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Los Angeles Wildfire Claims 10 Lives; Residents Return after Palisades Fire; 900 Firefighters Sent by Governor Newsom to Los Angeles; FEMA Assisting Survivors in Los Angeles Fire; Los Angeles Wildfire Still Uncontained; Death Toll Rises To 10 As Wildfires Rage In Los Angeles; U.S. Honors Former President With State Funeral; U.S. Accuses Paramilitary Rapid Support Forces Of Genocide. Aired 2-3a ET
Aired January 10, 2025 - 02:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[02:00:00]
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KIM BRUNHUBER, CNN HOST: Welcome to all of you watching us around the world. I'm Kim Brunhuber. This is "CNN Newsroom." California firefighters are racing to put out several major wildfires that are tearing through neighborhoods in Los Angeles. The overall death toll has risen to 10 and authorities are warning the total may grow. Officials expanded evacuation orders on Thursday after a new fire broke out near the border of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Now, video shows the flames inching dangerously close to homes in that area. California's governor said he's sending 900 more firefighters to battle this new fire. Now, the three largest fires that are burning right now have barely been contained. Officials say intensifying winds and dry conditions will continue to complicate firefighting efforts into next week, but they add that they're doing everything they can to get the fires under control. Listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KRISTIN CROWLEY, LOS ANGELES FIRE DEPARTMENT: You look at the multiple fires, the fires keep coming. Our firefighters are working to the highest efforts. I've never seen this in my 25-year career and I can tell you as a chief, I can stand strong. I can tell you that LAFD and the rest of our regional partners, our firefighters, boots on the ground are absolutely tired, but I tell you they will never ever give up.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRUNHUBER: CNN's Kyung Lah travelled to some of the hardest hit areas and spoke to people returning home to survey the devastation.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
YVETTE ANDERSON, HOME DESTROYED IN EATON FIRE: My kitchen table, my living room table right there, my stove and everything. KYUNG LAH, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice-over):
Finally able to return home in Altadena, Yvette Anderson is finding an entire life's possessions gone.
ANDERSON: There's nothing, there's nothing left. I literally just have the clothes on my back. There's nothing.
LAH (voice-over): Her story repeated for miles across this middle class community in northeast Los Angeles to the Palisades.
CROWLEY: It is safe to say that the Palisades fire is one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles.
LAH (voice-over): For a third straight day, firefighters across the region face out of control infernos. But signs of hope in the battle. Water drops from the air as winds weaken.
CROWLEY: Today, we expect winds to subside somewhat, which will allow fire crews to increase containment lines. However, and I want to be very clear here as well, we are still under red flag warning with extreme fire behavior possibilities.
LAH (voice-over): And wide ranging. Five wildfires continue to blaze across the county.
KAREN BASS, MAYOR OF LOS ANGELES: We continue to confront a big one level firestorm.
LAH (voice-over): Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is pushing back on critics who claimed budget cuts to the fire department last June affected firefighting resources.
BASS: There were no reductions that were made that would have impacted the situation that we were dealing with over the last couple of days.
LAH (voice-over): The Palisades fire has grown to more than 17,000 acres and is zero percent contained.
CHRIS GROEL, WORKPLACE DESTROYED IN PALISADES FIRE: It's been heartbreaking, pretty lost for words.
LAH (voice-over): Where once thriving neighborhoods graced the hills, apocalyptic scenes have replaced them.
GROEL: Something this big and this fast that, you know, kind of just wiped out the whole town was something that I personally, and I think a lot of people from around here, never saw coming.
LAH (voice-over): Nearly 180,000 are under evacuation orders.
UNKNOWN: It's time, Mom, just get out of the house. Where are the car keys? Mom?
LAH (voice-over): Harrowing tales of escape from the Palisades to Rustic Canyon, where there's now viral video. UKNOWN: Yeah, let's get out of here. We tried, we tried, bro.
LAH (voice-over): Capture the moments when Tanner Charles and his friend Orly Israel made their escape from Israel's burning home.
ORLY ISRAEL, HOME DESTROYED IN PALISADES FIRE: You know, I feel like we fought a losing battle, but we fought it and I'm glad we made it out alive.
ROBERT LUNA, LOS ANGELES COUNTY SHERIFF: Right now, frankly, we don't know yet. We eventually will.
LAH (voice-over): But worry is growing across the region.
LUNA: At one point, we'll be able to do a more thorough search of these impacted areas. Some of them look like a bomb was dropped in them, where we will be able to bring in K9's and other things to help us, um, uh, hopefully not discover too many fatalities. That's our prayer, but this is a crisis and we don't know what to expect.
[02:05:06]
LAH (on camera): Here in Altadena, you can see just a row of destroyed houses, just on this one block. Each one of these plots with the various chimneys, each one was a home. And these are three bedroom homes on this block. This is Robert Lara's home that has now been completely leveled. This is a 14,000 acre fire, 4,000 structures burned. But for families like this one and the families you just met, they now have to figure out the hard part of where to go next. Kyung Lah, CNN, Altadena, California.
(END VIDETAPE)
BRUNHUBER: Katya Meyer lost her home in the wildfires and had to flee to a friend's house with her mom and she joins us now from Los Angeles. Listen, I'm so sorry that you've been affected like this, but very glad at least that you and your mom are safe. You have a home in the Palisades, an area I know well. Did you see the fire coming or did you evacuate early when you got the first warnings?
KATYA MEYER, LOST HOME IN WILDFIRES: No, we could see the fire from our second story of our house from the back. We have a balcony out in back and we could see the flames. I'd never seen anything like it. And there was so much smoke. It was surreal.
BRUNHUBER: It must've just been terrifying. And I mentioned that you fled the house with your mom. I didn't mention that she has Alzheimer's. So many of us know all too well that the challenge, I guess, that poses, but not in a life-threatening situation like this. I mean, take me through just the process of how you got out of there.
MEYER: Well, we saw the smoke and I went outside and my neighbors were -- everyone was sort of coming out and checking out the smoke and thinking, should we leave? Do we stay? Like what's happening? No one really knew what was happening. Um, but then the evacuation alerts started coming like you may need to evacuate. And then it was like, okay, you need to evacuate.
So all of a sudden, I went into this fight or flight mode and I just started grabbing clothes and throwing them into a suitcase. And then I, asked my mom to, you know, get something together. And then she kind of put a pair of slippers in a bag. And I was like, okay, I need to help her out. So I grabbed some clothes for her, but I didn't think the house would burn down. I thought that, oh, we'll just be back in two days, so I'm not going to take that much stuff.
So I just grabbed as much as I could, got the dog because we have a dachshund and he was nervous, you know, there's alerts going off. And then I saw my neighbors bolting left and right. And I was like, okay, we got to go. And then we thought, okay, we're getting out of here. And then we drive down the street and there's a huge line of cars just getting from our street to Sunset Boulevard.
And I don't know if you know L.A., but Sunset Boulevard is really the only way to get out of the Palisades. And it was -- that's when it hit me.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
MEYER: It was just not moving. The traffic wasn't moving. It was complete gridlock.
BRUNHUBER: It must have been absolutely terrifying.
MEYER: Yeah. It was pretty terrifying.
BRUNHUBER: I know there are some people who panicked and just, you know, basically left their cars there. I mean, how frightening was that, the thought that maybe you might be trapped?
MEYER: Well, I think the people who left their cars were on Palisades Drive, which they could see the flames on the side. We saw flames up on the hill, but it didn't feel as imminent. So there was ashes coming down and smoke and after about an hour of sitting still and moving about a block, I started getting a bit terrified. The car was getting warm. I'm like, if there's a flame that comes right now, we're going to get toasted.
So it was -- it was weird. It was just bizarre at this point. But then the cops came in and then the traffic started moving. And so we relaxed and then finally made our way to our friend's house.
BRUNHUBER: Thank goodness. I mean, you had hoped that you'd be back in two days. Unfortunately, you won't be able to go back. I understand your home was lost. How did you get the news?
MEYER: We -- this was -- really, yesterday was really stressful because we didn't know what had happened. I was on a text chain with people who live on our loop and we just get it. We're getting reports like people were saying the loop is fine. Then, you know, the apps weren't being updated. So we had no idea what was going on. I thought our house was fine. But then we started getting reports that now there's houses down. Oh,
this house is down. And then someone actually finally snuck onto our street and took a video of the entire street. And that's when I saw that all the houses on our street had burned down. Like I think two made it and I was just in shock. And plus, we also have another building down the street that was also burned down. So we lost both of them.
[02:09:58]
And so today we both started feeling the gravity of the situation. Yeah.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah, I mean, it just -- I can imagine the devastating loss. So many people in California have problems with insurance, either getting it because they live in fire prone areas --
MEYER: Oh yeah.
BRUNHUBER: -- or just dealing with the insurance situation. Do you know what your situation is and the kind of struggles that you'll be dealing with? Can you build back?
MEYER: Well, we are insured. We did have a situation a few months ago where we were notified by our mortgage holder that actually that we didn't have insurance and we had no idea, they'd never alerted us. So we got insurance as fast as we could and we're really grateful now that we did because, you know --
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
MEYER: -- but I do hear that a lot of people didn't even realize that they were uninsured. So it's going to be a fight and we're not looking forward to it, but we just -- we're trying to move forward. I mean, I don't know if you -- I'm sure you've seen the images, the whole town was really wiped out. So it's just been shocking. We're -- it's very hard to put into words how it feels. I was raised in the Palisades and so it's very sad for all of us.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah, just an entire community so devastated by this and understandably people are --
MEYER: Yeah.
BRUNHUBER: -- possibly looking to assign blame either to, you know, the firefighters or to the city itself for not -- for cuts made to the firefighting department. I know that a council member that represents your area has indeed said that she had been trying to fight for more firefighters in the city and there should have been more infrastructure. Are you, you know, pointing fingers at this point?
MEYER: No. You know what? Right now basically like I'm asking anyone who feels like donating, donate to the firefighters because they risk their lives and I have nothing but appreciation and I know that they were trying their best. Maybe it's mismanagement. I don't really know what went wrong. But I would never blame firefighters for that. I really respect them and feel like -- I feel like if they could have saved our block, they would have. This fire was out of control. It was -- the winds were like 60 miles an hour.
I mean, it's like -- it's basically like a fire hurricane. So I don't -- at this point, we're just coming together as a community and I'm not trying to -- I'm -- don't want to point blame at anyone. I just want to like get through it, you know.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
MEYER: And my mom lost everything she owns. Everything.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. So much that even if you --
MEYER: So, that's what I believe and that's just me.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. Even if you can rebuild, I was going to say, I mean, there's so much that is lost that you'll just -- that you'll never get back. And, you know, I wanted to ask you about the rebuilding. I mean, this has been, you know, the hottest year on record. You know, you've --
MEYER: Yeah.
BRUNHUBER: -- lived there in the Palisades, you said, for your whole life, but you know that in these fire prone areas, there's just more and more questions about whether people should be living there. Has all of this experience made you maybe rethink your plans about living somewhere like that --
MEYER: Yes.
BRUNHUBER: -- or do you plan to go back there?
MEYER: Well, yeah, I mean, of course. I told my mom today, I said, I guess we bet on the wrong horse, you know, like, it just -- it was such a blissful place and no one in a million years could have imagined this happen, but then I think about it and go it could have happened. I mean, we're surrounded by brush and trees and there hadn't been rain and so yeah.
Now, you're starting to think is it -- but you know what honestly, Kim, I feel like people will rebuild and I think it's going to come back. I -- it's such a beautiful area and so beloved and I just can't imagine that people would forgo it forever. I just -- I can't imagine that.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. No --
MEYER: I can't.
BRUNHUBER: Neither can I.
MEYER: At least, I don't want to. I don't need to give up on the battle scenes (ph).
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. Well, listen, again, so sorry that you've had to go through this, both you and your mother, everybody in that community.
MEYER: Thank you.
BRUNHUBER: And I wish you all the best, both now and in the days, weeks, and months ahead as you try and rebuild your lives. Katya Meyer in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for being here with us.
MEYER: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.
BRUNHUBER: Good luck. Well, firefighters continue to battle critical conditions across Los Angeles County Thursday evening. Officials believe the weather will complicate efforts to subdue the fires again next week. Chad Myers tells us the wind is still fanning the flames.
CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Yeah, the winds have picked up overnight in some spots now 20 to 30 miles per hour, even gusting higher than that in the mountains up to almost 50 miles per hour up on top of those mountains.
[02:14:58]
And we've had a few new fire starts. The most significant obviously would be Kenneth Fire there, very dry air in the middle of a drought in the region. It rained a lot in the spring, then the rain just stopped. And now all of that vegetation that grew in the summer is now dried out and ready to burn. So, watching that Kenneth Fire there to the north -- west there of Calabasas with the wind speeds now about 20 to 30 miles per hour there.
Still tonight, critical conditions here, critically low relative humidity, the wind is still blowing. Tomorrow it dies off quite a bit, I mean, an awful lot. And then by tomorrow night possibly some more winds some around San Diego especially in the mountains to the east of San Diego. Looking at the smoke, sure it's still here, Pasadena, Altadena, all the way towards Santa Monica. All the usual suspects here with all of this smoke still in the air as these fires are nowhere near 100 percent containment. They're still trying to get fire to fire to fire on house to house battles.
BRUNHUBER: Strong gusty winds have made it difficult for firefighters to continue to fight the flames and dry, windy weather is expected to continue for several more days. We'll have details just ahead. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BRUNHUBER: The dry, windy conditions fueling the wildfires in South California are expected to continue into next week. Aerial video shows how massive the devastation has been with thousands of homes, businesses, vehicles completely destroyed. The National Weather Service says winds are likely to pick up Friday afternoon. It will be complicating firefighters' efforts.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has faced criticism for being away from the city when the fire started and for city budget cuts. On Thursday, the mayor answered her critics' issues. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BASS: These fires are burning now. Our job is to make sure that people stay alive, that we save lives, that we save homes, that we save property. And I also said that when the fires are out, we will do a deep dive. We will look at what worked. We will look at what didn't work. And we will let you know. Until then, my focus is on the TV screens behind you that are showing devastation that has continued. Thank you. Answered it in the morning, answered it now, won't answer it again.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRUNHUBER: Officials with the emergency management agency, FEMA, are working to help families who lost everything in the fires, which includes registering for federal assistance during the recovery process. The top U.S. Fire official explains why the frames spread so quickly once they reached homes and neighborhoods.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LORI MOORE-MERRELL, U.S FIRE ADMINISTRATOR: You can look around in any of these communities and see very heavy fuel loads. The close proximity of these homes, the vegetation that is heavy here, they're in drought. We had winds that we knew were coming. So that's why the red flag warnings are so important. And then when you have an ignition and you get vegetation or wherever the initial ignition was and you get structure to structure fire spread.
[02:20:00]
Now we have a conflagration. This is totally different than a vegetative fire. Once you have structures involved, now the fuel load is even heavier because it's not the structure itself, it's the contents of that structure that feed this fuel. And so this fuel is heavy so it's fast. All of this is fast fuel. So yes, they saw it fast. Was it wind driven? Yes. Was it horizontal fire? Yes. Firefighters, there's no firefighters in the nation, in the world who'd get in front of that.
And so the fire departments here threw everything they had. They had pre-positioned. In fact, FEMA had awarded what we call fire mitigation assistance grants. And so we knew that FEMA had enabled these departments to pre-position, to get in place, and to move as quickly as possible. So every resource that was available was availed on this issue.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRUNHUBER: I want to bring in Chad Hanson who's the author of "Smoke Screen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forest and Our Climate." And he's also a forest and fire ecologist with the John Muir Project and is with us now from Kennedy Meadows, California. Thanks so much for being here with us. So when we see those pictures and to see how fast it spread, how devastating it is, I mean, just talk to us about what you're seeing right now. CHAD HANSON, FOREST & FIRE ECOLOGIST, JOHN MUIR PROJECT: Well, we're
seeing the upper end of extreme fire behavior. You know, these fires, the Palisades Fire and the Eden Fire in particular, we're seeing the result of a convergence of circumstances, a very, very dry fall and early winter, very little precipitation. And Santa Ana winds and not just any Santa Ana winds, because they're always powerful, but an extreme version of the Santa Ana winds where we have not just the dry, dry winds with relative humidity in the single digits, but we have wind gusts of 60, 80, 100 miles per hour.
In conditions like these, these fires are going to spread. They're going to spread fast. They're going to move where the wind puts them and moves them and it is not possible for fires -- firefighting forces to stop fires like this. The only thing that they can do in that circumstance is try to get people and their animals out safely and help them evacuate, save homes, save lives.
And that's what they prioritize. They prioritize saving lives and that's what they could do. I don't think anything else could have been done in this circumstance.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. I heard the U.S Fire Administrator saying that no firefighters in the world could have stopped this, and we're getting an idea of why. The pictures that we're seeing on our screen there are live pictures and was just showing how widespread, how devastating those fires are especially when you can see that night from the air.
Many are pointing fingers, blaming things like California's water policies for a perceived lack of water to fight the fires or for the forestry policies, for instance. I mean, are these critics pointing the finger in the right place here?
HANSON: No, I don't think so. And I'm glad you raised both of those because I've seen them come up a number of times. You know, in terms of the water policy, I don't see any evidence that this was about a lack of water. It's about an infrastructure that was designed to put out a fire in a single house with a fire hydrant. And it's perfectly adequate for that. Maybe two houses, an apartment building, a commercial structure.
The infrastructure with the fire hydrants, that's what it's designed for. You know, individual residential fires. It's not designed to address a situation where you have several hundred homes simultaneously engaged in flames, in a fire that's rapidly moving. The sky has turned dark because there's so much smoke, embers are raining down by the millions, and you've got wind gusts that could blow people off their feet.
I don't think this is a time for finger pointing. I think this is a time to soberly consider the evidence of what works best in terms of saving lives and saving homes and how to best protect communities.
BRUNHUBER: But what does work best --
HANSON: This is not a partisan issue. BRUNHUBER: -- because certainly the question is, you know, some are
saying we should allow more logging, for instance, because that'll limit the amount of fuel that's available to these fires. Certainly on the right, that's been the accusation. What actually does work to try and prevent these things from happening in the first place?
HANSON: Yeah, well, I'm glad you raised that. You know, there was a letter from the Congressional Western Caucus yesterday making that argument, that if we just rolled back environmental laws and allowed more logging of mature trees on our national forests, that somehow this would have stopped the Pacific Palisades from being devastated, and Altadena and Pasadena from being devastated.
[02:25:07]
And I almost don't know how to respond to that because Pacific Palisades is nowhere near a national forest and Altadena and Pasadena are a little closer, but they're nowhere near forests. It's grassland, its chaparral, there's, you know, some scattered oak trees. But these are not forest communities. They're nowhere near forests. And in fact, most of the communities that are at the most serious risk from fires, from wildfires, are not in forests.
And in addition, you know, the areas where there are forests and there are mountain communities far away from these fires, what we've seen is where there has been more logging, more tree removal under the rubric of terms like thinning, the wildfires have spread even more rapidly through those areas because there's less of a windbreak and there's more sun and more heat getting to the ground and more production of combustible grasses because of that. The fires are moving faster through those areas, and then they're burning downtowns.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
HANSON: So this is not an effective way to go. What we need to do instead of political opportunism to, you know, promote logging policies from certain members of Congress who have been trying to do that for years, again, we need to put the partisanship aside and come together and look carefully at the science, and the science is clear. To protect communities, to save lives, it's about home hardening. It's about defensible space pruning, and it's about evacuation planning and assistance.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
HANSON: And it's about the funding necessary to do those things and provide the technical expertise to communities so they can do it effectively. If we do that, we will save thousands and thousands of homes and many lives.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. And speaking of homes, and you mentioned the Palisades. I just spoke a few minutes ago with a resident who lost her home and she lived there and she was questioning whether she would rebuild in the same area because we've said for many times in California, this is the new normal. Obviously, people want to live in these attractive, but fire prone areas. Fire seasons getting longer, the season's getting worse. Is this just the risk people will have to take if they choose to live in areas that are prone to burning or can more be done?
HANSON: Well, I think there's a certain amount of risk, yes. I mean, that is a fact. But I think that risk is mostly about needing to evacuate when a fire is nearby. If we're doing this right, if we shift our federal and state wildland fire policies so that we're focused on the communities and recognize these are community safety issues, not wildlands management issues, not forest management issues.
If we recognize that, I think then what we can really do is create fire safe communities and have effective evacuation plans and proper support for evacuation so you don't have everyone bottlenecking through one route of egress --
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
HANSON: -- when there's maybe two or three others that could be used at the same time. These things should be drilled ahead of time and there should be plans. It can be done effectively. And, you know, ultimately, these are policy decisions and I think elected officials at the state and federal level have a responsibility, especially given what we know now and what we've seen, the devastation we've seen in Pacific Palisades in Altadena.
There's a responsibility to come together and look at the science, because the science is very clear that these steps are the right way to protect communities. And we've seen real world examples where 99- plus percent of homes survive, and everyone gets out safe when this is done. And I think that is where we want to get to.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah.
HANSON: This is not a theoretical, you know, issue. We've seen real world examples when this is applied and that's the result.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah, hopefully --
HANSON: I wrote an op -- yeah.
BRUNHUBER: Hopefully lessons will indeed be learned by all this, but unfortunately the cost of learning those lessons is just so high. I will have to leave it there.
HANSON: Yeah.
BRUNHUBER: Chad Hanson in Kennedy Meadows, California. Thank you so much for being here with us.
HANSON: My pleasure.
BRUNHUBER: Crews are making progress on some of the smaller fires burning around L.A., but they've barely made a dent with the biggest blazes. We'll look at progress so far.
Plus, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter is laid to rest. All those stories when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[02:32:31]
KIM BRUNHUBER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome back to all of you watching us around the world. I'm Kim Brunhuber. This is CNN NEWSROOM.
I want to go back to our breaking news coverage of the wildfires in Los Angeles, where the county sheriff says it looks as though an atomic bomb dropped in the scorched areas. There are five major fires burning around L.A.
Officials say the two smallest fires, the Hurts and Lidia fires, are partially contained, but there has been almost no progress on the others, which have burned nearly 15,000 hectares. Authorities have confirmed ten fire related deaths so far, but expect that number could rise considerably.
Officials fear more windy and dry conditions will continue to complicate firefighting efforts into next week.
CNN's Anderson Cooper spent much of the day on the front lines with firefighters near Malibu and Topanga Canyon, and he gives us a look at the work they're doing and the challenges they're facing.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN CORRESPONDENT: As of this afternoon, the Palisades Fire, which we are right now on the northern edge of, is the one that concerns fire crews. Most obviously, they are battling all the fires that are going on. You can see a helicopter that's used to drop water flying over this area. We're in Topanga right now.
And what is happening here is there are two smaller fires which are moving up this hill and have been over the last hour or so. The firefighters here have been watching this, just tracking its progress as they prepare over the ridge. There is a community. There's residential community, there's homes. That is of course, what they are trying to defend.
This is just one small part of the Palisades Fire, obviously. But what they are trying to do for the entire Palisades Fire is use bulldozers, in some cases using shovels, whatever they can to build a perimeter around the fire. So we've seen -- we've seen three drops from these helicopters of water just on this one spot in the last ten minutes. There's a number of helicopters with water circling, trying to find the best locations for them to actually put down some water.
But this is a persistent fire that's been moving up this mountain. It looked like the helicopters had put it out, but it keeps flaring up again. There's also spotter aircraft, spotter helicopters which go around trying to assess where it is. They should put water down.
Over on this ridge, a large crew of firefighters, those are actually inmates who have volunteered to learn firefighting skills. [02:35:09]
They are working, clearing the you see the road there on, that's a road likely created by bulldozers earlier to kind of create a fire line.
They are now widening that road, clearing out more underbrush, and then they will move to other locations. But this is a very active spot. This is the northern edge of the Palisades Fire. And there are certainly because the wind has died down today, they're able to get a lot more air assets in the sky and a lot more water coming down.
They've dropped a lot of water from helicopters over the last hour or so. It seems like the wind shifted and suddenly the fire just erupted.
CHIEF JEFF GILBERT, WILLIAMS FIRE PROTECTION AUTHORITY: Exactly. You know, afternoons they get the wind shifts up here. So that's exactly what's happened. And they had to vacate the -- the line that we thought were going to put in. So back to a contingency line, come down around these houses and just try to cut this bowl off. You guys are doing incredible work.
COOPER: Is this the worst you've seen?
GILBERT: We're from northern California, so this is a little bit different down here.
COOPER: There's another fire now. There's a residential community right over here, but there is another fire, as you can see on the other side of it. So there's a lot of different areas that crews are trying to work on. They're trying to kind of build a defensive perimeter around the entire part of this northern edge of, of this fire.
But it is -- it is a very dynamic situation. It is changing. The good news is the wind has died down. They're able to get a lot of these air assets.
But, you know, just watching this one little tiny part of the Palisades Fire seeing numerous water drops on it. And yet the fire comes back. So it is -- it's a very tough, tough battle right now.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BRUNHUBER: Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, says that in order to fight the increasing threat of uncontrolled fires, we have to fight climate change. Trudeau sat down with CNN's Jake Tapper to discuss a range of issues, including the increase in wildfires that have been so harmful to both Canada and the U.S.
Here he is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JAKE TAPPER, CNN HOST: Our country and the world really is watching these horrible fires in Los Angeles. Canada has a lot of experience with similar conflagrations. I know that you have been offering resources to the people of California and Los Angeles. What advice could you offer them?
JUSTIN TRUDEAU, CANADIAN PRIME MINISTER: Well, I think unfortunately over the past years, we've seen it get far worse and we've seen wildfires increasingly encroaching on urban areas. And that's an interface fire where were having to train up more local municipal firefighters to deal with wildfires in a way that we never had before.
I've been back and forth texting with Governor Newsom. We've offered a tremendous amount of equipment that they're -- they're already accepting. There's -- there's expertise. There's things that were having to do to deal with together as we, of course, respond to these fires, but also know that climate change means they're going to get steadily worse, and we have to keep stepping up on fighting climate change, too.
TAPPER: A lot of people out there might say, what does climate change have to do with this? Explain.
TRUDEAU: Well, when the summers get drier, when the weather gets hotter, when weather patterns shift, communities that were built in a place that never saw fires are suddenly seeing fires much more frequently. There's a -- there's a shift in everything that means even what we see now is going to just get worse and worse and worse over the coming decades. If were not serious about reducing our emissions and looking for ways to protect our future generations.
TAPPER: So you are here in Washington, D.C., even though you just stepped down as your party's leader, and you will soon leave as prime minister. But why was it important for you to come here to Washington today to go to president Jimmy Carter's funeral?
TRUDEAU: Well, President Carter was a dear friend of my fathers. They overlapped in their times of service. And Jimmy had been down at my father's up -- at my father's funeral 25 years ago. He was always an inspiration to me in terms of compassionate, selfless leadership.
And it was important for me, and I think it was important for the friendship between our countries, that that the prime minister be there to represent.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRUNHUBER: The United States, together with many dignitaries and foreign leaders, including Trudeau, and bid a final farewell to former U.S. President Jimmy Carter.
Carter's body was interred privately near his home in Plains, Georgia, but the state funeral earlier in Washington, D.C., also included a rare constellation, the five living former commanders in chief honoring the former naval officer and state governor from the rural south.
Now, the Washington ceremony, there were words of praise and admiration for the man whose work, influence, and character reached well beyond his presidency.
CNN's Brian Todd reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN TODD, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): President Jimmy Carter's funeral was filled with personal accounts from those who were closest to him.
[02:40:03]
JASON CARTER, JIMMY CARTER'S GRANDSON: They were regular folks. Yes, they spent four years in the governor's mansion and four years at the White House, but the other 92 years, they spent at home in Plains, Georgia.
TODD: There were also unique touches, eulogies delivered by Steve Ford and Ted Mondale, the sons of President Gerald Ford and Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale.
Eulogies to Jimmy Carter written by their fathers before Gerald Ford and Walter Mondale passed away.
Steve Ford, relating his father's account of a political rivalry, turned friendship.
STEVE FORD, GERALD FORD'S SON: During our 1976 contest, Jimmy knew my political vulnerabilities, and he successfully pointed them out. Now, I didn't like it, but little could I know that the outcome of that 1976 election would bring about one of my deepest and most enduring friendships.
TODD: President Biden eulogized Carter by repeatedly praising his strength of character.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: It's about asking ourselves, are we striving to do things the right things? What values -- what are the values that animate our spirit? Do we operate from fear or hope, ego or generosity?
TODD: In attendance, dignitaries from around the world, including the so-called Presidents Club, Biden, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
Trump and his former Vice President Mike Pence shook hands for the first time since their falling out after January 6th. But as for Pence's wife --
KATE ANDERSEN BROWER, AUTHOR, "TEAM OF FIVE: THE PRESIDENTS CLUB IN THE AGE OF TRUMP": Karen Pence sat there very quietly, did not get up when Donald Trump walked in. There was a lot of tension in that room.
TODD: But it was Barack Obama who seemed to be the only one engaging with Trump, chatting and smiling freely with the president-elect.
BROWER: Now that the political dialogue has just gotten so vitriolic that Donald Trump can say really terrible things about these men and then sit next to them as though nothing had happened.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
TODD (on camera): Despite the tension in the cathedral, author Kate Andersen Brower says, we shouldn't forget the underlying lesson of the presidents club, that there is still a mutual respect between them that has not been completely done away with, and we should celebrate that.
Brian Todd, CNN, Washington.
BRUNHUBER: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump's Friday sentencing in the New York hush money case can go ahead. The justices, in a 5 to 4 ruling, denied Trumps emergency request to halt the sentencing, meaning the U.S. president-elect will be sentenced just days before his inauguration. The courts majority said any potential violations could be addressed on appeal.
New York Judge Juan Merchan has signaled Trump will face either prison time nor penalties, but Trump criticized him over the case, warning, quote, this is a long way from finished. Meanwhile, a federal appeals court also rejected Trump's attempt to block the justice department from releasing special counsel Jack Smith's report on the abandoned federal cases against the president-elect. Trump is expected to appeal that decision to the Supreme Court as well.
Now, the U.S. president-elect also says his future meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is in the works. Trump made the announcement on Thursday, saying the war in Ukraine needs to end soon. Here he is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES: He wants to meet and we're going to -- we're setting it up. We have to get that war over with. That's a bloody mess. Soldiers are being killed by the millions.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BRUNHUBER: But the number quoted by Trump appears to be wildly inaccurate. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin says the Russian military has suffered more than 700,000 casualties so far, which would include both killed and wounded.
Last month, Ukraine's president said his country has lost 43,000 troops and 370,000 were wounded.
All right, ahead, new allegations of genocide in Sudan as its civil war rages. We'll have more details about that and more coming up. Stay with us.
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[02:46:19] BRUNHUBER: Opposition and government supporters were back on the streets in Venezuela, ahead of the controversial inauguration of President Nicolas Maduro.
Just hours from now, Maduro was declared winner of the election in July, but the opposition says the winner was Edmundo Gonzalez. Now, in the run up to the inauguration, opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was violently intercepted and kidnapped, in the words of her team, after a rally on Thursday. She is now free again and the government denies she was detained, but her team says she was forced to record several videos before being released.
This week, the U.S. determined that Sudan's Rapid Support Forces has committed genocide during the country's ongoing civil war. The U.S. secretary of state says the paramilitary group and its allied militias have been directly targeting civilians, systematically murdering men and boys, even infants, and sexually assaulting women and girls from certain ethnic groups. The U.S. has now imposed sanctions and visa restrictions on the RSF's leader, Hemedti.
Antony Blinken stressed that the U.S. doesn't support either side in the civil war, accusing the rival Sudanese armed forces of also committing war crimes, and says both sides bear responsibility for the suffering.
Kholood Khair is a researcher and political scientist, and she is in London.
Thank you so much for being here with us. So I take it these findings won't surprise you?
KHOLOOD KHAIR, RESEARCHER & POLITICAL ANALYST: No, not at all. The U.S. has been sitting on evidence of mass atrocities and indeed genocide for some time. We've also known, through reports from civil society organizations, but also international and very well recognized human rights organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and The Raoul Wallenberg Center, that crimes of this nature have been happening. And of course, these crimes are very much following in the vein of those 20 years ago, where the U.S. also made a genocide determination in 2004.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. I'm wondering about the importance of these findings. I mean, the RSF leader could become an important world figure. He's already met with African leaders all over the continent. So, will this declaration matter at all?
KHAIR: It really depends on what comes next. I mean, certainly even just this genocide determination which has come far too late, but it has come and is welcome in that regard, will dent his credibility. He and his Rapid Support Forces and their civilian allies are currently trying to set up a parallel government in areas they control.
And so, you know, any hopes and aspirations they have for that government to have immediate international legitimacy will be dented by this. But it really depends on what comes next. In 2004, those determination of genocide then led to an ICC indictment of then President Omar al-Bashir.
I mean, given the current issues between the ICC and the United States, I'm not sure were going to see something similar. And of course, coming right at the end of a Biden administration, it remains to be seen what the Trump administration, the incoming Trump administration, will do about this.
BRUNHUBER: Yeah. Good question. Before we get to what comes next, I want to ask you about what's happening now as a consequence of all of this, the famine is getting worse. And you've warned about exactly that. You've called it a living nightmare. So much suffering that just shows no sign of easing.
KHAIR: Unfortunately so. I mean, and much of this is happening sort of away from international attention, both media attention and policy attention. And in many ways, this is what is contributing to the situation getting markedly worse.
[02:50:01]
And there doesn't seem to be any kind of, you know, scenario on the horizon where this gets better. The dry season has just started a few months ago, so were looking at least another six months of fighting and all mediation and, and sort of humanitarian initiatives have basically dried up.
And in the meantime, of course, what we have is the IPC, the integrated phase classification, which is a famine monitoring system, a global one has now said that famine has spread across the country and is likely to spread even further. Some number crunchers in Europe have also, estimated that by June of next year, so only in six months we could see an excess of 12 million deaths. But even if it's not that high a number, even if its half the amount, were dealing with 6 million deaths caused by famine.
And at the same time, the day facto authorities, who are one of the main belligerent parties, the Sudanese armed forces, are engaging in famine denial all the way up to the U.N. level, the Security Council. So it's a very unfortunate situation that doesn't seem to be bearing in mind at all the starvation and the suffering of people on the ground.
BRUNHUBER: That is just a staggering number of deaths projected on, on either end, the low scale or the high scale. So let's talk about stopping this. What comes next? I mean, history in Sudan suggests a political settlement of some kind rather than a military one, will be the only way to end the fighting. How does that happen, given that both sides still think they can win?
KHAIR: Well, not only do they think they can win, they also feel that they have to win, both have committed war crimes. The RSF has now been accused of genocide and so without a win, it's very difficult for them to extricate themselves from any kind of accountability measures. But equally, they'll be trying to game any kind of political mediation in their favor to ensure that they won't see any kind of accountability mechanisms. The justice will be very much deferred, if not denied. And unfortunately, Sudan's history, very long history of peacemaking
or lets say, deal making, um, shows that almost all the time, justice is very much the last thing to be considered. And unfortunately, under President Trump, um, it's unlikely that were going to see justice featuring centrally in any kind of U.S.-led mediation.
What's very likely to happen is that, as with Trump's first presidency, the U.S. will see Sudan mostly through a security lens, through an Abraham Accords lens, and effectively defer all decisions on, what's happening in Sudan to U.S. allies in the region, chiefly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. Now, those countries are not interested in justice in Sudan. They're not interested in a civilian dispensation.
They're not interested in any kind of democratic government in Sudan. They much prefer a military actor. So what were likely to see, unfortunately, is some kind of, you know, um, deal between the two main belligerent parties where they effectively divvy up power and money and meet the interests of their foreign backers, and without really any kind of recompense or redress for core grievances for the Sudanese people.
BRUNHUBER: And in the meantime, those people continue to suffer. We'll have to leave it there, unfortunately.
Kholood Khair, thank you so much for being here with us.
KHAIR: Thank you.
BRUNHUBER: And well be right back with more here on CNN NEWSROOM. Stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BRUNHUBER: All right. We're following breaking news in southern California, where several major wildfires have forced evacuations. At least ten people have died, and thousands of homes and buildings have been destroyed. Officials expanded evacuation orders on Thursday after a new fire broke out near the border of Los Angeles and Ventura Counties.
[02:55:07]
The three largest fires that are burning right now have barely been contained.
2024 has officially become the hottest year on record, according to latest data from Europe's climate monitoring agency Copernicus. The milestone caps a decade of unprecedented heat while also breaching a critical climate goal.
CNN's Chad Myers explains.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: I'm CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, and this is your Copernicus climate change update for the year 2024. It was the warmest year on record, probably surprising no one.
But what did surprise me, 1.6c above pre-industrial levels. And a lot of that was in the oceans. You see here for the warmest on this dark red here, warmest in the Indian Ocean, part of the Atlantic. Obviously, we had rapidly intensifying hurricanes, a number of them in the Atlantic, very rapidly intensifying typhoons, cyclones here in the Pacific and also in the Indian Ocean.
So it was a warm year. It started out very warm. It was much warmer even than 2023. The line that you see here now, even though we transitioned to La Nina by the end of the year, we were still very, very close to that warm 2023. And so because we've had so much area here above 2023, only a little bit of area here below 2023, this turns out to be the warmest year on record for Planet Earth.
There you see the rankings, a little bit of cool water in the Pacific, but not very much. It's very hard to find a cool spot on this map -- 1.6 Celsius above what were trying to hold, which is 1.5.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
BRUNHUBER: The wildfires ravaging Los Angeles have forced two major sports leagues to change their schedules. The NFL is relocating the upcoming wildcard playoff game between the L.A. Rams and the Minnesota Vikings from southern California to Glendale, Arizona.
And in basketball, the NBA postponed Thursday night's home game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Charlotte Hornets. The league will announce a new date at a later time.
All right. That wraps this hour of CNN NEWSROOM. I'm Kim Brunhuber.
I'll be back in just a moment with more news. Please do stay with us.
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