extremely dry out. we had extreme winds, which makes it easier for the fire to move forward. it s in very steep terrain. fire likes to move uphill. and then we had a lot of dead fuels because of drought. are there technologies being worked on or things that you feel hopeful about that we re developing? yeah, the wharf-f fire, the forecast model we run takes all the factors, the weather, the fuel, the topography and show you an exact picture of how that fire is going to move over time. so we have two different trucks. when is a lidar truck. one is a radar truck. it s basically like storm chasing for wildfires. oh, wow. basically drive the trucks up, collect a bunch of data, and the ultimate goal is to be able to create the simulation and give that to firefighters. if you really know what the fire is going to do that day, then you can deploy resources in the most efficient way. i mean, storm chasing already sounds crazy. but fire chasing sounds even crazier. while it s comfor
home. jesus. never seen anything like this. you can still smell, like, ash and burn, but also smell the trees. there is like a pine smell. there is also maybe a chemical smell, maybe because of all the plastic. it makes my stomach hurt a little bit. never seen this stuff this close up before. yeah. it was heartbreaking, man. it s been four months. a lot of the stuff has just been sitting here. yeah. we re in the midst of it. we re in the midst of the fire. you can still it looks like a bomb still went off. man. i m just devastated. we re all in this together, you know. this is our whole greenville tribe, even the nonnatives. my new tribal member danny manning and his family have
gotten so bad that it wasn t safe to breathe. so my wife and i took me, the asthmatic, my elderly parent, and our kids straight to vegas. not because we wanted to gamble, but because it was close and there were cheap flights. now back then, it seemed like a oneself-in-a-lifetime thing. rescue, what is your emergency? reporter: but ever since, the fires in california have gotten worse. dixie fire. woolsey fire. are more towns burned to the ground, more forests devastated and more refugees. this episode is about californians and fire, because we got to learn how to get along.
home. and i had to be like i m sorry, but everybody here is going to die if we don t get all four lanes going south. i saw people running on foot, carrying babies and dogs and their hair catching on fire from embers. at one point, we re herding them into a walgreens to shelter them. i think we ended up with over 100 people in there. and i remember the firefighters going is this going to work? and i go i don t know. but if they re outside when the fire front hits, it s going to kill them all. it was chaos. by the end of the day on november 8th, almost 19,000 structures had been destroyed and 85 people had died. how many times did we try to get to a person that we couldn t make it to, or get somebody, you know, too late. i just can t imagine what that feels like. i think the campfire is
so the idea is not that we re never going to have fire here again. but when we do, it won t be hot enough to kill all these trees. it will stay low to the ground. yeah. we re looking great here. all with pitchforks with start coming in here. fire is a very social thing. if you can have the family involved, it should be like second nature to have that level of comfort in the culture around fire. wow. look at that. look at that over there. whoa! i mean, if i was just walking and i saw fire this high, i would be ahh! but very quickly out there today, i sort of was like this is what we re supposed to do. i think that s where we used to be going back 150 years or more, and that s where we need to be. you want to come out here and light something with a torch? yeah, sure. light one right there. and let s light every one step, okay. okay. fire is the teacher. going on down. and if you spend time with fire, then you get the lessons.