California brush fire explodes over 20,000 acres, Newsom declares state of emergency
Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images
(LOS ANGELES) — A wind-whipped Southern California brush fire that exploded to over 20,000 acres in about 24 hours, destroying homes and prompting mass evacuations, remained out of control Thursday as Gov. Gavin Newsom rallied state and federal resources to battle the blaze.
The governor declared a state of emergency in Ventura County as firefighters struggled to gain an edge on the Mountain Fire, which had burned 20,484 acres and destroyed an undetermined number of homes since starting near the town of Camarillo. The blaze was 5% contained Thursday evening.
The November fire came amid unseasonably warm temperatures and strong Santa Ana winds. The National Weather Service issued red-flag warnings for Ventura and Los Angeles counties that are to remain in effect through at least Friday morning.
Aerial footage from ABC Los Angeles station KABC showed what appeared to be row after row of destroyed homes in the towns Camarillo, Moorpark and Somis.
Multiple people were taken to the hospitals to be treated for smoke inhalation and other injuries, Ventura County emergency officials said. Some victims became trapped in their cars as they raced from the fast-moving flames, officials said.
In a press conference Thursday evening, Ventura County Fire officials said 88 structures has been damaged and 132 structures were destroyed, the majority of which were homes.
Offcials said there were 10 confirmed injuries, most due to smoke inhalation and all were deemed non-life threatening.
At least 14,000 people were ordered to evacuate, said Ventura County Sheriff Jim Fryhoff.
Newsom announced on Wednesday that he has mobilized statewide resources to help battle the fire and has secured a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to make vital resources available to extinguish the fire.
The California Office of Emergency Services said it had prepositioned 48 pieces of firefighting equipment, nine helicopters and over 100 personnel in 19 counties across California in advance of dangerous fire weather forecast in many parts of coastal and inland California.
“This is a dangerous fire that’s spreading quickly and threatening lives,” Newsom said in a statement. “State resources have been mobilized to protect communities, and this federal support from the Biden-Harris Administration will give state and local firefighters the resources they need to save lives and property as they continue battling this aggressive fire.”
The Mountain Fire is one of two wind-driven fires that broke out in Southern California, leading the NWS to issue rare November red flag warnings for Los Angeles and Ventura counties alerting of an “extreme fire risk” from Malibu into the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles, where winds could gust near 100 mph.
“A very strong, widespread, and long-duration Santa Ana wind event will bring widespread extremely critical fire weather conditions to many areas of Los Angeles and Ventura counties Wednesday into Thursday,” according to the NWS warning.
The cause of the fire remained under investigation Thursday.
Due to extreme wind conditions, fixed-wing aircraft are unable to assist in firefighting efforts, according to the Ventura Fire Department, which said ground crews, helicopters and mutual aid resources are “actively working to protect lives and property.”
Broad Fire
A second wildfire erupted in Los Angeles County’s Malibu area Wednesday — named the Broad Fire — and has burned at least 50 acres southwest of South Malibu Canyon Road and the Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) in Malibu, according to CAL Fire.
The fire was 15% contained Wednesday evening, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Local fire officials have warned residents to prepare for potential evacuations and the PCH has been closed in both directions between Webb Way and Corral Canyon.
Santa Ana wind conditions
Named after Southern California’s Santa Ana Canyon, the region’s Santa Ana winds bring blustery, dry and warm wind that blows out of the desert, drying out vegetation and increasing wildfire danger.
The long-duration Santa Ana wind event was expected to peak late Wednesday, becoming moderate on Thursday, then tailing off to light offshore winds on Friday.
Northeast winds moving 20 to 40 mph with gusts up to 60 mph are expected across the canyons and passes of Southern California, with higher winds in the more wind-prone areas.
Another surge of wind is expected to peak through Thursday morning with widespread northeast winds of 20 to 30 mph with gusts to 50 mph before weakening considerably by Thursday afternoon.
A school sign is seen on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Calif., in August 2023. — Mike Levine/ABC News
(BERKELEY, Calif.) — Two weeks ago, as college students returned to campus at the University of California, Berkeley, some of the most senior officials in the FBI were huddling inside a nondescript conference room beneath the stands of the school’s football stadium.
“Here’s where the rubber meets the road,” one of the FBI officials told the group of law enforcement officials, academics, tech developers, venture capitalists, and crime victims.
The problem they’re trying to solve, according to officials, is that the FBI is losing its ability to fight some of the greatest threats facing Americans, because phones and other electronic devices are increasingly being designed with no way for authorities to access their contents when the law authorizes them to collect evidence regarding suspected crimes — including those committed by radical terrorists, fentanyl dealers and online child predators.
It’s hardly a new problem.
“[It’s] the same conversation we had yesterday, five years ago, and 10 years ago, and 15 years ago, and now 20 years ago,” a professor told the group. “There’s something depressing about that. … We keep making the same goddamn mistakes over and over again.”
That’s why the FBI has taken the unusual step of turning to an academic institution for help. And not just any academic institution, but Berkeley — considered to be the birthplace of the Free Speech and student protest movements of the 1960s.
“To their credit, they were willing to think outside the box,” former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who now runs a center at Berkeley focused on security, said of the FBI.
‘A historic milestone’
A generation ago, such a partnership would have seemed unthinkable. In the 1950s and ’60s, in the midst of the Cold War, the FBI reportedly targeted a wide swath of Berkeley professors and students with surveillance and other secret tactics, convinced that radical Communists were among them.
Now, however, the FBI is battling a very different set of threats — and a new generation of advanced technologies.
Last year, the FBI signed an agreement with Napolitano’s center, the Center for Security in Politics, vowing to exchange resources and technology related expertise in a shared effort to support the FBI’s mission.
In a press release at the time, Napolitano touted the arrangement as “the first collaboration of its kind” and “a historic milestone for both institutions.”
The meeting two weeks ago was one of the first in-person gatherings to come out of the agreement.
The gathering involved three sessions spread over two days, and ABC News was allowed to observe the closing session on the condition that it not name any of the speakers.
One FBI official framed the final session by noting that while the FBI brings “enormous resources to bear” in significant or high-profile cases, “we don’t have the people, we don’t have the financial resources to do that” in the many thousands of other cases the FBI pursues each day.
“[That] is why we need to work with our private sector partners to have a lawful-access solution for our garden-variety cases,” the FBI official said during the session.
Instead of trying to address the many types of threats investigated by the FBI, the summit focused on just one: finding ways to stop child exploitation and the spread of sexual abuse material online.
“I think there’s a universal recognition that that stuff is bad, and we need to figure out a way to better deal with it,” Napolitano told ABC News.
‘A really egregious trend’
More children than ever are being exploited online, as predators use newer technologies like live-streaming apps, online video games and advanced messaging platforms to solicit sexual material from them, according to Abbigail Beccaccio, who heads the FBI’s section focused on violent crimes against children.
Beccaccio told ABC News there’s been a significant shift in these cases as they’ve exploded in number.
While the FBI had long seen cases of “traditional sextortion,” when predators with a sexual interest in young girls trick them into sharing explicit images of themselves, the FBI has in recent years seen a “huge uptick” in so-called “financially motivated sextortion” targeting boys, Beccaccio said.
In such cases, the victims are tricked into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves — but “that’s where the scheme turns,” said Beccaccio. Armed with the compromising material, the perpetrator then threatens the victim with claims of, “If you don’t send me money, I will ruin your life, I will send this to all your friends and family,” Beccaccio said.
In less than 18 months, from October 2021 to March 2023, the FBI counted more than 12,600 victims of such schemes — a “huge” and “shocking number,” as Beccaccio put it.
She said she knows of cases where children even dipped into their college savings accounts to pay the criminals who targeted them. But worst of all, she said, “We began to see a really egregious trend in suicides.”
Beccaccio said that helps illustrate why she and her FBI colleagues are so adamant that law enforcement needs some way to access criminals’ devices when a judge authorizes it.
“Without lawful access, we lose the ability to obtain the information we need to prosecute the offenders and rescue these child victims,” she warned.
The public, she said, should find that “troubling.”
‘A very dark place’
A decade ago, as highly-encrypted phone apps became commonplace, the FBI tried to engage the public in a national conversation about the future of lawful access. Then-FBI director James Comey warned that “going dark” by losing lawful access to personal data would lead to law enforcement agencies “missing out” on chances to stop “some very dangerous people.”
“Criminals and terrorists would like nothing more than for us to miss out,” he warned during an October 2014 speech in Washington, D.C. “Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place.”
The issue came to a head a year later, when for several months the FBI was unable to unlock an Apple iPhone left behind by one of ISIS-inspired terrorists who killed 14 people and injured nearly two dozen others during an attack in San Bernardino, California, in December 2015.
There were congressional hearings held on the issue, and the FBI even took the matter to federal court, seeking to force Apple to find a way for authorities to access the phone’s content. The case became moot after an Israeli security company found a way to unlock the perpetrator’s phone.
“It’s so seductive to talk about privacy as the ultimate value,” Comey told a House panel in March 2016. “[But] in a society where we aspire to be safe and have our families safe and our children safe, that can’t be. We have to find a way to accommodate both.”
But the FBI’s public campaign over lawful access appeared to lose steam after FBI leadership become engulfed in a controversy surrounding the 2016 presidential election and Comey was fired as the agency’s director in May 2017.
Now — more than seven years later — the FBI is trying to spark the conversation again.
Katie Noyes, the head of the FBI’s next-generation technology section, said that in a survey of the FBI’s field offices last year, the bureau identified nearly 17,000 active cases that were either stalled or missing key evidence due to “warrant-proof encryption.”
Just two months ago, as the FBI struggled to determine why a 20-year-old Pennsylvania man tried to assassinate former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally, Abbate, the deputy director, told lawmakers that the shooter had used encrypted applications and that, more than two weeks after the shooting, the FBI was still unable “to get information back because of their encrypted nature.”
“We need a solution that provides lawful access to law enforcement,” Abbate implored lawmakers during a Senate hearing on the assassination attempt.
So the FBI is turning to Napolitano and her team at Berkeley for help.
‘Waiting for the market’
The summit at Berkeley was led by Napolitano’s team and an array of FBI officials, including deputy director Abbate; Jeff Fields, the head of counterintelligence at the FBI’s San Francisco field office; and members of the agency’s technology units.
Victims of online sexual exploitation, including a woman whose likeness appeared in a “deepfake” video that went viral, also shared their stories and perspectives.
“What was really wonderful about this convening was having really disparate points of view around the same table,” Noyes told ABC News, adding that some of the tech companies and venture capitalists there said they had never heard directly from victims before.
The group got into an impassioned debate over whether tech companies, especially global giants such as Apple and Meta — neither of whom participated in the summit — would ever voluntarily redesign their devices and platforms to ensure that law enforcement could access them with a court order.
One law enforcement official noted that the FBI spoke with the companies a decade ago, but they had little interest in having a conversation about changing their ways.
“Waiting for the market here is not going to get it done,” said another law enforcement official, insisting that the only thing that will bring change is Congress passing a new law.
Others rejected that view, saying that the point of holding the summit is to potentially find other ways to address the problem.
“There hasn’t been much movement at all, but on the other hand the technology has changed,” Napolitano told ABC News after the summit. “And so there may be better and more available ways for government — meaning law enforcement — to get around some of the traditional barriers to lawful access, and those were part of the discussions today.”
‘What’s next?’
Noyes emphasized that she and her colleagues at the FBI are “big fans of encryptions” for personal security and privacy — and that the FBI is not trying to expand or change what it’s legally allowed to do.
As she described it, the FBI just wants ensure that law enforcement maintains the type of access that it has long used to bring criminals to justice.
“There’s no discussion around a request for any additional authority,” she said. “In many cases we have had this access, and it has been removed or taken away over time” due to newer technology.
According to Noyes, the summit produced a number of ideas and proposed approaches.
Some participants suggested that an independent third party could hold a technology company’s access keys in “escrow,” so those keys would not be in the hands of law enforcement but could be used under court order.
There was also discussion about “homomorphic encryption,” a type of encryption that can keep data encrypted even as that data is processed or even shared.
Napolitano said the summit two weeks ago was just the beginning.
“The challenge for us is, ‘OK, now we’ve had these discussions, what’s next?'” she said.
NOTE: If your child is the victim of a predator or you know someone who is a victim, you can always call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit information online at tips.fbi.gov.
(WASHINGTON) — The Navy identified on Monday two “trailblazing” women aviators who were killed when their jet crashed in northeast Washington during an Oct. 15 training mission.
A day after Navy officials declared them dead, they were identified as Lt. Cmdr. Lyndsay P. “Miley” Evans, a Naval flight officer, and Lt. Serena N. “Dug” Wileman, a Naval aviator. Both women were 31 years old and from California, according to the Navy.
Evans and Wileman were described by Navy officials as “two highly skilled, combat decorated aviators.”
“More than just names and ranks, they were role models, trailblazers, and women whose influence touched countless people on the flight deck and well beyond,” the Navy’s Carrier Strike Group Two and Carrier Air Wing 3 said in a statement.
The aviators were identified a day after Cmdr. Timothy Warburton of the Navy’s Electronic Attack Squadron 130 — which goes by the nickname “Zappers” — announced they had been declared dead.
“It is with a heavy heart that we share the loss of two beloved Zappers,” Warburton said in a statement. “Our priority right now is taking care of the families of our fallen aviators and ensuring the well-being of our Sailors and the Growler community. We are grateful for the ongoing teamwork to safely recover the deceased.”
Wreckage of the EA-18G Growler jet was located Wednesday on a mountainside east of Mount Rainier, military officials said.
Search-and-rescue crews faced mountainous terrain, cloudy weather and low visibility during the search for the crew, Navy officials said in a statement last week.
The jet, from Electronic Attack Squadron 130, crashed at about 3:23 p.m. on Oct. 15, about 30 miles west of Yakima, according to the Navy.
The jet crashed after launching a training flight from Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, officials said.
Evans and Wileman had recently returned from a nine-month deployment to the Red Sea in the Middle East, where they were part of the Carrier Air Wing 3 and stationed aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, according to the Navy. During their deployment, the aviators were involved in what the Navy described as “the most dynamic combat action.”
“During their deployment, both Evans and Wileman distinguished themselves in combat operations,” Capt. Marvin Scott, a Navy flight commander, said in a statement.
Scott added, “These role models cemented legacies by making history that will inspire future generations of Naval officers and aviators.”
Evans completed multiple combat strikes into Houthi-controlled territories in Yemen, making her one of the few women to fly combat missions over land, according to the Navy.
In 2023, Evans was part of an all-female Super Bowl flyover of State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, which the Navy said was “a historic moment marking 50 years of women flying in the Navy.”
In 2024, Evans was also named the Growler Tactics Instructor of the Year, according to the Navy.
In 2023 and 2024, Wileman also flew on multiple combat missions into the Houthi-controlled territories of Yemen.
“I have personally flown with both of these great Americans in both training and dynamic combat operations, and they always performed professionally and precisely. I could not be more proud to have served with each of them,” Capt. Marvin Scott, a Navy flight commander, said in a statement.
The cause of the crash that killed Evans and Wileman is under investigation, according to the Navy.
The Growler aircraft, which according to the Navy is worth about $67 million, is “the most advanced technology in airborne Electronic Attack and stands as the Navy’s first line of defense in hostile environments.”
The 130 squadron adopted the nickname “Zappers” when it was commissioned as the Carrier Early Warning Squadron 13 in 1959, the military said.
The squadron was most recently deployed to the Southern Red Sea, where it carried out seven pre-planned strikes against Houthi-controlled areas in Yemen, according to a statement.
The Zappers also carried out some 700 combat missions “to degrade the Houthi capability to threaten innocent shipping,” according to a press release announcing the squadron’s return to Washington in July.
(NEW YORK) — Dangerous, record-breaking heat is ongoing in the West, with the temperature in Phoenix reaching the triple digits every day for the last three weeks.
Phoenix climbed over a scorching 110 degrees on 80 days in 2024 — shattering the record set last year with 55 days of temperatures over 110 degrees.
The heat spreads across the Southwest and the South this weekend, with temperatures soaring to the 90s in cities including Las Vegas, Austin, Dallas and Little Rock, Arkansas.
There are hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. due to excessive heat, according to CDC WONDER, an online database, and scientists caution that the actual number of heat-related deaths is likely higher.
Meanwhile, as Florida cleans up from the devastation left by Hurricane Milton, lingering river flood warnings are ongoing for parts of Florida and Georgia.
Choppy seas are also keeping the rip current risk high for many beaches in Georgia and Florida’s east coast.
