 Coming up on this edition of Inside Look. It has been burning for a week now, but the massive Thomas fire shows no signs of letting up. That has now become the fifth largest wildfire in California history. We're almost to 2018, but the 2017 fire season is still in full blaze. Southern California now feeling the heat. Some scientists are saying Southern California is literally burning up. We'll take you to the fire lines and show you how California's mutual aid system is once again coming to the rescue. Without the support of some of the states that are in here helping us, I don't know where we'd be. It was an alert that warned more than 12 million people of unprecedented fire danger in Southern California. We'll hear firsthand what prompted state officials to hit the send button. And we'll take a trip back to Northern California to get an update on the recovery progress from the October wildfires. I'm Brian May in the Cal OES newsroom. It has been a busy week and a tragic week as well. On Thursday, a 32 year old Cal Fire firefighter lost his life while on the line at the Thomas fire burning near Ventura and Santa Barbara. That fire is the number one concern for emergency managers and going into the weekend red flag warnings are saturating much of the state from the North Bay to the Eastern Sierras and Southern California. The Thomas fire, now the fourth largest fire in California history. It is more than seven and a half times the size of San Francisco larger than New York City and Boston combined. Our Cal OES information team is all over the California December wildfires. Jonathan Goodell is in Santa Barbara to talk with us about mutual aid. Cal OES deputy director Kelly Houston is in the state operation center to talk with us about the wireless emergency alert system. But we begin with Sean Boyd who is in Ventura County. Sean. Yes, I'm here to venture a County EOC where some of the managers here have received a copy of the alert that went out to select residents in the Santa Barbara area. This is what they heard. Residents only. And that's just part of the message. It goes on. But while those select residents are being allowed back into their homes, the firefighters are wondering what's gonna happen to the calm winds that they've enjoyed recently. Those are expected to pick up dramatically over the next couple of days. The Thomas fire in Santa Barbara and much of Ventura County is relentless. At more than 238,000 acres, it's on its way to the dubious distinction of becoming the largest fire in California's long wildfire history. But firefighters are relentless too, having tirelessly worked to contain 30% of the Thomas. After a quote, pretty good day Tuesday with minimal fire movement, strike teams monitor the fire in neighborhoods above the Highway 192 corridor. And again, now at night, just like the previous night, the fire activities picking up and we're doing some structure defense. Assistant Chief Mike Taylor knows the night has just begun. Around 3 a.m., he expects winds to shift down the canyon and threaten homes. He's just looking for the signs. What is it that you're looking for? The smoke's our biggest indicator. Obviously, we can feel the breeze but sometimes when you're tucked into these canyons, you know, we can have wind here that's just around the corner, completely different. It poses a lot of challenges. Experience tells him it's gonna be a long night. Daybreak reveals fresh burn scars and flare-ups, big ones, that could add to the 930 homes already destroyed. Helicopters ferry Bambi buckets to and from canyons, dumping water on fires that continue to burn. More than 8,000 mutual aid firefighters are in on the battle and more than 94,000 people have been affected or evacuated. The shelter here at UC Santa Barbara opened for many of them on December 6th. And it's amazing when it all moves together like a big puzzle piece, it makes a big, beautiful recovery operation and that's what we do. Stephen Klopp says the evacuees here are emotionally drained. Right now we have about 70 people last night we did it this year. The rec center is now home for Anfield and Michael Acosta. They were camp hosts at Los Padres National Forest until they were evacuated. I know there's people in the shelter right now who are in a bigger mess than I am, but for us and him being sick, it's really harsh. A few cuts away Norma Sears and her 92-year-old mother are relieved they don't have to spend nights in their car or inhale the fine particulate matter and ash that's inescapable outside. And the Red Cross will come by and just ask her how she's doing. And the added attention Norma's mom gets from Red Cross volunteers is a blessing, she says. Red Cross, I didn't know that much about it. These people are phenomenal. As night falls once again, they wonder how their town of Carpinteria will fare. After all, the Thomas fire has been 60 years in the making. It's been that long since a fire burned in Santa Barbara's front country. That type of fuel. It's also Amber Anderson's hometown. So what we have now is a lot of very old growth, dense chaparral, chaparral higher than 20 feet in some places, which makes it incredibly difficult for our crews to get in there and make any sort of hold in front of this fire and to do it safely. Well, increasing winds means increased air debris, particulates, ash, that kind of thing. But we've seen just about everybody wearing these N95 masks, that's a good thing. But what's not a good thing? Expected wind gusts over the weekend, up to 50 miles per hour. That's gonna pose some serious challenges for firefighters. Brian, back to you. All right, Sean, thank you. Fighting the half dozen fires in Southern California required a massive amount of resources and personnel. At the peak, Cal OES coordinating mutual aid of more than 2,700 firefighters, 1,200 of those coming from 11 different states. We continue our coverage now with Jonathan Goodell, who joins us from Santa Barbara. John? Thanks, Brian. Since October, more than 20,000 firefighters, some from across the Western states, have joined the fight against these wildfires, first in Northern California and now here in Southern California. They came here from remote towns in Alaska, from the Northwest and the mountain range, all here for one fight. The mutual aid system is designed on assisting others. It's built on neighbor-helping neighbor. California offered assistance earlier this year for fires in Oregon and hurricanes across the US. Now, other states are pitching in to help California. In Utah, we have a couple hundred firefighters covering the entire state. It's a massive state, just like California is. So we really rely on other folks from other states to come over and help us when we need it. Kinda, and the same idea is that when you guys need it, we'll be there for you too. Six states deployed resources through the Emergency Management Assistance Compact, while another was arranged via Interstate Compact. In all, 14 states have sent resources. And without the support of some of the states that are in here helping us, I don't know where we'd be. Introduced nearly 70 years ago, the mutual aid plan has grown exponentially. Resources are quick to respond, not just throughout California, but state to state, by ground and by air. You know, you go back to 1950, when they wrote up the mutual aid plan and ultimately the state's MASH mutual aid agreement. I don't think anybody intended that mutual aid would be in Siskiah County helping San Diego or vice versa, or to the extent that we're doing it so constantly. Kaiser Fire District in Southwest Oregon has spent a majority of the past few months in California. After crews responded to the October fires, Matt Dryden, Aaron Pittis, and their crew are now here in Santa Barbara to fight the Thomas Fire. We're here to help, so whatever everyone needs from us, we're here to do what we need to do. Happy to be here and ready to help. Normally, the fires we get are in one kind of little geographical area. This is spread all over the place where you drive five minutes from here and you're seeing burned places already and then we drive for a half hour to get to where we're assigned. We're still seeing the same burned places and just the magnitude is unbelievable. With containment of nearby fires, some fire personnel are transitioning to Santa Barbara. Shane Ward and his unit from Utah arrived overnight after battling the Lylac Fire Fire in San Diego. By the morning, his crew was working the Thomas Fire. We want to get there quick. We want to be able to help out as much as we can because it's no one wants to see home. We all have a lot of empathy as being firefighters and first responders. We never like seeing that, especially if we can do anything to help. That's just where our mindset's at. Let's get there, let's help these folks out. To put it into perspective, just how many firefighters have been out here in Northern California and now here in Southern California, 20,000 represents nearly a quarter of the population in Santa Barbara alone? Brian? All right, John, thank you. The red flag warnings and weather conditions in Southern California last week led leaders here at the Office of Emergency Services to take extraordinary measures. This wireless emergency alert, or WIA, sent to over 12 million cell phones in seven counties from San Bernardino all the way down to San Diego County. Kelly Houston, his deputy director here at Cal OES, he was involved in sending this alert out last week. Kelly, joining us from the State Operations Center. And Kelly, I know that alerts are sent out all the time, so what makes this alert that you guys sent out so unusual? Well, if there was ever a time, Brian, for the state to send out an alert to millions of people, it was this time, because the fire danger in Southern California was extraordinary, where there's seven counties down there that all were in red flag conditions. In fact, beyond red flag, it was worse than it has ever been. And we wanted to make sure that as people were going into the evening hours, that they were getting an alert and being aware of what the conditions were. You got a lot of attention from this alert to the point that the New York Times did an article on it, and the comments that followed that New York Times story on social media were almost all positive. What are you guys hearing or action-wise from people who got those alerts? Well, there was a lot of careful consideration into whether or not we were going to send out an alert to 12 million people, because sometimes an alert can be annoying to folks, or they feel that they may have been over-alerted. But we thought that with the extraordinary danger that was present in this case, and the fact that we just needed people to know that it was very dangerous conditions overnight, the reaction by folks was actually a bit surprising. We had a lot of support from people saying that they appreciated that we took the time to alert them, even if they weren't in the direct fire zone or somewhere where a fire was actually burning. Kelly Houston, Deputy Director here at Cal OES. Thank you for joining us. To learn more about wireless emergency alerts, you can go to our homepage, Cal OES.ca.gov. And before we go, we want to give you an update on the cleanup efforts that continue from the October wildfires in Northern California to date over 5,200 rite of entry forms have been processed over the seven counties that were affected by those October fires. Over 438,000 tons of debris have already been removed from the burn zones. That is equal to the weight of more than four full-size aircraft carriers. For more information on the October and December wildfires, you can go to wildfirerecovery.org. For all of us here at Cal OES, I'm Brian May. Thanks for watching. Visit our online newsroom at oesnews.com to learn more about this program and get the latest news and information from our team. Don't miss our next video on your Facebook timeline. Like our page and you'll get the latest posts as they happen. If you're an Instagram user, you can see the latest snapshots by following our Cal OES Instagram account. 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