California Wild Fires

Los Angeles,  CA

October 27 - 31, 2003

I drove all night to get to the Simi Valley Fire.  The night picture is the 118 overpass at Topanga Canyon Boulevard.  The fire is coming right down the mountain.  I parked the sat truck on top of the bridge and started doing live shots at 3am.  These flames were blazing at midnight when I pulled up.  About 2am the wind died and the flames just went out.  Our live shot was fairly boring when the sun came up.  So with 20 minutes to pack everything up, I moved the truck to a new location in the Twin lakes community about a mile up into the hills.  From here the news crews could see flames in their shots.  The helicopters were buzzing all about us as soon as the sun was fully up.  Dropping water on flames not more than a mile or so from my truck.  The white square thing is a lighting screen from one of the camera positions, but the chopper dropped lots of water on those flames.  

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A few days later and a quick drive back to Phoenix for a job that was booked long before the fires started and I am back at the Old Fire in San Bernardino Mountains.  Below is the community of Cedar Glen.  It was almost completely burned to the ground with only the chimneys standing.  The big black chunks to the left of the hearth are the stove and the washing machine.  Just after I took this picture I looked down and the same fire that leveled this house only melted this action figure.  The last picture is correspondent Larry Weidman in the red coat giving hourly reports for MSNBC.






   


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