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New Fires in Los Angeles
Update: 2025-01-23
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Firefighters race to contain new wildfires in Southern California as some Altadena residents question why evacuation orders for the Eaton Fire came late. The Laken Riley Act, which allows illegal immigrants suspected of minor offenses to be detained, will become the first measure President Trump signs into law. And a rare winter snow storm hits parts of the South.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Winter, time for ice fishing, snowmobiles, and maybe a little pond hockey.
00:00:07
Winter's full of fun and games, until a pipe freezes and bursts.
00:00:13
Get ahead of the freezing weather with Moan Flow.
00:00:19
It monitors your home's water and shuts it off automatically before it can burst your winter plans.
00:00:26
Moan.
00:00:28
It's Thursday, January 23rd.
00:00:32
The fire risk never went away, and now the blazes are back.
00:00:37
Let me start here.
00:00:38
New wildfires are sweeping through Los Angeles.
00:00:44
There were multiple fires starting in multiple different places, seemingly all at once.
00:00:48
This comes amid new investigations into emergency alert failures.
00:00:52
We'll take you there.
00:00:53
The first bill sent to President Trump's desk will crack down on migrants.
00:00:57
What if a person finds themselves wrongfully accused?
00:01:00
They still might end up detained and removed from the country.
00:01:03
Meanwhile, troops are on the way to the border, so what impact will these policies have?
00:01:08
And when you say something's got a snowballs chance in Florida, that means it's unlikely.
00:01:12
Our infrastructure is designed differently than states that are used to this.
00:01:17
How a historic blizzard completely snarled the south.
00:01:21
From ABC News, this is Start Here.
00:01:25
I'm Brad Milky.
00:01:26
[MUSIC]
00:01:33
So much has been said of the recovery effort in the wake of the Los Angeles fires.
00:01:38
More than two dozen have died, and in fact, when you factor in the toxic smoke that is clouded parts of the metro area there, health officials say the indirect death toll will potentially be much higher.
00:01:48
But remember, it's still dry and windy there.
00:01:51
And yesterday, new fires exploded.
00:01:54
Dangerous, Santa Ana winds back and fueling the flames.
00:01:58
This is the huge fire spreading 30 acres of minute.
00:02:02
This time in the northern areas of LA County, just past the city of Santa Clarita.
00:02:08
So while we've been talking a lot about politics this week, and we will talk about politics later in the show, I want to start the day with the most pressing news of the morning.
00:02:15
ABC's chief national correspondent Matt Gutman is based in LA.
00:02:18
He is back on the fire lines right now, Matt.
00:02:21
What is happening there?
00:02:22
I can tell you personally, Brad, that my family, people I know are scared.
00:02:26
And when we watched the plumes start, there was a chill that ran up most people's spines in LA.
00:02:33
There were multiple fires starting in multiple different places.
00:02:36
It's just driving to this fire.
00:02:39
I encountered another fire on the 405 Freeway, one of the primary north south thoroughfares in Los Angeles.
00:02:46
A car went on fire, burnt couple of trees.
00:02:48
And it managed to get the car fire under control right off the 405, but all these trees keep igniting.
00:02:55
And in the background is the huge fire from the freeway you could see the massive towering column of smoke of the huge fire here.
00:03:04
The moment you hear about it, and then it goes from what 50 acres to 300 to 3,500.
00:03:11
And of course, people here in Castellock and these towns north of LA also very afraid.
00:03:17
55,000 people in the evacuation zone.
00:03:20
We have neighbors that got out, got our pets.
00:03:22
We got our dogs out.
00:03:24
My niece, that's a baby that's in here.
00:03:25
We got her out immediately.
00:03:28
They began evacuating five schools here.
00:03:31
You see the traffic of people carrying their go bags, their pets, their kids trying to get out of here.
00:03:37
I was really scared because I thought I was going to get really hurt.
00:03:41
And then there were lots of folks who tried to fireproof their homes to stay behind to ensure that they could try to spare their homes.
00:03:48
How long have you been standing here trying to water everything down?
00:03:51
Well, we started with the front of the house a couple hours ago.
00:03:55
And one of the people I met, Hoson Hand, was Tony Caballero here in Castellock, who was watching the fire devour the mountainside just across the reservoir from where he lived.
00:04:07
So you're pumping pool water to hold down the vegetation here?
00:04:11
Absolutely.
00:04:12
I don't want to leave the fireman without a pressure on their hydrant.
00:04:17
There has been this massive firefighting effort over the past 18 hours here.
00:04:22
The situation remains dynamic and the fire remains a difficult fire to contain, although we are getting the upper hand.
00:04:32
And again, with the fire swirling because of this erratic wind pattern that we're in, nobody exactly knows where it's going to move because the wind picks up embers and can cast them hundreds of yards ahead of the fire,
00:04:46
even miles ahead of the fire, depending on the wind speed.
00:04:49
What is the forecast?
00:04:50
Because there's rain on the way we've heard, right?
00:04:52
So will that mitigate what we're seeing there?
00:04:53
So the winds are expected to persist through today.
00:04:56
And then this weekend we have another weather pattern coming in for the first time in over eight months, Brad.
00:05:01
And when you see the vegetation out here, you can tell how dry it is and why it's igniting like tinder.
00:05:06
It is so dry.
00:05:08
So for the first time in over eight months, we are going to get or forecast to get some appreciable rain.
00:05:14
We're not sure how much.
00:05:16
But the concern is that in the burn scar areas above Altadena and above Pacific palisades, that the soil there is now hydrophobic.
00:05:26
This is a word that we're going to hear a lot more of in the coming weeks and months.
00:05:30
Basically what happens in these fires, they burn so hot, they cook and burn, not just the vegetation, but also the soil and the rocks.
00:05:39
And I was on the eating fire and I can tell you, it feels like quick sand when you're walking through it.
00:05:44
It feels like you're at a dune at a beach.
00:05:46
You can't imagine that this was once a mountain side with trees and vegetation.
00:05:51
And what happens is when the rain hits that, it's like water off a ducts back.
00:05:56
It becomes slick.
00:05:57
It comes roaring off the hillside and that's what causes mudslides.
00:06:02
And the concern is that that is the next calamity that Los Angeles have to fear right now.
00:06:08
And already I'm told that the National Guard has been moving off from trying to protect some of these neighborhoods to filling sandbags.
00:06:14
That's unbelievable because you think rain, you're like, oh, thank goodness.
00:06:17
And yet this lastly, the scariest part about the fires earlier this month was how quickly they spread.
00:06:23
We saw people struggling to escape.
00:06:25
And the question has been, was there a way to get people out earlier?
00:06:29
You've been reporting on these electronic alert systems that were supposed to aid that process, right?
00:06:34
What are you learning?
00:06:34
So what we've noticed and what the LA Times and the New York Times have reported on as well is that there were many people living west of a street called Lake Avenue in Al-Tedena who didn't get emergency alerts.
00:06:49
And these are absolutely essential to informing people want to get ready to go.
00:06:53
That's the evacuation morning.
00:06:55
And when they need to leave their house, that's the evacuation order.
00:06:59
I'm so sorry.
00:07:00
It's the first time I'm seeing everything is gone.
00:07:03
The people we spoken to, including a woman named Linda Zhang who we found in the debris of her home looking for her cat, say they didn't get it until well after they evacuate.
00:07:15
Were there evacuation alerts on the phone?
00:07:17
When I got on the ambulance, then I received it.
00:07:20
Only once you were on the ambulance and everything was burning around.
00:07:23
The fire started at 6.15, 6.10 p.m.
00:07:27
on Tuesday, January 7, Lindo left her house because someone banged on her door at 5 a.m.
00:07:34
went to a fire station, was taken via ambulance out of the danger zone as her house burned down.
00:07:40
And only half an hour after that did she get her first emergency alert, which is more than 11 hours after the fire began.
00:07:49
There are people in that same section of Al-Tedena who say that they never got an emergency alert.
00:07:55
I would have been dead if I had listened to that.
00:07:58
And it's that western part of Al-Tedena where 17 people, all 17 people killed in the fire were found dead.
00:08:07
There must be a thorough examination of the lifesaving emergency notification actions that took place throughout the wildfire events earlier this month.
00:08:16
And so at this point, Ellie County Supervisor, Katherine Barger, is demanding an independent investigation into the emergency alert system.
00:08:23
And it wasn't just one mistake.
00:08:24
There had been continuous mistakes throughout those first couple of days.
00:08:27
The most notable of them was on January 9, two days after the fires began.
00:08:32
There was a county-wide evacuation order issued to all 10 plus million people living in LA County.
00:08:40
Even if they were really far from where the fires were, which you can imagine, caused a tremendous amount of fear and confusion and even more dangerously a little bit of suspicion and lack of trust in the emergency alert system in LA County.
00:08:56
Right, you need to have people taking these things seriously and you need to have the alerts coming out in a quick and accurate way.
00:09:03
Matt Gutman, back on the fire lines in Southern California.
00:09:06
Stay safe and thank you.
00:09:08
Thanks, Brett.
00:09:09
Next up on Start here, President Trump is sending troops to the border, but what will they do when they get there?
00:09:17
We're back in a bit.
00:09:18
If you're trying to predict what the future holds for a particular business or particular industry, good luck with that, right?
00:09:26
Sometimes it feels like if you ask nine experts you're about to get 10 different answers.
00:09:29
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00:09:35
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00:10:58
For this new White House, this week is all about firsts.
00:11:01
President Trump issued his first executive orders this week.
00:11:04
He got his first cabinet member confirmed and he issued his first pardons.
00:11:08
In fact, you've probably heard so much about the January 6 pardons.
00:11:11
You might have missed last night the president issued a pardon for two Washington DC police officers convicted for their roles in a motorist's death.
00:11:19
They've been chasing a guy on the scooter but then smashed into another person driving their car and then tried to hide details of that crash from their department.
00:11:28
It turned out that scooter driver they were originally chasing was an undocumented immigrant and that seemed to play a key role in why President Trump issued his pardon.
00:11:37
They got five year jail sentences.
00:11:39
You know the case and we're looking at that in order to give them a...we gotta give them a break.
00:11:48
Last night more firsts.
00:11:49
Once again tied to Trump's focus on immigration.
00:11:52
The Pentagon announced it sending active duty troops to the US-Mexico border and in Washington, Congress has passed a bill that will become Trump's first that signed into law, one that might get ICE agents involved in responding to low-level crimes.
00:12:07
ABC's Armando Garcia covers immigration and so Armando, I mean the first law President Trump seems poised to sign is the Laken Riley Act.
00:12:14
This was named after a young woman who was murdered in Georgia by Venezuelan migrant who had been caught at the border when he was trying to come into the country.
00:12:22
He was released into the US as he awaited asylum hearings and in the meantime was arrested several times for different low-level crimes and he was never sent back for any of them.
00:12:31
So what would this new law do?
00:12:33
Well the point of the law Brad is for DHS to quickly be able to detain migrants convicted or charged or who admit to certain crimes like burglary and theft and that was a major problem for a lot of critics of the bill.
00:12:47
You're asked to vote to advance a constitutionally dubious bill that feels to address any of the real problems of our broken immigration system but requires the mandatory detention and deportation of people simply accused of a crime.
00:13:02
What if a person finds themselves wrongfully accused they still might end up detained and removed from the country.
00:13:08
The bill also gives the states a lot more power to challenge federal immigration law.
00:13:12
I mean you and I have been talking about this for many many years now.
00:13:17
We saw that play out a lot in Texas with them literally stalling almost every single bite in immigration policy by filing a lawsuit and conservative leaning courts.
00:13:26
The standing provisions in the Lake and Riley Act actually give the states the ability to challenge it in court in future open borders administrations that refuse to follow the law is written by Congress.
00:13:39
That's now the law of the land and states will have more power to do just that now according to documents we obtained ice has been telling Congress for weeks that given the current funding that they have it would be impossible to fully enforce the law.
00:13:53
They say they need at least 27 billion dollars just to start with that's for removal flights tons of new positions that they need to add as well as at least 110,000 additional detention beds.
00:14:05
FYI they're currently only funded for about 41,000 so that kind of gives you an idea of how much they would have to beef up their detention capacity and of course we're only talking about enforcing one specific law not any of the executive orders that Trump has issued.
00:14:19
So Congress is definitely finding out that mass deportation costs a massive amount of money.
00:14:25
So you'd actually have like federal agents more involved with what in some towns might be considered just kind of like local crimes however this did have some bipartisan support some Democrats like John Federman in the Senate were on board with this.
00:14:37
Hey in the meantime Armando the other I mean it's very dramatic to hear that we are going to be sending more than a thousand troops to the southern border under President Trump's orders.
00:14:46
Some of these deployments apparently are happening right now by the end of the week apparently it's going to be 1500 members of the army and Marines.
00:14:53
What is the mission and how significant is it well senior defense officials say troops are going to be down at the southern border by the end of the week.
00:15:00
But they are not going to be used for law enforcement use to be clear there's already about 1500 troops down at the border serving in support roles.
00:15:10
The DHS and CBP they've been down there for years that's separate to some state national guard that's also their supporting governor Abbott's operation loan star in Texas.
00:15:21
Now when troops are deployed to the border they're typically helping with building barriers or processing migrants typically only CBP actually arrests and apprehends migrants.
00:15:31
But in Texas for example we've seen national guards responsibilities expanded under governor Abbott's direction.
00:15:38
But Brad when these troops get down there it's possible that they're not going to see a ton of action.
00:15:43
The number of daily encounters at the border have actually been lower than at some points during the first Trump administration.
00:15:50
In December 2024 a border patrol encountered migrants about 47,300 times in between ports of entry that's 81% lower than in December 2023.
00:16:02
It's also the lowest daily average for a month since July 2020 when Trump of course was president and Brad this is obviously another way that President Trump wants to show that he's making good on his promise to be tough on immigration.
00:16:17
So while the military might not have a lot to do when they get there at first in the next few days we might see larger groups of people congregate on the southern side on the Mexican side of the border and that's because we're still in the first week of the Trump presidency and asylum is essentially dead at the border.
00:16:45
He has really struck down a lot of the Biden policies that allowed people to come here legally for example CBP1 app he got rid of that on day one.
00:16:54
People were told that even if you had an appointment and were ready to present yourself legally at a port of entry to try to seek asylum that those appointments were canceled.
00:17:03
So of course that coupled with the military now heading down to the border it's just a big big show of force and I think that's exactly what the Trump presidency campaigned on and what they're trying to deliver now on their very first week.
00:17:19
So less illegal crossings right now but then once you put a lot of people on the other side of the border and make them desperate like there's no legal ways to enter no sign of any legal ways to enter that is when the desperation creeps up and that is when you start seeing more illegal crossings.
00:17:33
Just good reality checks here on both sides of the border Armando Garcia covering immigration.
00:17:38
Thank you.
00:17:38
Thanks Brad.
00:17:42
I've got a buddy who leaves New York most winters goes down south to escape the snow we yesterday he sent me a photo from New Orleans of him covered in powder like icicles hanging from the eyebrows type stuff.
00:17:57
These are the scenes that are dominating Instagram feeds and newsrooms across the American South as residents deal with the biggest snow storm in decades.
00:18:08
ABC's Trevor alt is in wait for it Florida where there have been full blown blizzards this week Trevor how much snow are we talking about because this is not just like a cute dusting.
00:18:17
No Brad we're talking about more recorded snow than we've ever seen for the state of Florida and this is not just a Florida issue Texas has been hammer Georgia also really has been battling a mess and Louisiana too.
00:18:29
I mean there are parts of Louisiana that got their first blizzard warning ever issued your buddy in New Orleans they're talking about eight inches of snow there in the French quarter where there's still bands marching down the street in the midst of snowball fights too.
00:18:41
I mean this is truly a once in a lifetime snowstorm.
00:18:47
We're talking about weather records and how long we've been tracking it we can only go back 130 years and at least in Florida in the area around Pensacola they had more snow than they've ever had before.
00:19:02
So there's literally not a single person alive in Florida that has ever seen the amount of snow that they have gotten from this snowstorm.
00:19:10
It was going to snow but I didn't know it's going to be like actual thick snow.
00:19:16
I had exams I had no choice I had to walk it was cold.
00:19:18
I'm bucket list was to see it snow here at the beach just to experience it.
00:19:25
And of course it's not just a one-off thing you have to deal with the treatment in a place where they don't often get a lot of snow and they're not really equipped for it and as the weather continues to move it's still warm because it is Florida.
00:19:38
So you have some of that snow melt up but then it gets cold again it freezes.
00:19:42
It is a beautiful sunshiney day not a cloud in the sky but just frigid.
00:19:48
I think I woke up at around 6 am this morning it was 16 degrees which is highly unusual for us at any time of the year.
00:19:57
Those conditions are really dangerous still and this has been a deli storm to begin with.
00:20:02
There's already been at least 10 deaths and counting a lot of them on the highways Brad.
00:20:06
Well yeah I'm trying to figure out what is it because I'm sure there are people that are like well yeah welcome to snowstorms like deal with it but what I guess I'm wondering what this does to an area that's not used to it because we've seen like a Pacific Northwest when there were big heat waves.
00:20:18
A lot of houses don't have air conditioning and so it actually becomes more dangerous there than it would in hotter places.
00:20:23
What is it what happens when there's a huge snow storm in the south.
00:20:26
Yeah and you could be forgiven for thinking well they just don't know how to drive down there and yes there's an element where of course they don't know how to drive in it because they never had to do it before.
00:20:35
But there is a lot to be said about how much of a difference salt treatment and snow plows really can make in the aftermath of a snowstorm like this and all those areas that usually get hammered.
00:20:47
I mean Chicago by itself Brad has hundreds of snow plows ready to deploy all the time our infrastructure is designed differently than states that are used to this.
00:20:58
I mean if this were South Dakota they would just shrug their shoulders now the state has done a lot to prepare.
00:21:05
Florida's governor Ron DeSantis said the other day that they had 11 plows for the state now they've been taking some out on loan.
00:21:12
I mean Houston brought in some snow plows from Wisconsin a few different states that have been generous enough to give some of their supply of snow plows that will help out a little bit.
00:21:21
But I spent all day in Tallahassee yesterday I did not see a single snow plow and I can tell you based on those conditions an ice is certainly a factor in a two.
00:21:31
A treated road no matter how much snow there is is much better than an untreated one and having spent a lot of time reporting on lake effects snow in Buffalo where they'll get well over a foot sometimes two feet.
00:21:44
It felt safer to drive there after all that snow fall than it did here in Tallahassee yesterday after one in three quarters inches of sleet because there was no treatment on the roads and so yeah there's an element where the drivers are just having to figure it out.
00:21:59
But there's also the problem of having to deal with it and it sticks around because it has been so cold so it's a several day event even that one and a half inches of sleet is enough to shut down basically every business in Tallahassee.
00:22:12
I was going to say what is this meant for just anything interstates companies businesses throughout this because because this is so widespread.
00:22:19
Yeah I mean it's paralyzed a ton the huge portions of the the golf and really a lot of the South bread.
00:22:28
I 75 we saw some drivers that were stranded near Atlanta for 15 hours overnight because a truck getting into a crash catching on fire there's been a few different accidents like that.
00:22:40
Not to mention the number of deadly incidents to and in the severe cold it is truly life threatening.
00:22:47
When you have a storm like this naturally there are a lot of power outages they've had to open up a lot of different shelters to hundreds of people that just need a place to stay where they can stay warm.
00:22:59
In a place where even in January a lot of people would be watering their lawns because it would be so dry and warm.
00:23:06
It really bizarre scenes here people have described as kind of an upstied down storm that this the north is relatively dry very cold but relatively dry compared to what we are seeing across the South right now.
00:23:16
Trevor all thank you so much.
00:23:18
Thank you Brad.
00:23:21
Okay one more quick break when we come back he was bearish on the block chain until he started selling his own crypto unless thing is next.
00:23:32
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00:24:00
And one last thing lots of people watch the stock markets in the first days of a new administration but if you're just keeping track of dollars and cents you're thinking in the wrong currency.
00:24:11
I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet just ahead of inauguration day Donald Trump launched his own brand of cryptocurrency.
00:24:23
This is like Bitcoin or Ethereum those currencies that exist solely in digital form that have no central bank and can be started by anyone.
00:24:31
However unlike those ones that you might have heard of this product simply called Trump with a dollar sign in front of it is not expected to be used as a currency really.
00:24:40
These are called meme coins.
00:24:42
This is a great analogy because there are people that buy baseball cards solely because they like baseball players.
00:25:02
It's a hobby and there are Trump supporters who will go oh this is like a cool way to show support and be part of this community.
00:25:07
It's like buying a pair of Trump shoes or a Trump branded water bottle but this is digital good clean fun.
00:25:13
But then there are those who buy baseball cards solely to see their value go up.
00:25:17
If it's scarce enough and if people wanted enough that trading value can skyrocket.
00:25:22
The value of that meme coin of the Trump meme coin went from zero.
00:25:26
This was worth nothing on Friday launch Friday night and on Monday when Trump was inaugurated it went to $8 billion.
00:25:33
But here's the important thing to know about these sorts of crypto currencies.
00:25:36
President Trump and the people around him created this crypto coin and presumably would own large quantities of it.
00:25:43
So when people initially buy these coins that money is going to Trump ventures and then when the president sells his stake he'd earn even more.
00:25:50
Which is why it's worth noting that the first lady now has also started minting crypto.
00:25:55
Sunday night on the eve of the inauguration the incoming first lady Melania Trump also launched her own meme coin which briefly hit $1 billion.
00:26:05
It's a little bit below that now.
00:26:07
But what you're seeing is the president and the first lady find a way to basically directly cash in on this crypto trend and put their names out there and people are buying into it.
00:26:20
Now to some people this enterprise comes off as shady.
00:26:22
We've seen it happen before where the creator of a cryptocurrency sells their stake in it right when the value starts to tank.
00:26:30
It's the regular people that got swept up in the moment that have now spent hundreds or thousands of dollars buying something they now can't even hold and that nobody wants.
00:26:39
However, that's a risk with all types of crypto.
00:26:41
They're not regulated like traditional currency.
00:26:43
What's different about these coins Elizabeth says is who's doing the regulating?
00:26:48
The crypto industry says Trump is the crypto president.
00:26:53
Trump went to a Bitcoin conference over the summer and basically vowed to be a best friend to this industry.
00:26:59
He said that he would take a light handed approach toward regulation and that is exactly what the crypto industry wanted to hear.
00:27:07
Because for years, Brad, there's been this back and forth about how exactly should cryptocurrency be regulated.
00:27:14
He says it's no coincidence that the price of Bitcoin has exploded since election day.
00:27:19
It's no surprise that those around Trump would think they could profit off of selling mean coins.
00:27:23
But what is unprecedented is the commander and chief himself, effectively launching a business that he profits from in a nation industry he will have a hand in shaping.
00:27:33
There are far-reaching questions about conflicts of interest.
00:27:36
Also, you have the reality that you could see a foreign government decide to invest millions billions of dollars into Trump's crypto meme coin.
00:27:46
And then essentially maybe in return say, okay, hey, that made you really rich.
00:27:50
What can you do for us when it comes to foreign policy?
00:27:54
We hear about meme stocks all the time.
00:27:56
Investments that are driven by vibes, more than financial discretion.
00:27:59
Well, compared to stocks, crypto is the wild west and the sheriff has something he'd like to sell you.
00:28:05
By the way, did you catch how Elizabeth translated the concept of baseball cards for anyone who's not an old man at heart like myself?
00:28:15
She was like, you know, like baseball or Pokemon cards.
00:28:18
Like, thank you.
00:28:19
Now they understand.
00:28:20
Yes, the magic of the gathering cards, like those have cultural relevance.
00:28:23
Meanwhile, I, an adult man, have a Mike Trout rookie card on my mantle that I got as an adult.
00:28:28
And I'm never selling them.
00:28:29
More and all these stories on ABCNews.com and the ABCNews app.
00:28:32
I'm Brad Milky.
00:28:33
See you tomorrow.
00:28:34
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