Fire Crews Battle Major Wildfire Outside L.A.; Interview with Tom DeLay
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: It's 5:00 p.m. here in Washington and you're in THE SITUATION ROOM where news and information from around the world arrive in one place simultaneously. Happening now, it's 2:00 p.m. in Southern California where a wildfire is burning out of control, thousands of acres charred, hundreds of homes threatened. It's 4:00 p.m. Central in New Orleans where a probe is under way into allegations of looting by police officers. It's 5:00 p.m. here on Capitol Hill where embattled Congressman Tom DeLay of Texas is standing by. He'll talk to us about the indictment that cost him his position as House majority leader, at least temporarily. I'm Wolf Blitzer. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM. Seventeen thousand acres and counting. Fire crews battling a major wildfire outside Los Angeles. They've managed to save 2,000 homes, but hot, high winds are testing their limits. CNN's Dan Simon is joining us now live from Thousand Oaks with the latest. This is a very popular area, Thousand Oaks. Update our viewers, Dan, on what's going on.</s>DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, Wolf, this is one area that's been under attack all day long. If you look up, you can see the fire personnel up there. Those are hotshot crews. And what they're doing is they're building a fire line, trying to keep those flames at bay, trying to top the flames dead in their tracks. And with us right here is Battalion Chief Gary Croucher. He's with the San Miguel Fire Department. Explain how this process works.</s>GARY CROUCHER, SAN MIGUEL FIRE DEPARTMENT: Well, what we did is we brought the engine crews in along with the hand crews. And there's a lot of unburned fuel in between where the fire came through. And what we don't want to happen is some small fires reigniting, taking us back out, and being just as big of a threat as initially it was when the first fire came through.</s>SIMON: You told me that you and your crew have been up for about 36 hours. What's the most, I guess, alarming thing you have seen so far?</s>CROUCHER: Yes. We got in last night about midnight and I think the most alarming was this morning right about daybreak when the winds really picked up. The fire really took off, blew into the structures that we were protecting. And it just came up and really just blew right past us. And there were some of the people that hadn't evacuated that we had to get in and get out. And like I said, it was pretty intense for a little while.</s>SIMON: It's pretty tough getting a handle on this thing because of the winds, right now it's fairly calm, but if the winds pick up, what do you fear the most?</s>CROUCHER: I think the biggest thing we fear the most is we're now getting a handle on it. We're able to get in. We're able to pick up any of those spots. If the wind changes and catches us by surprise, like I said, any of the areas that we have an open line in it's not secured, it can be up and running again in no time. So we are really trying to get in and just close off any of the open lines we have right now.</s>SIMON: Chief, thanks very much, I'm going to save you from a bee sting right there. OK, Wolf, right now, 3,000 firefighters here on the scene. Still the estimate we have is 17,000 acres have been charred and only one house has been destroyed and that's because firefighters have truly done a magnificent job bringing in the helicopters, have the crews up, like you see right, really keeping these flames back and protecting these homes.</s>BLITZER: And we are looking at these live pictures, Dan. These are incredible pictures. You can see the flames and you can see the smoke, the smoke, you're there, can you smell this fire?</s>SIMON: Yes. And if you have breathing problems, if you have asthma, it's going to be pretty tough for some of these folks. We have had masks, and I put it on from time to time. And I don't know if you can see this, but you know, you can see some of the ashes. Let me see, look at this car, for example. You know, all this, you know, this is just all ash that's come down on this one particular vehicle. And so, because of the embers flying, there's concern that perhaps one of these homes could catch fire. But because, you know, you see the fire trucks right here. They have got the hoses set so none of these homes right now appear to be in any danger. Wolf.</s>BLITZER: Have these homes though been evacuated, Dan?</s>SIMON: Well, it's basically a voluntary evacuation for these folks. I interviewed several of them and a lot of them left last night when things were really getting rough. But we have seen some come back, you know, once they felt like it was OK and that their homes really weren't in any danger. And I think there is a sense of confidence because you see all these crews here that their homes really aren't in danger of going up in flames. But you never know, you know, the way these things work, the winds get going again, they could all be at risk for a second time. And we're certainly hoping that doesn't occur.</s>BLITZER: Dan Simon, we'll get back to you, thank you very much. Dan is in Thousand Oaks. Zev Yaroslavsky is a Los Angeles County supervisor. The fire is in his district. He's joining us live once again on the phone. Zev, thank you very much. Where are you right now?</s>ZEV YAROSLAVSKY, SUPERVISOR, 3RD DISTRICT, LOS ANGELES COUNTY: I'm at the command post which has just been moved. But the old command post in the city of Calabasas, just south of the fire. And the wind has shifted, Wolf, it shifted about the time you and I had our last interview and clearly there's an ocean breeze now coming, which is good news in terms of the humidity increasing, but it's bad news potentially depending on how fast it blows back in the other direction, as your correspondent was just ascertaining from the firefighters. So -- but generally things are moving in the right direction. We may have dodged a bullet here.</s>BLITZER: Well, one of the things you really need is rain. Is there any rain in the forecast?</s>YAROSLAVSKY: The rainy season doesn't start here in earnest until November, around Thanksgiving. One of the reasons we have and one of the reasons you're seeing such heavy floodings is the -- we had the second rainiest year on record last winter here in Los Angeles, and so the vegetation is thick and dry. It's dry thick because the summer has past but it's because it had a lot of water to grow. So there's a lot of fuel to burn, which complicates the issue a little bit. But we're fortunate and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this weather holds. But we're fortunate that we did not have heavier winds, and for a longer period of time. And these firefighters have done an incredible job with the resources they have.</s>BLITZER: Zev, this is an area that I'm pretty familiar with, you're very familiar with, and it is pretty populated. I hear towns like Thousand Oaks and some of these other towns that are potentially in trouble. This is not just a remote area, this is a major bedroom community of Los Angeles.</s>YAROSLAVSKY: Well, you're right. It's a suburb or an exurb of Los Angeles. It's about 35, 40 miles west of downtown Los Angeles. There have been a number of cities that have grown up here in the last 20, 25 years, Calabasas, Thousand Oaks, the places like that. And they sit the mountain range called the Santa Monica Mountains. Most of those areas have either been hollowed out, flattened out, or they are in the hills. And then you have the surrounding hills, which there are quite a bit of rustic cabins and homes that are isolated. So we spend a lot of times and a lot of resources clearing brush from around structures, educating people on how to inoculate themselves against the fire. And invariably you will see that the houses that get burned are the ones that did not clear the brush from around their house. So they've got something that was flammable right over their roof or next to their house. And those that did take the precautions survived. So it's one of the controversies we have about how much to develop in the mountains. It's something we've been trying to manage for quite some time. And it's also found -- you find yourself in the middle of a national park area. These developed areas are surrounded by park lands. They're required by the state and federal government and by the county for open space. And so you have a town here and open space and hills with brush there right next to you. And it can get a pretty good head of steam pretty quickly.</s>BLITZER: It's a beautiful area. Zev Yaroslavsky, an old friend of mine for many, many years, he's a county supervisor in Los Angeles. Zev, I want to get back to you. But I want to bring in our Tom Foreman because has been carefully looking here in THE SITUATION ROOM at this situation developing. Give us a little sense about this area that we're talking about, Tom.</s>TOM FOREMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, let's expand upon what Zev said a moment ago. You can see how the buildings run right up to the edges of the mountains there. And then start moving into the valleys of the mountains. Look at this. A little bold here, this is Chatsworth where we're talking about with the fire. If we move into the mountain area, look at this. We have very sharp little short hills, all chopped up in here. If you ever drive up and down here, lots of little winding roads. A fire starts moving up that area, and what happens is it gets updrafts up the mountains. It moves right up into that foliage and moves up to the top, all those little scrub oaks. So what they're trying to do here today, big goals that they had today had to do with this sort of thing. Look over here. If we fly over this way, you'll see a natural break. And firefighters look for these a lot. This is the 5 Freeway right here leading up to Santa Clarita, which is over there. They want to keep the fire from jumping across these. They're trying to keep it under control. If any of it gets across, get it out fast. Firefighters look for that sort of thing. That natural break is important to them because this is a whole collection of houses over here. The winds however will tend to take it south. So let's look down south here. If you move this way, we get down toward Thousand Oaks where our reporter is. And this is the breakdown there. It's the 101. This is the one that they are really looking for because if they can get down here to the 101, they can possibly keep the fire contained here also, because again, as we were pointing out earlier, if you go south of the 101, that's when you start getting a wide open run down toward Malibu, through all sorts of hills and valleys and lots and lots of houses all the way out to the Pacific Ocean this way. If you go out the other way over here, you're going to lead all the way out to Ventura. So what they're trying to do at very least is keep it hemmed up in the area they have got it in now. If the winds will cooperate, they can do that.</s>BLITZER: Let's hope it does. Tom, excellent presentation. Thank you very much. Let's head up to New York. Jack Cafferty is with us once again. He's watching this and a lot of other stuff. Jack?</s>JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Yes. We're looking at a story that just absolutely put my teeth on edge earlier, today, Wolf. It's this. It's been one year since the Congress demanded that the Pentagon come up with a way to reimburse soldiers in Iraq who buy their own body armor out of their own pocket to protect themselves. And nothing has happened, nothing. The Associated Press reports soldiers and their parents continue to shell out hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars for equipment they say the military won't provide for them. This includes everything from protective gear, body armor, armor for their Humvees, medical supplies, global positioning devices. Now the Pentagon has called the reimbursement idea that Congress demanded they address -- the Pentagon calls it an unmanageable precedent. Meanwhile Americans continue to die in Iraq. Twenty-one of our troops killed in the last week there. And that brings the total body count to 1,936 American lives lost in that conflict. The question is this. Why should troops have to buy their own equipment? It is absolutely outrageous, disgraceful. I have no idea why it's being allowed to happen. We have, what, a half-a-trillion- dollar-a-year defense budget it in this country. If you spend $1,000 to buy body armor for every troop over there, we have got 140,000 give-or-take soldiers on the ground -- if you bought $1,000 worth of protection for each one, it would be $140 million. We have a half a trillion dollar defense budget. This is disgraceful. It's a national embarrassment that any soldier wearing the American uniform has to reach into his own pocket to buy anything necessary to defend this country. The e-mail address is CaffertyFile - one word -- @CNN.com.</s>BLITZER: You are going to get a lot of e-mail on this one, Jack. Thank you very much. We are going to continue to watch those fires in Southern California, a serious situation. These are live pictures you're seeing right now. About 17,000 acres already scorched in that fire. But they seem to be getting a little bit of a handle on it. We'll watch that situation. Also coming up, Congressman Tom DeLay calls the day-old indictment against him baseless and a partisan vendetta. Up next the House Republican responds to the charge that forced him to step aside as the house majority leader, and to the political firestorm under way right now. Plus, a danger in dark and dank places in the hurricane disaster zone, that would be mold, another serious threat after the flooding. That's coming up. And a far more lighthearted story, love among penguins. CNN's Jeanne Moos -- only CNN's Jeanne Moos can give us the story about what is happening with those penguins. You'll want to stick around for this. You're in THE SITUATION ROOM.