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The 2000 election was a street brawl
for the presidency of the United States.
What happened in Miami changed this country, forever.
While Democrats wanted to do the right thing,
Republicans wanted to win.
The election was lost in many different places.
But it was stolen in Miami.
...Branch One or Battalion 44.
Get ahold of OES there at the command post
and let's push it all the way out
to the edge of the city of Ventura.
Take a look at this. It has exploded into 500 acres.
These high winds, not so good with the helicopter.
We're working our way over there,
but we can tell you
that this is burning very close to Santa Paula.
It's right off the 126 and the 150.
The 150 is actually the road that takes you to Ojai.
Just wanna make sure you're aware of the fire.
It's moving at a rapid rate of spread.
There's Thomas Aquinas University that's in that area.
That's where it's getting the name.
Now, there are plenty of homes in this area as well.
If they are not evacuating, they will be told to.
Obviously, life foremost, property second.
-I'm in a bad spot, ooh. - As we understood it
listening to some scanner traffic,
they could not get enough resources
to this fire fast enough.
There's helicopters in the air,
there's ground crews on the ground,
but the high winds this evening,
along with the dry temperatures,
has made this into a huge fire, and these flames continue
just to gobble up acreage out here
and keep moving out to the west.
What are you making?
NOÉMIE DUMONT MILANO: I'm making a cheese-slash-potato French dish...
that I'm gonna make my husband for the first time tonight,
on the 3rd of December.
Go.
We met in San Francisco.
We fell in love and got married.
When I was around five months pregnant,
we decided to explore California
in the hope to find the right place
to raise our little girl.
As we learned more and more about California,
people kept telling us about this special place called Ojai.
There is a place
that everybody finds in this valley
that is home to them.
I grew up here in the Ojai Valley.
"Ojai" is a Chumash word, and it's a village
that's up here in this upper valley.
And it means "moon" or "lunar phase."
So when you're up here and the moon comes up,
it's as if you could touch it.
NOÉMIE: We just fell in love with the weather,
the flower, the smells, and the animals.
Maé was born two months prematurely
and, uh, when we move to Ojai, she was not even two months old.
The size of a tiny little human being.
So as a new mom,
this move across California was pretty rough on me.
We moved here about a month before the fire.
A house directly on the edge
of the Los Padres National Forest.
High wind advisories have all been upgraded to all-out warnings
as the dangerous Santa Ana winds are blowing big time.
NOÉMIE: Uh, I remember telling myself,
"What's going on with this wind?"
I went outside, I was like,
"This is not normal."
I just had a feeling.
I knew that something bad was gonna happen.
-911 OPERATOR: Fire paramedics.
We were just sitting out on the front porch
and I noticed, uh, an orange glow and smoke.
It's really blowing up now.
We have a fire. We are in a house here
at Anlauf Canyon Road above Steckel Park.
911 OPERATOR: Is your structure threatened?
Yes, it is.
The first engine that arrived
was from Upper Ojai.
The fire captain got in
and he said, "Look, it's in Anlauf Canyon,
but we can't access it yet."
It was a total envelopment
of Anlauf Canyon in flames,
50 acres of hell.
Basically, we had about 30 engines ordered
in the first 10 minutes.
Has anyone reported a fire?
911 OPERATOR: Yes, ma'am. It was Saint Thomas Aquinas College,
that's-- that's where it started.
We're almost next to them.
-What should we do? -911 OPERATOR: Yes, ma'am.
You do what you feel is best.
For the Highway 150 corridors,
we move into Santa Paula for immediate evacuation
of approximately 500 residences.
Sheriff's office!
-Fire! -911 OPERATOR: Fire paramedics.
We're on Wheeler Canyon Road,
and there's no fire engines here
for structure protection or anything,
and the fire is coming down the mountain right now.
This area has to be evacuated right now.
I'm not kidding around!
Winds on the ridgetop probably...
-...it's 40 to 50 miles an hour.
Active long-range spotting.
Where are the fire department?
911 OPERATOR: They're all there, ma'am.
-They're all there. - No, they're not!
We're surrounded by fire and we can't get out.
-We have no help!
My mom's stuck in the fire down there,
and she can't get out. She's with my brother.
The tree right above my house.
And there's embers. Oh my God, it's starting to go.
I'm at home alone, and I can see the flames
-coming over the next canyon. -911 OPERATOR: Yes.
And I don't know what to do. I can hear the crackling.
There was just fire absolutely everywhere.
It was getting so bad, I couldn't breathe,
I couldn't see much more than an arm's length,
and as we were driving out, uh,
the fire was pinching off and we barely made it out.
Go! Let's go!
And it hopscotched from canyon to canyon to canyon
and moved, in a matter of six hours,
what it would probably take six days
to accomplish on a normal day without the wind.
Residents north of Foothill,
-evacuate your home.
While all this was taking place, a new fire started.
A transformer just blew up,
and, uh, it's going pretty good.
Very end of Koenigstein,
there's, uh-- A transformer just blew, and--
and there's a major fire started up here.
That new fire started in Upper Ojai.
We were being hit on multiple fronts.
As priorities came through for the Koenigstein Road area,
the fire apparatus was quickly cut off
from traveling the Highway 150 corridor.
We had burning power poles,
we had live electrical lines down across the highway.
And that main thoroughfare that got companies
up to Upper Ojai quick was immediately cut off.
NOÉMIE: It was exactly 8:00 p.m.
and I was very, very excited
because for the first time, I was able
to just put her in bed at the right moment.
My excitement faded pretty fast
because right after that,
I started to hear sounds of helicopters.
We put all of the aircraft
up in the Koenigstein Road area,
but the water that you drop is just being taken by the wind.
The aircraft called Operations on the radio and say,
"It's unsafe for us to be up in the air.
We're shutting down."
As it was rapidly escalating,
the potential for loss of life
was greater than anything that I had seen before.
NOÉMIE: When I went outside the house,
I saw this gigantic glow up in the mountain.
And I decided to check on the Ojai Twitter,
and I just read, "There is a fire...
two miles from your house
with 70-miles-per-hour gusts."
I remember telling my husband, "We gotta go now."
I woke up the baby, put her in her car seat,
-put her in the car.
NOÉMIE: I run back inside the house and...
...the baby starts screaming, and I turn
and I could see this insane, scary glow...
that was coming right at us.
We drove down to the nearest hotel
and spent the night watching the news.
The Thomas Fire in Ventura County
forced new evacuations overnight.
It is the largest of the four fires,
and it's only five percent contained.
Now, winds are actually carrying the fire
toward Ojai.
We saw a wall of flames that had to have been
300 feet or higher.
We've been hearing the sparks and loud booms
from transformers that have caught fire
and they blasted off.
Uh, have 'em head toward the city of Ventura
on Highway 126. It's at the Aquatic Center
is what we're being told for the nighttime spot.
I hear the screaming.
"You need to evacuate! You need to evacuate!
Search and rescue."
He says, "Sweetheart,
the fire is right there in Bill's yard.
You have to get out of here."
I see the fire in that canyon,
and I don't wanna leave
because I spended a lot of time to build my house.
And then all of a sudden, the wall of flame came over.
Then I looked to the left,
and the flames are coming up the valley.
Then I looked behind me,
and the fire was coming behind me,
so virtually surrounded.
When I got to the perimeter of my property,
I could see that my neighbor's house...
was completely on fire.
I've seen a lot of fires in the Australian Outback
and in surrounding suburbs and around the cities,
but I'd never seen it move this fast.
We're alive. And, uh...
You go on.
Now we have five fire fronts.
We're still dealing with Santa Paula,
Fillmore, Upper Ojai,
and now the topography drives this dry weather
and the wind is even stronger,
and now it starts moving around Ojai,
and you're getting an idea now how this is a monster.
NOÉMIE: We were in the hotel room in shock.
And in the morning,
when my husband went to get coffee,
one of our neighbor in the lobby said
that he personally witnessed our house
being attacked by flames.
As this news try to sink in,
someone knocked crazy and just yelled,
"Get out, get out, evacuation again."
I mean, everything is on fire.
I was extremely scared...
because we were new to the area.
I just didn't know what was the best escape plan.
Oh, my God, are we driving right at it?
It's okay, this is turning away from it.
NOÉMIE: No, I don't think so.
These people are just looking.
NOÉMIE: Oh, my God.
We escaped north through the mountains
towards Santa Barbara.
The fire got to our house so fast the night before
that we didn't have time to pack anything.
We just ran out,
and, uh, we didn't know what was gonna happen next.
Going into the weekend,
red flag warnings are saturating much of the state.
The Thomas Fire is larger
than New York City and Boston combined.
As we're listening
to how it's just raging towards us
down on the west end of the Ojai Valley,
we started thinking about the things
that we needed to gather.
We had seven cats,
three dogs, two ratties, and two birds
to travel with five of us.
We took two vehicles, and we drove to Santa Barbara.
As of Saturday afternoon,
8,400 firefighters working on this fire.
Already we've seen 1,000 structures destroyed,
18,000 structures threatened.
NOÉMIE:
On our wedding anniversary,
we decided to drive back.
It was... apocalyptic.
When we finally turn into our street,
um, I was shocked.
All those houses, so many, they were just gone.
When we finally arrived to our house,
I couldn't believe it.
After thinking that your house is gone,
this feeling of knowing that it's still there
is just amazing, but at the same time,
I just felt so sorry for all my neighbors.
We got really, really lucky.
Because our house is the last house
just before the national forest,
the last fire hydrant on the street
is actually right here, which made it an ideal place
for the firefighters to battle the blaze.
They were literally firing their hoses over the house
as the fire blew over here.
NOÉMIE: Some of my neighbors just were not that lucky.
The people of the Upper Ojai suffered greatly,
due, in part, to the second start
up in the Koenigstein area.
It started right here.
I remember coming up here, and we were already evacuate--
trying to evacuate, uh, some of these residents up here,
and we looked at it, we go, "Wow.
We know where it's going."
It's going right toward your house, basically,
and everyone else's house down there.
So the whole team is en route.
Mark Scantlin, we went to school together.
Oh, gosh, Mark, yes. How are you?
I'm doing all right, John.
-Were you up here that night? -Yeah.
-How'd it go for you? -Oh, I lost everything.
-Oh, man.
-Everything. House-- -Yeah.
House, garage, barns, cars.
-Yeah. -Looked like a tornado after it went by.
I hope the future's bright.
-We're moving. -Are ya?
-Yeah. Yeah. -Out of the area, or what?
Yeah, I'm done.
The Thomas Fire currently is at 242,000 acres.
It's been burning for 10 days.
It ran through to the western edge
of the City of Ventura in five hours.
We evacuated in this area, I think the estimate's around
60,000 people in that five-hour period.
The first fire started in the creek bed.
Within an hour of that, we get information
that we have a second start on Koenigstein Road.
You couldn't start a fire in a worse spot.
We were watching it from up on the other side of the road.
We saw it start,
we saw you guys lined up, and we saw you guys leave,
and then it came our way.
-We couldn't get out fast enough. - Hmm.
Why weren't you fighting that fire when that--
when it just started,
when it was just local, right there?
-We have-- Hold on. Wait. - Another question.
-Let-- let me finish. Hold on. - You're charging an extra tax to us.
-So, hey, we have a-- -And you're requiring us to have hydrants,
but you won't use them? I don't understand that.
One hose would have reached my house
and put it out and saved five more
from burning down on Cesar. One hose.
Not to downplay any of the losses,
but to not have more life loss is pretty remarkable.
And this is the third time I've been wearing this this year.
How many homes did you save?
More than we lost, I'll tell you that.
The numbers that I'm getting on the property loss
is somewhere around 100, uh, structures in this area.
Per capita, that's the highest loss
we've had on a fire. Um...
That's-- that's a tough discussion to have.
I lost my home from the Thomas Fire.
And, uh, it take me 13 years to build my beautiful house.
And I-- my son told me,
"Daddy, could you please save the house?"
And I said, "Yes. I will save the house."
My daughter who lives in Santa Paula,
she called me and she says, "Mom, our house is gone."
And when I saw it...
it was devastating.
I still can't believe it.
E-- Even though I'm sitting here...
with my back to it.
And my cats...
didn't live.
We just spray-painted some signs
on pieces of plywood that said, "Fire relief."
And the supplies kept coming in.
That's how the relief station was born.
Leona Mote says, "I live right here on this road,
and I've lived there for 54 years.
And my husband just died in October.
And when the fire came, I was panicking,
looking for my cats."
And I say, "Hey, Leona, do you need any help?"
She says, "Yeah.
One of the things that was sitting on my dresser
was my husband's size 13 wedding ring."
First thing we find, size 13 wedding ring.
Swear to God.
The first thing that the sifters found
was this ring and another ring.
I love the way the neighborhood has rallied around.
It's called Star Point Ranch.
We're grateful that, uh, we got this help
to help clean up a bit of the mess.
'Cause as you can see, it's quite devastating
to lose a beautiful 1930s wooden home
and all your belongings.
And we saved bugger all, you know what I mean?
So nothing, and virtually the clothes on our back,
basically.
After the fire,
it looked like we had been through hell.
We couldn't breathe, and we couldn't drink the water,
and we c-- we had to wear masks.
And it was like,
"Are we gonna be able to live here?"
NOÉMIE: The air quality was just so bad
that we just couldn't risk to bring our baby back
before it got better.
The air quality and the conditions
in Ojai Valley were untenable by most people.
There's a lot more going on than the fire itself.
Oh, don't try to walk, buddy.
So, it just happens to be
that this upper valley is a place
where the people considered bear to be their spirit animal.
That poor little bear that-- that survived the dehydration,
it must have suffered the burning of its feet.
Great resilience.
The power and the spirit of these animals,
even the smallest little ones,
hummingbird, butterfly,
they all have abilities that, as human beings, we want.
Oh, it's coming, it's coming.
And so to see it suffer that way,
I could just feel his grief
and total sorrow.
Oh, he's thirsty as hell.
And then to think about
how many other animals perished...
Here, pal. Little bit more.
One second, one second.
Let's do 1.5 of Telazol and 1.5 of water.
You can't overdose a bear on Telazol,
so that's the good thing.
Just don't hit its lung.
No, I got a front right shoulder.
-You guys ready? - Yeah.
-Clean hit. - Good shot.
So, it was just like the last bear.
The animal had to be immobilized
so it could be assessed for further injuries
to see if, you know,
rehabilitation is something that we can do.
What's the weight estimate now?
- Now, about 30. -Yeah.
- It's a he. -It's a he, yeah.
- Okay. -All right.
Can you tell me sort of about the scale of this event
in terms of its effect on the wildlife?
It's gonna be significant,
especially of a fire of this magnitude,
you know, raging through the Los Padres National Forest
as well as up into the urban community.
And anytime you have wildlife,
just like people living at homes where they're affected,
you're gonna have wildlife that's impacted.
It was a really devastating time
for the natural world out here.
But it isn't our first time that we've experienced fire
growing up here in Ojai.
Evacuation is now taking place.
Three quarters of the town has been wiped out,
Blackened waste.
Entire communities to be evacuated.
The president today proclaimed the fires a national disaster.
We can't keep doing what we've been doing.
And what we've been doing is not considering,
"Well, this is a fire corridor.
We know that. We have to rethink things."
You see something on that side over there?
Yeah.
That means people may not be able to build
in places they wanted to build, and if they do build,
they need to recognize
the fire department's not gonna be able to protect them.
And the fire agencies in these firestorms
are basically at wits' end, and all they can do
is try to keep people safe and get them out of the way.
Okay, sir. Keep your arms in for me.
Sadly, through lack of understanding of nature
and understanding this fire ecology,
we have allowed houses to be built
further and further into the urban wildland interface
right on the edge between the chaparral
-and the urban areas.
The areas that are very difficult to defend.
JONATHAN "YONNI" SCHWARTZ: Well, the fire comes and goes,
but for the vegetation to reestablish itself,
it takes a few years.
Now, concern was how this burned landscape
is going to respond to rainstorms.
Equally as scary to the fire
is the risk of a mudslide or some sort of debris flow.
During the 1969 flood,
there was actually a family living right here
that got washed out
by the amount of water that comes off this hillside.
We were able to move back in about a month after the fire,
just in time for the biggest rainstorm in years.
I started digging some trenches out back
to protect our house.
A cold front and a squall line with lightning
is developing and moving into the Los Angeles area.
The National Weather Service has warned that flash flooding,
debris flow, and mudslides are possible
in the communities already devastated
by the Thomas and La Tuna Fires.
Mandatory evacuation orders are in place here.
Thirty thousand people are in these evacuation zones.
Many of these slopes right above Ojai
have very high probabilities
of producing debris flows.
People have these big boulders in their backyards,
really like them.
It was great landscaping, but none of them thought,
"Well, how did these boulders come here?"
For the second time in about a month,
search and rescue was on our street,
evacuating residents.
It happened in the past.
It will happen again in the future.
That's a basic law of geology.
Developing tonight, the search is on
for mudslide survivors in Southern California.
Rescuers are trying to reach 13 people reported missing,
17 have already died.
Authorities say at least 100 homes are destroyed,
-washed away by the wall of mud. - The staging area
for the urban search and rescue efforts
-had been set up... - Live in Montecito
where the streets are absolutely littered with cars and debris.
I heard the rumble of the rocks and I looked over at the river,
and the trees are just coming down.
We were able to crawl out our window to the roof.
House is wiped out. Just took everything out.
And then later, we were worried about our neighbor's house
and we went over to see if, uh, they were okay,
and we heard a little baby crying
and, uh, dug down, found a little baby.
I don't know where it came from.
But, uh, we got it out, got the mud out of its mouth.
I hope that it's okay.
They took it right to the hospital.
But it was just a baby four feet down in the mud,
in nowhere, just under the rocks.
I'm glad we got it.
But who knows what else is out there.
ALEXANDER "TREY" ROBERTSON IV: Okay, folks. We'll go ahead and get started.
Thank you for coming.
Collectively, our group represents
about 455 clients
whose homes were either completely destroyed or damaged
in the fire or the resulting debris flow.
Cal Fire investigators are looking at burn patterns,
how it spread,
and they specifically are looking
at Southern California Edison's power lines and poles.
I was sitting in our family room
that has the beautiful view up to the Topas,
and I said, "Oh, my gosh!
I see two flashes, two fires just started."
And it was the transformers that had exploded
on Koenigstein.
As soon as the transformers exploded,
our power went out.
It was about a 50-foot wall of flame
that actually came up and hit the house.
It looked like a war zone.
It's amazing to me in that,
in this age of technology,
we're still relying upon World War II infrastructure
to transmit electricity.
It's-- it's just crazy.
Overall, all the fires in 2017,
you're talking almost 10,000 structures lost.
If you count the Montecito mudslide,
you're talking 60 plus fatalities.
I was hoping that event would create a wake-up call
and force us to ask the hard questions.
Should the utilities do something to create
a more resilient system? Absolutely.
But we have to look at the big picture,
because what we're really doing is putting Band-Aids everywhere.
We're not looking at the disease.
The last drought we had recently
was the worst drought we've had in a thousand years.
There's probably gonna be towns
in the western side of the Sierras
that are just gonna become drought ghost towns.
I knew my neighbors were not doing great.
I knew my neighbors were uninsured or underinsured,
living in tents.
But there are certain times where I'm like,
I don't wanna be waking up at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning,
looking out the windows when there's 70-mile-an-hour winds,
thinking my house is gonna burn down.
That's not normal.
It's sad because I always thought
I'm gonna live here forever.
I raised my kids here on this property.
And this is my new home.
I got myself two four-month-old kittens.
And they are filling my house with love.
This is my sanctuary.
NOÉMIE: You hear a lot of people that say
that we shouldn't be living here,
but I'm looking all around the news
and seeing all of those big natural catastrophes
happening everywhere, and I'm just wondering,
"Where am I safe to be living in?"
Tonight, rivers are rising to record levels,
threatening homes and businesses in Arkansas, Oklahoma,
Kansas, and Missouri.
Hurricane Michael closing in on the Florida Panhandle.
It could be the strongest storm ever to hit that area.
The Mendocino Complex Fire
is now the largest wildfire in state history.
Sixty-six million Americans
are bracing for impact.
In the past week, at least 15 people
have been killed by tornadoes and flooding.
There are more severe storms in the forecast
for later on this week.
All burned in here.
This high up.
When we look back
at how the Native people survived here,
their connection and their conversation with nature
was supreme.
We can learn a lot from the natural world.
Plants have tremendous intelligence,
the way they've adapted to this fire climate.
We can see corollaries for our lives.
And I know there's a mystique about Ojai,
uh, being a "spiritual center" and stuff like that.
And, uh, I think that's-- I think it's in the mountains.
I think if you get up to some of these amazing,
beautiful places up there,
you can have a spiritual experience in nature.
Oh, my God.
Made it to the top.
Really, really spectacular.
NOÉMIE: You know, I'm still traumatized.
You don't want nobody to just feel
what we felt that night.
Every time I hear the helicopters,
every time the wind picks up,
I have this scared feeling inside me.
If we wanna continue living here,
that's what we will have to deal
for the rest of our time here.
And I don't know if I'm just ready for that.
Offshore winds begin, really, by tomorrow.
Extreme fire danger for Southern California.
After the Thomas Fire,
after Casitas Fire,
another fire was right here where I live right now.
My daughter see me sometimes,
that I went out of the house and look in the stars,
and I say,
"What's going on?" You know?
A 150-acre brush fire broke out here
at approximately 6:15 this afternoon.
My phone starts going crazy and I look up,
and what do you know?
There's another fire. And that's one ridge away.
Monsters come in different forms.
Halloween Night, 2019,
there's a fire in Santa Paula.
We can see it here from Sulphur Mountain Ridge.
And it begins again.
Okay. That's it.