focus. and later you can t throw a generation of kids away. an icon speaking out on some alarming statistics. we ll tell you what has the grammy winner so fired up. good morning, everyone. i m randi kaye. it s 8:00 on the east coast. 5:00 a.m. out west. thanks for waking up with us. we start in colorado where firefighters are hoping for a little help from mother nature. the waldo canyon fire has destroyed nearly 350 homes so far and thousands more are threatened. firefighters have been working around the clock to protect those homes. we ll have a live report later this hour. moving to egypt now, an historic day for people there. last hour mohamed morsi was sworn in as the new president. during the inauguration he offered a salute to the people of egypt and promised to promote unity. back in the u.s., newly released e-mails showed penn state knew they had a problem with jerry sandusky long before he was ever charged with a crime. concerns date back to an incident in
tried calling her, tried to get her out to no avail. there are at least 12 fires burning in six states right now, and the head of the forest service says unless we change how we care for our forests, we will see more of these super fires all summer long. we re joined by tom of the u.s. forest service, he s the chief of that industry, and we re going to draw upon your 33 years of service when we talk a little bit about these fires. we haven t heard that term, super fire, before. why is it being used? it s just another term. we ve been calling these mega fires in the past, but it s to really bring anticipation to the level of fire behavior attention to the level of fire behavior we re seeing in our forests across this country today. and to really stress how different it is today from what we were dealing with just a decade ago. jenna: and tell us a little bit about that. why is it different? well, there s several things that have contributed to these conditions. one has been the de
and they are trying to create a back wall of flames. what you can t see through the wall of smoke is that the fire that has rolled over a small mountaintop has rolled over in the last hour and barreling towards where we are, and the winds are the starting to move it to the left of the screen over here, and what they are afraid of the you will follow me over here is this highway over here, and they are afraid that the flames will jump over this highway and light the other side on fire. there is another fire a few miles away and they are afraid that the two fires would merge and creating a super-fire if you will, so there is an intense effort to get this situation stopped right here at this brink. ironically enough, this roadway is called hell s gate drive and leads into the southern edge of possum kingdom lake, and these fires are intense and as one firefighter said to me, it is about to get ugly here, and we are seeing it firsthand and up
were on a mission to rebuild this area. they did just that and not even a year later in september just yesterday, last night a huge super fire hit the boardwalk again. at 2:30 yesterday afternoon it hit the custard shop the soft serve ice cream shop which is behind the arcade behind me on the boardwalk at sea side park it spread north two blocks to seaside heights it barreled through the boardwalk where the mtv reality show jersey shore was filmed. taking out 50 businesses in its path. firefighters brought in heavy equipment creating fire breaks by destroying the newly freshly rebuilt boardwalk. they had to destroy about 70 feet of that. built a fire break packed it with sand and that helped control some of the flames. the governor was out here last night at 7:00 declaring a state of emergency. here s what he had to say. i said to my staff i feel