her farm outside of Hutchinson. She returned later that night with her adult daughter to retrieve her tractor. “I don’t know if I have a home,” Wilson said at the shelter Tuesday as her daughter did her best to lighten her mood. “In case I needed to rebuild, I wanted to at least have my tractor.” Retiree Sheryl Stessen said she grabbed her cat and fled her apartment on the outskirts of Hutchinson when she saw the fire quickly go from a puff of smoke to a big, orange ball. “Most of us are generally grumpy,” she said Tuesday. “I just want to go home.” Several hundred more people evacuated their homes in Russell, Ellsworth and Comanche counties, in central Kansas.
MORE
He posted the video on his Facebook page and told what happened:
Kansas Highway Patrol Trooper Tod Hileman shared a video Tuesday on social media of what he called "one of the most steering wheel gripping moments" he's had.
He was directing motorists Monday on Interstate 70 near Wilson in north-central Kansas to turn around, he said, "before they drove into" the raging fires.
One semi became high-centered in the median while trying to turn around, Hileman said in his post. He can be heard in the video urging the semi's driver to get out. They both made it out safety.
Kansas Dashcam Shows Scary Moments Amid Fires | Officer.com
The US National Weather Service extended warnings through today of extreme fire danger conditions throughout much of Southern California due to lack of moisture along with a possible increase in wind gust speeds at the end of the week. Firefighters made some progress on Wednesday on corralling the so-called Thomas Fire, which has spread into national forest land northwest of Los Angeles. However, they warned that the fire would continue to spread west as it eats up parched brush. By Wednesday evening, state fire officials said the blaze was 30 percent contained, but it continued to threaten Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, Summerland and Montecito — a wealthy area home to celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey.
Since the blaze broke out on Monday last week, it has burned more than 965km2 and destroyed 921 buildings — including at least 700 homes. It threatens 18,000 buildings and has prompted evacuations of about 100,000 people. Elsewhere, fire officials announced that a cooking fire at a homeless encampment last week sparked a blaze that destroyed six homes in the exclusive Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles. Arson investigators determined that the so-called Skirball Fire near the world-famous J. Paul Getty Museum was started by an illegal fire at a camp near a freeway underpass, Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Erik Scott said, adding that the camp was empty when firefighters found it, but people apparently had been sleeping and cooking there for at least several days.
The Fire Department was working on a plan to relocate such encampments at the start of fire season next year to avoid danger, Scott said. At the largest of the fires northwest of Los Angeles, firefighters protected foothill homes while the flames churned mostly into unoccupied forest land, Santa Barbara County Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason said. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Eric Burdon and his wife, Marianna, were among the people who fled the smoke in the small city of Ojai on Tuesday. Burdon, a member of the 1960s British Invasion band The Animals, wrote on Facebook last week about having to flee and returning temporarily to find his home still standing with ashes all around it. “A week like this gives you the perspective that life is what truly matters,” he wrote. A photograph accompanying the post showed his handprint and signature written in ashes.
California firefighters wary despite gains in unpredictable fire conditions - Taipei Times
On Thursday, they were deep in the Los Padres National Forest, covered in wood grit, soot and sweat, as the Thomas fire continued to grow — becoming the fourth-largest in modern California history. In the morning, commanders stressed the dangers of the work and urged them to be careful even while mopping up hot spots, cutting burned trees or striding though charred rubble. Hours later, a San Diego fire engineer, Cory Iverson, died on the fire lines. The loss rippled through the army of 8,000 fire personnel — both professionals and inmates — on the scene. Some lined the road as Iverson’s body was loaded into a hearse and taken from the fire zone. For 11 days, they’ve been fighting a sharply uneven battle against a devilish fusion of dry wind, fault-crumpled terrain and desiccated vegetation. Playing some of the hardest roles are the inmate hand crews, which make up about 20 percent of the firefighters here.
On a ridge above Montecito on Thursday, they worked in crews of 15, leaders shouting orders, scarifying a ribbon of mountain too steep and craggy for any bulldozer. The winds had abated, as they had many times before, but the inmates were racing the clock, chopping away at ceanothus trunks and gnarled manzanita roots with specialized saws, picks, shovels, rakes and axes. Forecasters predicted Santa Barbara’s notorious sundowner winds, which howl down the mountain canyons to the coast, driving flames and embers with them, would return Friday night. Because the wildfire has sprawled so widely, the task of finding the critical points to cut it off had become profoundly difficult. “This thing is 60 miles long and 40 miles wide,” said Tim Chavez, a fire behavior analyst with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “There’s a lot of fire out there.”
Inmates working on a fire crew rest at camp between shifts on the fire line as they work with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) on the Thomas fire in Ventura, Calif.
No day has been the same on the front lines. On Saturday, the winds had calmed. The heat rose in a column, carrying smoke and soot, mushrooming into a pyrocumulus cloud 30,000 feet high. On the ground, it was quiet and still. Gerardo Moran, 41, and his fellow convicts thought the worst was over. They were loading the truck about 2 a.m. Sunday to head back to camp and rest, as the temperature dropped. Then the weight of all that material in the atmosphere collapsed. A violent downdraft hit the ground and blew in every direction, fanning waves of flame. “Come on, tools out!” a Cal Fire captain shouted. “I never knew we were gonna be in the eye of the storm right there,” Moran recalled this week. “It’s pretty intense — the biggest adrenaline rushes I’ve ever had, right there on the fire line.”
The fire scorched another 50,000 acres during that bout. But Moran and the inmates were able to save a horse ranch off Highway 150, which he was happy about. Established in 1943, the inmate fire program employs roughly 3,800 prisoners across California, paying them $2 a day in the off-season — when they clear flood control channels and hiking trails — and $1 an hour when they’re fighting fires. “I’ve always been a fan of the program,” said Mark Brown, a deputy fire chief in Marin County and operations commander on the Thomas fire. “They work their butts off.” For the inmates, the danger is obvious — four have died since the program began, including two in the last two years. And some have manipulated the program — in October, an inmate escaped when he walked off the fire line while fighting a blaze in Orange County, only to be recaptured on Halloween in Los Angeles.
MORE
A monster of a wildfire burning in Southern California froze the Sawyers' plans for a big family Christmas and has forced the couple from their Santa Barbara home for nearly two weeks. Even if their beloved home of five decades survives the next predicted onslaught of winds, the Sawyers are preparing for Christmas in yet another hotel. "This is getting ridiculous," said the 82-year-old Curry Sawyer from her hotel in Goleta on Tuesday. "My husband has the feeling, 'Why aren't they letting us back in?' but they've got hot spots up there and if we get more Santa Ana winds, we're going to be back to square one," Sawyer said. "I'm not sure we're out of the woods."
Flames rise behind a home in Santa Barbara, Calif.
The Sawyers are among dozens of frustrated evacuees who've been away from home for days and weeks, living out of hotels or evacuation shelters, or staying with friends or family. Some have no home to go back to while others are hoping theirs survive. The Sawyers were planning a big family Christmas with their sons, who each are married and have a daughter, and live in Los Angeles and Amherst, Massachusetts. If their home doesn't make it, or if a mandatory evacuation remains in place come Christmas, Sawyer said the family will make do in Los Angeles. Her son's home can accommodate her other son's family, but Sawyer and her husband would have to stay in a hotel. "We'll be more just trying to cramp ourselves into a small space," she said. "But at least we'll be together."
Hundreds in shelters
As of Wednesday, 432 people were still staying at evacuation shelters run by the Red Cross, agency spokeswoman Georgia Duncan said. The shelters are preparing to stay open for Christmas and many agencies are donating toys so that the children there have presents to open. One company already donated more than 100 bicycles, mostly for children. And Christmas came early for one 5-year-old boy who was handed a Mickey Mouse doll. "He just grabbed it and cried because he had lost all of his toys and just thought there would be no Christmas," Duncan said. "To him, yesterday was Christmas."
Santa Barbara County Firefighters haul dozens of pounds of hose and equipment down steep terrain below E. Camino Cielo to root out and extinguish smoldering hot spots in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Marolyn Romero-Sim, her husband and their 9-year-old daughter have been at an evacuation shelter in Ventura for two weeks after they watched their home of four years, an RV, burn in the wildfire, along with their beloved dog, their Christmas tree and a few presents. The family is trying to save money for another RV, but knows Christmas will probably be spent in the shelter. "I try not to let my daughter know, but I feel horrible," the 34-year-old Romero-Sim said through tears Tuesday. "She's being so understanding. She's just thankful we're going to be together for Christmas."
Battling the Thomas Fire
