Live: Officials provide an update on the battle to contain Airport Fire in Trabuco Canyon

everybody we are going to get started now right at 4:00 all right well welcome to the 4M media briefing of the airport fire my name is Captain Paul holiday Public public information officer for the Orange County Fire Authority and public information officer for the airport fire as of our last report this morning the airport fire has grown to over 10,000 acres and continues to grow we have firefighters actively fighting the fire from both air and ground we have heavy equipment and hand Crews also engaged in the fire and we're making every effort to contain this fire we at this point still are reporting 0% containment and we have reports of zero homes or uh sorry zero homes or structures are destroyed or damaged we have a th Personnel actively engaged or in route to the fire to protect our communities the cause of the fire as we announced yesterday is an accidental unintentional by heavy equipment working in the area of the RC of the RC airport I'm going to that's all I have for new updates I'm going to turn it over to our subject matter experts to give you more information from their uh perspectives first I'll bring up Orange County Fire Authority fire chief Brian fennessy all right thank thank you Captain holiday welcome everybody uh to reiterate what the captain just shared uh the fire is currently over 10,000 acres and growing uh quite quickly we've got more than a thousand firefighters assigned and uh likely equally as much on order uh one of the challenges we're we're having is competition with other large fires in Southern California the line fire I believe is in excess of 20,000 Acres at this time and and they've had a lot of resources tied up now for for nearly a week uh the bridge fire on the Angeles National Forest in LA county uh also blew up you probably saw the smoke column we certainly could see it here from Orange County and it too is growing exponentially so uh all of these fires are drawn down on the limited resources available uh to us not completely a surprise uh we talked about this certainly in the spring and and when you all met with us uh in our pre-season meetings and and media conferences uh I I believe that and I said it in LA county at at one of our events that um people believe that just because we got the rain that we did the last couple years that we would not have the fires we're experiencing now and and what I try to do is remind people that we went through many years of drought and you know our fuels our chaperal here in Southern California is what we call drought resistant well it's drought resistant up to a point then eventually that vegetation does die and we've got a significant dead fuel load in our Southern California mountains and so well it did get green it was very pretty during the Spring and we thought wow it's going to stay this way within that green that live vegetation uh we have considerable dead vegetation well now that we've had months of hot weather we've just experienced what four or five days of extremely hot weather that live vegetation is dead and we are seeing the results of that fuel load not to mention as you look behind me the steepness of these slopes you get dry brush high temperatures steep to top topography and an ignition that's a formula for the problems that we're experiencing today uh we expect even though the weather is to get cooler and humidity is supposed to increase my understanding is the Weather Service is saying we're going to get more of an onshore flow that certainly is a a great break for us but it's not doing us much good right now if you look again to behind me you're seeing a significant smoke column that I'm being told is up near the top of the Ortega Highway my understanding is the fire has jumped the Ortega Highway and is now working into Decker Canyon and anybody that knows anything about Decker Canyon in Riverside County knows that that is a a very difficult place to fight fire and in fact we've had firefighter loss of life there in the past uh again I mentioned the Steep terrain the challenges with with the temperature I'm getting a lot of questions about Santiago Peak many of you probably saw the same videos that that I have on social media and on TV and certainly uh they were impacted my understanding is that we put quite a bit of retardant around those uh towers and the communication site and advance of the fire hitting but you got to you got to understand that when the fire does reach up there it's going to wrap around so there were several times uh through last night and through today that fire made additional runs at those Towers uh I don't know what if there's any damage up there but in talking with the sheriff Communications and fire Communications we haven't experienced any loss of communication but in terms of damage I really don't know uh as I mentioned burnings in all conditions we are getting some uh due to the winds spe you can look behind me you can kind of see that the Left Flank here is looking a whole lot better uh we hope it stays that way we did move resources this morning into maesa Canyon and into Silverado Canyon because the fire was starting to creep down you know from the mouths of those Canyons although it was backing we're always cognizant of the fact that the wind could change at any time and blow that fire down into those heavily habitated uh communities uh there is unless it's changed I'll turn it over to the sheriff here in a minute Evac uh my understanding is there are voluntary evacuation notice in those Canyons I personally drove those Canyons about midday today and people were leaving livestock was leaving but there's always a few that are going to stay but it still looked very very good when I left there today again numerous or numerous warnings and orders remain in place for the communities of truko Canyon Rano Santa Margarita and sound surrounding areas we remain in unified command with calfire United States Forest Service the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Riverside County uh we'll take questions at the end of this uh conference and until then I will introduce ascensus Sheriff John molo good afternoon I'd like to thank our partners with the Orange County Fire Authority and calfire for being in unified command with us as we work together to respond to this fire and most importantly I'd like to thank the community for their support and patience as we address these CH challenging conditions we continue to update evacuation orders and assist with Road closures to ensure the safety of any homes and residents during the evacuation currently we have road closures at the following locations Plano Trabuco Road and Joshua Drive Plano trabo Road and Robinson Ranch Road Robinson Ranch Road and rree Antonio Parkway and theost DEP trabo Canyon Road and trbo Creek Road and Santa Margarita Parkway and then Antonio Parkway the entire Ortega Highway will also be closed and at this time only residents will be allowed the California Highway Patrol will be insisting with us enforcing the closure of that Highway mandatory evacuations have been issued for the following areas the neighborhood of Robinson Ranch in the city of ranch of Santa Margarita the areas of Rancho CIO Hot Springs C aspers Park Blue J Campground Falcon Campground San Juan Campground and the Ortega Corridor also El cariso in the County of Riverside has also been issued a mandatory evacuation order voluntary evacuation warnings are in effect for the following areas Dove Canyon and Rancho cello Rancho Santa Margarita Zone 2 trabo Canyon Rose Canyon and Holy Jim canyon Kota deaza zones 1 and two which is mainly the east side of Kota deaza and also the north Canyons of Silverado Canyon and maesa Canyon for up-to-date emergency me messaging including maps of evacuation areas and zones please visit OC sheriff. goov airport fire the Orange County Emergency Management Center and the City of Rancho Santa Margarita have established a care Reception Center located at the bell tower Regional Community Center in the city of Rancho Santa Margarita and that address is 22232 El Paso in the city of Rancho Santa Margarita the Red Cross will be available to assist with evacuated residents there there's also a large animal shelter established at the OC Fairgrounds located at 88 Fair Drive in the city of Costa Mesa and there's other Stables available and posted to the OC EOC website there's also two small animal shelters for affected residents established at the Mission vijo Animal Services and that's located at 2895 Hill Crest in the city of mission vijo and Med pets OC shelter located at 1630 Victory Road in the city of Tustin also for residents who have not signed up for the alert o you can get emergency messaging at alert.com in closing I'd like to emphasize a couple of key important points it's important if you live in the area you are prepared to evacuate if needed also if you don't live in the area the evacuation effort becomes increasingly difficult when people come down to take pictures and clog up the roads so please stay away from the affected communities so we can get them out in an emergency also so we have a large police presence in the area to maintain the safety of residents and the laws will be enforced I want to finally emphasize the the thank you that we give to the community for their support and patience as we work through these difficult challenges next I'd like to welcome up Todd Hopkins The Incident Commander from calfire thank you good afternoon I'm Todd Hopkins I'm the of the unified inate commanders for calire and for Riverside County Fire Department uh first as you heard from Chief fennessy uh we can confirm that the fire has crossed Highway 74 in the uh El cariso area the uh this is putting a threat to the community of el cariso and then also uh the lake Elenor front country especially with uh a wind phenomenon that's known as the Elenor effect where winds will burn uh downhill in the afternoons uh so many of those Community areas have been put into an evacuation order uh for any of the residents uh that are in Riverside County if you can go to Riv cor.org that's rco re e a d y.org uh that's information that you can sign up for to get any of the evacuation warnings uh or orders that are in place uh additionally uh resource from uh are assisting both from Riverside County uh along with uh the state and the county resources and the FED resources that um are on this side of of the fire of uh the main divide um what we want to do is make sure that residents that are going into uh being asked to evacuate with either a warning or order that if it's evacuation war that you get your items ready and we would prefer that you leave at that time when there's an evacuation order in place we'd like you to end up leaving right away so that it's not hampering any of the firefighting efforts uh during the firefight at this time uh I'd like to thank you and I'd like to turn it over to T Hayes from the Cleveland National Forest good afternoon everybody my name is T Hayes I'm the fire chief for the Cleveland National Forest and first I just want to thank the public for their patience I know a lot of folks have been evacuated from these communities and they're just going to you know hopefully the weather is going to start to cool off and in the next few days we'll look at repopulation and some of these areas and also all the Cooperators we've got Cooperators from all over the place coming to this fire and more on the way and there's three things that really are driving this fire right now and that's weather Fuel and topography the weather has been tripled digit temperatures with low relative humidities today is actually a cooler day but it's still in the high 9s and then the fuel bed is the second thing and you're looking at 3 to 4T tall grass with five to 8 foot tall chaperel and then the topography some of these slopes you can see them right out to the east here um some of them are barely hikable for even our most fit firefighters so those are our challenges that we're up against and when those three elements line up like they are right now it makes for Rapid Fire growth that we're seeing today we are throwing everything we have available at this fire as Chief venesy mentioned one of three major fires in Southern California going right now not to mention all the fire activity in the Pacific Northwest and the northern Rockies in Idaho Montana Oregon and Washington all those fires are also taking a lot of federal resources I want to talk a little bit about some of the infrastructure on the Cleveland National Forest we've got about 36 special use Recreation cabins that reside in Trabuco Canyon and Silverado Canyon we're still trying to survey the damage to those cabins we also have Santiago Peak lots of communication and repeater Towers up there very high value we we threw a lot of resources at that yesterday late in the day with retardant and we actually had some engines up there that we're working around the repeater sites all through the night and we're still trying to survey the dam damage if any to those repeater sites we have numerous trails and also a couple of fire stations and several campgrounds on the east side of the fire that are being impacted as we speak so you can guess there's going to be a large portion of the tribo ranger district that's going to be closed to the public numerous trails and and roads are going to be closed please check our website for the most current updates and that's all I have thank you all right thank you to all of our speakers at this time um we're going to open up to questions from the media if you have any questions I'll field them and send with the appropriate yeah so talk a little bit about what the plan is for tonight in the air tonight and are you worried about that down slope on the other side headed toward El I know that has sort of its own unique weather yeah the elnor effect the calire chief spoke to that would you like to address so as you're asking if we're going to be flying night flying missions tonight um so um as long as it's it's safe to do so and the approvals are made then yeah we'll continue to fly night flying missions um I haven't seen a a weather forecast yet uh an updated weather forecast talking about the effect is that something you're concerned uh that's something that we're always concerned with the Elenor effect uh that's something that uh pretty much occurs daily in Lake Elenor uh us usually what the Elenor effect is is you will have up Canyon winds um that are are normal during the day and then around 2 3:00 in the afternoon the winds usually will become a down a down Canyon wind in Lake Elenor so we're always worried about the what we typically know as the Elenor effect yes sir aine so we are actively trying to go as direct as we can uh with a fire uh we always prefer to go direct uh when possible there are times where we do have to fall back and and do what we call an indirect attack but as of right now we're going as direct we can we have uh right now 45 surge engines into the community of of el ciso uh plus I believe uh we sent three more uh sech strike teams from Orange County over into El cariso that is uh doing their best efforts to keep any structures uh defending any structures okay you've been listening to officials given update on the fires that we're having here as far as the airport fire in Orange County they said it's accidental an accidental fire started by Machinery now they also talked about the three major fires and in combination I mean we are dealing with some challenging um issues here they talked about uh those challenges being the you know the competition amongst the three that they have there's one in San berino the line fire which is over 20,000 acres and then of course the conditions it's dry brush heat the low humidity and then of course the topography well let's go back to the competition that he was talking about we have these three big fires three separate counties now with this fire moving you have to add Riverside County into it so you have fires burning in four counties this is Governor Newsome today announced that they are deploying 6,000 boots on the ground to help fight these fires and to also try and protect these communities but again as this fire continues to move the airport fire heading in oh jumping Orga Highway into Decker Canyon that's really tricky terrain that is you know where six firefighters died 60 years ago trying to fight that fire fire there in the Decker Canyon area so it is a very dangerous place to for anyone to have to go and try and to do battle so as we continue to look at this we talk now about the line fire and Annabel you were just mentioning that is continuing to grow in the San Bernardino National Forest that's right and as of now it's about 28,000 acres and just 5% contained and within the past hour be Valley Unified announced all schools will be closed for the remainder of the week NBC Forge Christian C is is live in Running Springs where the community is stepping in to help firefighters Christian that's right today we met several families who decided to stay behind and help firefighters protect their Community Running Springs is under a current evacuation order meaning everyone needs to leave uh because this area is really not out of the woods yet right now you are hearing some of the air units going around here in the area and I can tell you this is because we have seen several hot spots and flare-ups all day which have really it's really created a lot of smoke a lot of Ash in the air overall a very poor air quality here in the area but families tell us they are not leaving without a fight as the fire line continues to spread across San Bernardino National Forest for the fifth consecutive day Don rice says he's not giving up without a fight oh we're just trying to get burning Material off the side of this bank cuz they were supposed to start a backfire last night so we ran chainsaws virtually till 5 to 6:00 this morning on Tuesday the Mountain community of Running Springs about 7 M west of the city of Big Bear is almost empty except for a few people who stayed behind to help um I'm the only one open here in the area yeah I'm here for my First Responders they're here to take care of this mountain and that's why I'm here after several days of triple digit temperatures firefighters finally catching some relief while holding the fire line strong even after flareups happen fire officials say their best attack is fighting fire with fire so with the Steep terrain up here and the vegetation the way it's burning what we do is we put a little bit of fire on the ground up here on our road that we're trying to hold it burns slowly downhill toward our main fire slows that down a little bit and then what that creates is it's called a black line it's basically everything that's burnt up and it slows the fire down helps us get containment line the National Guard also stepping in to help in evacuation areas even as the fire continues to spread and Rule Parts according to this 3D map from calfire well this has been 17 years since it burnt 2007 so it has a lot of fuel over the years and of course you know the last couple years have been very heavy rain and snow seasons for us anyway so this growth has grown so heavy and thick for 17 years so being it hasn't been cleaned out that's why these fires are so gnarly right now and we're just lucky the winds haven't blown hard and back out here live I can tell you the line fire burning in very rural areas but even then listen to this about 66,000 homes are threatened yet no homes right now have been reported as lost but guys I have to tell you the cause of this fire still under investigation that's the latest from Running Springs chrisan goett is NBC4 news let's bring in meteorologist David bigger right now to track the current conditions for all of these fires yeah so we'll start off with the airport fire that's the one in Orange County obviously and I want to make one little note here before we get into the rest of the fire conditions Maps you'll occasionally see these little fire perimeters that we've dropped on the map to kind of help out the fire locations these were taken in the morning keep in mind this fire has now burned all the way down to here this is Ortega Highway this observation site actually saw a spike in temperatures as the fire burned past the observation site so that just shows you that we have grown Beyond this perimeter pretty quickly today right now we've got Westerly winds about 5 to 20 mph depending on location look at this observation s right along Santiago Peak which also had a temperature Spike earlier today as the fire burned through gusting up to 34 that is not what the firefighters want to contend with for today it's part of the reason why the fire has been moving so quickly so let's also talk about the bridge fire this is in the same Gabriel mountains again this is just one of the small little perimeters we have it has likely grown Beyond this we are looking at winds currently relatively light but we have still relatively low humidity and some pretty warm temperatures 95 degree temperatures at this observation site by the San Gabriel River 91 degree temperatures around tambark as we take a look around the line fire in the San Bernardino Mountains you can see how close it's gotten to Running Springs but relatively calm winds in that area right now one of the observation sites relatively light winds about 3 m hour 20% humidity by Highland about 19% humidity so it shows how dry it is and how hot it is as well we will be getting some relief from that over the next couple of days an overall look at the pattern here shows this area of low pressure just dropping in along the west coast that's going to enhance that onshore breeze might be a little bit Gusty later on this afternoon with a Westerly wind and that will also carry in cool air from the ocean and you'll notice that we have a much cooler feeling for the rest of the week so for tomorrow cool than today we're looking at temperat tempates in the low to mid 90s at the warmest of the High Desert Mountain spots mid to Upper 70s keep in mind though plenty of smoke across the mountain spots and likely plenty of smoke in the IE for tomorrow as well upper 80s though and low 90s so definitely cooler for the IE mid 80s around Corona 86 degrees 90° around Paris 90 in Hemet 75 degrees around Idol wild as we take a look across Orange County you'll see the Inland temperatures upper 70 so low 80s so definitely cooler low 70s along the coastline by Huntington Beach as well as San Clemente for the San fernan Valley Santa Clarita Valley no triple digits here we're finally back into the mid to Upper 80s so we actually might be a little below average for this time of year in a few spots mid 80s through seimi Valley 76 degrees in camio 71 in Malibu and for the Basin and the San Gabriel Valley maybe some patchy early morning fog for the morning hours Upper 70s and the low 80s so definitely cooler than we've been over the past couple of days and actually possibly cooler than what we've been over the past essentially cool than average for this time of year Bas and forecast on top coastal forecast on the bottom here's the morning fog in there then we continue to cool down into the upper 70s going through the remainder of the week the coastal forecast low 70s the valleys are on top I.E forecast is down below we've got the mid to Upper 80s for tomorrow then down to the low to mid 80s for the next couple of days maybe even the 70s potentially as we get into next week so