Staten Island Brush Fires; Detroit Hit By Dozens of Fires
SANCHEZ: Breaking news is coming into us now and I was looking over at some of the tweets that we're getting as well, which seem to reflect there is something that officials are going to be dealing with here for sometime here. Before we do that, Rog, put up the shot that's coming in now from Staten Island. Take a look at this. These are, you know, Staten Islands, one of New York's five boroughs. Two brush fires burning on Staten Island this afternoon, this is what we're getting. No injuries at this time. New York City Fire Department on it. They're battling a four-alarm brushfire on Buffalo Street and Highland Boulevard. Apparently it's extended all the way to Fox Beach. Three alarms sounding at the 43 Ridgewood Avenue area. So there you go. We told you about the brushfires and the wildfires taking place outside of Boulder, Colorado, yesterday. Now these coming in from just outside New York, New York. Staten Island to be more exact. And let me show you this tweet from New York Office of Emergency Management, OEM. "Emergency personnel are on the scene of a three- alarm brushfire in the vicinity of Highland Boulevard, Buffalo Street in (Staten Island) SI. Expect traffic delays." So breaking news coming into us right now. This is from Staten Island. Also now, I want to show you some of these new pictures that are coming in from Texas. Remember the other day we talked about this, the fact that, OK, the hurricane comes in and they miss, maybe not do as much damage, but if it sits up there in the inland parts of Texas, it will cause problems. Chad Myers is going to help me pick this up now. Chad, you know what we're looking at here?</s>CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Six Flags over Texas in Dallas.</s>SANCHEZ: Ooh, is that water?</s>MYERS: No, just kind of mud. I think water was up and now it's come back down and that's what flash flooding is about. Literally, some of these streams and creeks that are still downriver from where it rained yesterday could go up 12 feet in about three hours. We've seen that. That's not an abnormal number. And so, if you're 12 feet from the water, you want to make sure you know what's going on because this water has been going up so very fast and obviously the water still has to go somewhere. Just because it stopped raining in a lot of spots doesn't mean the flooding will stop. All of these counties all the way from Austin all the way back down here almost back to San Antonio, especially Round Rock and Georgetown really getting hard hit. Then all of these red counties here -- that's Dallas, Metro Ft. Worth right there -- that's where we got flood warnings going on at this point. And it's still raining in some spots. Not a lot of rain. It's kind of slowed down significantly since yesterday but all the way through Dallas, all the way down I-35 there have been numbers of 15 inches, 15 inches of rainfall in the past 24 hours. There's not a place in the world that can handle that except maybe the Amazon and then the water doesn't go very far, it just goes back into the river. The rivers here, the Trinity, back into the red, we will definitely be seeing significant flooding in the next couple of days and even right now where the water was and where it rained just a couple hours ago the flooding is there down river. If you live down river of Dallas or Waco or San Antonio or Austin, you better know what's going on -- Rick.</s>SANCHEZ: All right, Chad. Appreciate it, man. Stay on top of that for us. Meantime, take a look at this.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: She lied right to my face knowing that my family was dying of cancer.</s>SANCHEZ: What did this woman allegedly lie about? See her right there? You're going to be disgusted when you hear her story. That's ahead. Also, dozens of Detroit neighborhoods in ashes. The city's already dealing with enough economic turmoil, but now suddenly a string of devastating fires break out all over the city, from one neighborhood to the next. What happened? I'll take you through it. Stay right there. This is RICK'S LIST.</s>SANCHEZ: Here are the lists of stories that we are following up on today. First of all did you see our newscast last night in primetime? Because suddenly something revealed itself to us out of Detroit, a bizarre rash of fires that look like this. I mean, flames tearing through whole blocks jumping from house to house in a city already devastated by years of hard, economic times. There were about 85 fires within just four hours in Detroit. What gives, right? So many that firefighters had trouble getting all of them out. Dozens of buildings destroyed, some of them commercial, most of them residential. But about 20 houses actually caught fire in one neighborhood, most of them empty. They were abandoned after hard times. The bulk of the fire were caused by a perfect storm, according to officials -- hot, dry weather, winds gusting to almost 50 miles an hour, and power lines that were crashing on top of buildings setting them on fire and then the wind would spread the embers from one roof to another. Electrical transformers started exploding to boot. You could actually hear them pop. In fact, watch this. (</s>BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, IREPORT BY JOE WILK) UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Fire all the way down there. Wires are on fire. There goes the boom.</s>SANCHEZ: "There goes the boom." Now, take a look at this. This is Detroit today. It's like a war zone. That's how one woman puts it. Her neighborhood was devastated. What were once houses and cars are now scorched hulks. Making the situation even worse there wasn't enough man power to fight all of the fires all at once. At least two are believed to be the work of an arsonist, though. Gloria Borger is standing by live in Kentucky where some congressional battles are heating up. We're going to take you to the very latest stop on the CNN Election Express. There it is. We're going to be right back. This is RICK'S LIST.