closest to the closest neighbor. it s covered in a fire-retardant gel. so that prevents the fire from moving to another house and, god forbid, the rest of the neighborhood. they ve taken a lot of precautions. okay, you re break out a little bit. we re going to try to establish a better line with you. that may be the wall that was p set up to prevent the fire from getting to the closest house. as we discussed, it s very calculated. one gust of wind going the wrong way or the danger of that could take a fire into make this? a whole other problem. we talk about the the ten-mile-per-hour rule when it comes to a wildfire. 20 miles an hour is a huge threshold where sparks will fly miles and miles. they re not only looking at this neighborhood. the sparks are literally going into the sky now.
you can see some very, very thick, black smoke wafting away. they apparently know what a lot of the materials are inside there, but they want this house basically to burn to the ground. they want a very, very hot fire to burn everything in this house, specifically the chemicals in there that have been used for making bombs. so these are live pictures you re seeing. they have set this house on fire. these are the early stages of this fire. we don t know how long this could take. it could take hours to get through everything. authorities are not sure whether something in there may blow up. we may see different things happening with this fire. at the moment, you can see a few angles of it. this is the side that the wind is blowing toward. you can see heavy, heavy black smoke coming in this direction. from the other angle that we ve got, you see a very, very active, fully-involved house fire. this is a controlled fire. this is authorities having set this on fire. this isn t a random fire.
right. 500, 200 feet depending on the ember itself and landing other places. the reason why they waited for such a dry day, for such a non-windy day, is that they want to keep these embers from going a mile down the road, two miles down the road, three miles down the road. they re chasing the fire as it s making more hot spots down along the way. this is never a wet place in the wintertime. this is already all of this sage l sage, all of this brush is already dry. there hasn t been any type of weather to get all of this wet. i ve been kind of waiting, looking for some kind of a pop. there s chemicals in there, something might explode. we re not seeing that yet because chemicals that in here literally need to be combined to make the explosives. if they are in separate containers, they will burn, but they will not be explosive by themselves. right. but really now the flames getting significantly bigger. at the moment, we re probably
seeing what we normally see in a house fire. it s eating up the housing materials. they didn t set this fire on the chemicals. this set this far to start burning, to burn up materials in the house and get hot. i wish we could get an aerial of this. maybe they re keeping the helicopters away from the area. that would be smart, right? i don t know if we ve got a distance shot. we had that distance shot. okay. you will see that this fire is black. and black means burning homes. i constantly get these fires in oklahoma. they say, grass fire, grass fire. it s black. grass doesn t burn black. grass burns white, gray. this is housing material that s bunning. shingles are burning. everything that they cut, they doing the right thing. you are one of the few guys here who s been inside of a burning house, a fire house, a controlled burn. when we say we want this to burn at 1,800 degrees fahrenheit, do we know if that s normal? does a house that burns for a
have in defusing bombs and removing hazardous materials, they could not get the stuff out of the house. apparently it was just all over the place. they couldn t use bomb-removing devices. it was too volatile, too dangerous. so they decided they would burn the house down. quite a spectacular sight when you see all the houses in the neighborhood. this isn t some house on a ranch somewhere with acres and acres of land around it. this is in an urban area. the people around that house are anxious at this moment. they re watching this live. they must be very, very concerned that something goes awry, something shoots out of that house and ends up going through their roof or through their window and sets their house on fire as a result of that. there are many, many firefighters on the scene. 50 different agencies involved in this in order to control this fire and make sure nothing else burns down. there s a wider picture of it. you see the plume from that fire going very, very high into the sk