 Okay, so we got him in here. Great. Hi, good morning, everyone. I'm Mark D'Arnucci. I'm Governor Brown's Director of Emergency Services here in California. I wanted to take a few minutes and give you a quick briefing on the fire activities and the various cascading impacts and consequences that we're dealing with in Northern California and kind of what is the prognosis as we move forward in the coming hours and days. To start off, though, I have a series of folks that will be briefing in different places with regards to their agency's response. Know that you're here at the State Operations Center. You see the operations behind me. This is a multi-agency center where all the different state agencies and our federal partners at FEMA and others have come together to be able to effectively coordinate the overall state's response and support of the local authorities and the citizens that have been impacted by this event. Our hearts and thoughts and prayers go out to those. We know many have lost their homes and it's been a very challenging and very dynamic last several hours. It continues to be the case with the winds and the fire weather we're having. So to continue to frame that issue, we'll start off with the director of the CAL FIRE, chief Ken Pemlot, who will give you an overview of where we're at on our fire conditions. Chief Pemlot. Thank you, director. Ken Pemlot, director of CAL FIRE. As the director pointed out, we are under significant fire weather conditions over most of California. Late last week, we entered into red flag warnings for many of the counties in California, and that's for high winds and low humidities. Late last night and early this morning, over 50-mile-an-hour winds surfaced over the northern Bay Area and interior Sacramento Valley region. With that brought numerous fire ignitions across the wildlands. As we speak right now, over 14 major fires burning across eight counties, from Mendocino, Lake Sonoma, Napa, across the valley to Yuba, Nevada, and into Butte. We are burning over 57,000 acres as we currently speak. Most of these fires have limited or no containment. They're very rapidly burning fires. Almost the entire effort last night and early this morning was focused on evacuations and moving citizens out of harm's way. We are hopeful today, whether forecasts are indicating that sometime here within the next several hours, that the winds should subside and we hope that slows the forward progress of many of the fires and allow firefighters to get in and engage and actively fight fires. And though right now, very conservative estimates are that over 1,500 homes and commercial facilities have been destroyed. We are beginning to work on damage assessment. Obviously, the focus has been on the fire itself, but we hope to have updated damage assessment figures here within the next 12 to 24 hours. Again, we are a long way out of fire season in California and it's not just here in northern California. Currently, we are under Santa Ana wind conditions in southern California, and that's a, as we know, a traditional fire window in the fall months throughout southern California, and we're already experiencing fire activity there. So we are moving resources throughout the state. In addition to Cal Fire, we are very engaged in the state's mutual aid system with hundreds of fire engines and fire departments across the state engaging in this fire fight with resources from San Diego to Siskew, mobilized and deployed. We're working very closely with our partners at the California National Guard and the California Office of Emergency Services to ensure the right resources get to where they need to be. But obviously, we're prioritizing and we're moving resources where the greatest life safety threats are so we can protect, again, life and property. So again, I think I want to really reiterate that firefighters, law enforcement officers, EMS professionals are out on the front lines, moving citizens out of harm's way. We need every resident, every resident to heed evacuation warnings and orders and move out quickly and orderly so that firefighters can focus on protecting homes, protecting infrastructure, protecting critical hospitals and other critical infrastructure and we can get through this fire fight. So with that, thank you. I'd like to introduce Commissioner Warren Stanley of the California Highway Patrol. Thank you, Ken. I'm Commissioner Warren Stanley with the California Highway Patrol. This is the CHP's response. We have approximately 83 personnel assigned to roadway closures throughout the two fires, the Cascade Fire and the Atlas Fires. With that being said, there are going to be a lot of roadways shut down so we're asking the public, if you would go to our website, www.chp.ca.gov, have information up there regarding all the closures we have. It would take too long to name all the closures in here because we have so many of them. So if you could do that, that would be great help to us and to the public. Also, some of our personnel, we're looking at some of the shelters throughout the Bay Area and other places where the fires are. Taking a look at those and providing assistance for security at those shelters with our personnel. As Director Pemla said, we're pleased to be working with all our partners to alleviate this problem as soon as possible. And we just want to thank the public for their support. Thank you. I'm Major General David Baldwin with the California National Guard. The California National Guard is supporting fire, rescue, evacuation, sheltering and security efforts throughout all of the fires burning in Northern California. We've deployed three medical evacuation helicopters from the California Army and Air National Guard that are transporting victims of the fire to burn centers in Northern California. We've also deployed six firefighting helicopters to assist Cal Fire with their efforts. And we're sending 100 military police personnel to Napa to provide support for law enforcement and to assist with evacuations. We've also opened our armory in Petaluma and Santa Rosa to accept evacuees. We're stand ready to provide additional assistance as the need arise. So right now Governor Brown has been briefed on this regularly. A short time ago he did proclaim a state of emergency that took into account the counties that have been impacted by the fire. That state of emergency clears any hurdles or regulatory impediments. It ensures that all state assets and other resources that are necessary to provide protection of life and property and respond to this event are taking place. And he continues to get briefed by the team that's here up at the podium with me regularly. Our priorities are going to be now moving forward as they continue to support the sheltering operations. Beyond the firefighting that Chief Pemlock talked about is to support those sheltering operations. We know we have several thousand people who have had to evacuate from fires both in Napa and or in shelters in the Napa Valley. Or have had to evacuate in Sonoma County and our shelters that have been established there. We have had hospitals that have required evacuation. We have had special care facilities that have required evacuation. All of those take a significant amount of coordination and assets to ensure that those individuals, those special needs populations and others that require special assistance are taken care of. And so that will remain our priority. We have talked with our partners at the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA. FEMA is supporting us with personnel and we've also requested from them assistance with sheltering services and other kinds of sheltering items like cots and blankets and water to augment the shelters that have put in place in both Napa and Sonoma counties. Regularly we will be working to with our local counterparts to do damage assessment to get a good handle on how much damage has been taking place. We know we've had loss, total destruction of homes and we've had damage to homes. We know we have a number of injuries and possibly some fatalities which we're still trying to get our hands around with regards to that whole aspect. And so we'll continue to work on that as a priority in the next few hours. The other thing is power restoration, power water and cell site service. Currently there's roughly about 45 to 50,000 without power between Napa and Sonoma counties. We are working closely with the Pacific Gas and Electric and the other utility providers. We're working with AT&T and Verizon on the cell site services to be able to try to get those services back up and operational. It's a key priority. We know that once we get the communications back up people can start communicating with their families and others within the region. So the State Operations Center behind me is fully activated as well as our regional emergency operations centers in the coastal region. All agencies, this is an all hands on deck response and we will continue to be here for the long haul. There will be multiple phases that we'll be going through first in the response phase and being able to address the immediate needs. And then as we move forward, starting to look at the recovery process and getting those communities and those individuals' lives back up online. With that, be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you. Have there been resources in over the past couple of weeks, Cal OES has organized resources to go out of state for responses to, you know, Hurricane Harvey and other things. Are we depleted in any way? Do we have full resources here to deal with these fires? So the question had to do with the resources that the state has already sent out to support hurricanes around the country and the Mexico City earthquake. And the answer is yes, we actually have a significant amount of resources here. We do regularly manage the drawdown of resources in California. It is a very large state and we have a lot of resources. So we are a donor state at many times. We're sending resources to support other jurisdictions. But we never send more out of the state than what we would need in the event that we would have something as large as this or larger. So we are in good with resources. And let me just say that the system at large, law enforcement, emergency management, fire and rescue, emergency medical has been phenomenal. We are getting resources from throughout California, as Chief Pemlot says, from San Diego to Siskiu, all responding and pouring into the areas that have been affected. Perhaps for the Chief, could you describe what the crews were up against last night? So imagine, you know, just a wind whipped fire, you know, burning at explosive rates. This is 50 mile an hour winds pushing the flaming front. When it was hitting these impacted communities, literally it's burning into the city of Santa Rosa and burning department stores, you know, burning box stores, impacting hospitals. It was literally move people from out of the front of the path of this fire. Fighting the fire at that time was not going to be possible. Just due to the intensity and how rapid that fire was spreading. We've been back here time and time again in the last four to five years. These are the conditions we continue to talk about that California is experiencing. Even when folks, the public may be lulled into thinking the fall months are here and the temperatures are going down. This is traditionally California's worst time for fires. California's most damaging fires have occurred in the months of October, and we're seeing that again this morning today. Do you have any idea how many people live in the evacuation zones throughout those 14 fires? You know, we're estimating that 20,000 plus individuals have been evacuated, but I don't have account for you on actually how many live within the impacted zones. We can certainly find that out. So number on casualties, you're still counting that? Yeah, as Director Geller-Ducci said, that's an assessment that's ongoing. Again, this all started about 10 o'clock last night. Many communities were just overrun, and so now we're working back through all of the sources. Local law enforcement, EMS, the hospitals, fire agencies, and many others to determine accountability where folks are. And so that process will be ongoing. You know when we might get numbers on that? I hesitate to speculate on that, but certainly it's in everybody's best interest for us to work on that quickly. And that is literally one of our priorities, along with obviously sheltering and getting people out and taking care of. So we're actively working on that today, and we hope to certainly have better numbers, you know, later today. I think you said earlier, and correct me if my numbers were wrong, but 1,500 structures potentially being threatened, and you said that was a conservative estimate? No, actually 1,500 structures, homes and commercial facilities actually destroyed. Yeah, many, many more threatened. But again, we're out there trying to get the assessments done right now. But just the initial estimates from our firefighters and law enforcement personnel at the scene across the swath of these fires indicates at least 1,500. Is that a conservative estimate because right now we can't get to certain areas? That is correct. Were all these fires started overnight? I mean, that's quite a few fires just to start overnight. Absolutely, all of these fires started sometime from 10 o'clock last evening on into the early hours this morning, and we continue to get new starts as the day warms up. And again, we're under critical fire weather conditions. That's why the National Weather Service put red flag warnings up across much of the state. We're under critical fire weather conditions for low humidities and high winds, and we combine that with the extremely dry vegetative conditions that we have. Every spark is going to ignite a fire. And so regardless of what that may be, wind can impact, start fires, down power lines, vehicles pulling off into the dry grass, all of those things have the potential. And under these kind of conditions, the risk is just extreme of new starts. What happened last night in this morning? The planet's literally aligned to have these explosive conditions. Just for perspective sake, can you talk about the magnitude of that number 14 either starting or accelerating in just a matter of a couple of hours? Have we seen that before? So we have been throughout the summer seeing just an accelerated number of fires. Literally as we speak this week, we are about 1,500 fires to date, year to date, above where we were last year. So our initial attack, our number of new fires we've been getting every week, has been increasing every week throughout the year. We've been doing an amazing job, all of the firefighters across the state, of putting these fires out in that initial attack phase. But some of them escaped just for lots of reasons. The case of last night is very challenging when you have these kinds of weather conditions working against the firefighters. And so you start getting ignitions, multiple fires starting at the same time. You know, we've got to try to react and move resources. So it's not uncommon to have multiple fires burning, but I can certainly tell you it's becoming more than norm now to have multiple large damaging fires like we're seeing today. What do you call just the past like 10 or 12 hours exceptional though, just given the magnitude? I think what we're going to find when we talk to season fire professionals here in the next several days is they're going to talk about conditions that they have not seen before. And we were saying that two years ago in 2015 when the valley and the butte fires burned in these same areas, seeing conditions we hadn't seen well. I think we've raised the bar again in California in terms of the conditions that we're facing and the destruction and devastation. Who, why was the National Guard called out and what what conditions required them to be called out? Well, certainly deferred to General Baldwin, but I can tell you from Cal Fire and from the Office of Emergency Services, it's routine to work very closely with the California National Guard, providing surge capacity, not only in aviation assets, both helicopters and the MAFs, the C-130 air tankers, but also in a variety of support equipment as well as hand crews. And that's become, quite frankly, a go-to source for firefighting in California when we need surge capacity. It's become very well practiced and a process that we have very well in place. Thanks, Ken. I would just add that the California National Guard is fully integrated into both the fire and law enforcement mutual aid systems. So when either of those systems become tapped or they need resources that are unique to the military that we can provide to assist law enforcement agencies or the allied fire services, we're ready to deploy. So you were called right away. I mean, do you know what time you were called? Our initial calls came early this morning and for both the medical evacuation helicopters, the firefighting helicopters, and then Director Gillarducci in communication with law enforcement leaders in the area made the decision about 8 o'clock this morning to deploy the military police personnel. Do you know anything about their rescue at night with a helicopter? I'd have to defer to Cal Fire on that. I'm not familiar with any of the specific operations that occurred relative to rescues last night, but we can certainly look at it for you. I think we can do more one-on-one interviews later if you want to get that scheduled. But right now we're going to call a close for today's press conference. 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