While President Joe Biden is worried about California Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass getting a “bad rap” for the California fires, the VP is busy serving up word salads.
Listen:
Only 6 days left. We are so close.
Read the full White House transcript here:
THE PRESIDENT: Folks, what we’re going to do is I’m going to make a brief statement; the vice president is going to make a brief statement; Liz is going to call on Chief Moore and call on Griswell [Criswell], the — so FEMA is sp- — spoken; and then I — we’re going to each ask some questions; and then we’re going to ask you to leave. Okay? Unless you want to talk about the (inaudible) or something.
You can smile. It’s okay. She’s a real tough guy, right there.
All right? Okay.
Can you guys hear us?
CHIEF MOORE: Yes, we can hear you.
THE PRESIDENT: All right.
Well, look, we’re heading into the second week of fil- — of wildfires out in California. These wildfires are the worst in California history.
And Vice President Harris and I are about to meet with Secretary Mayorkas, who is here; FEMA administrator; FEMA regional administrator — regional administrator; and the chief of U.S. Fire — Forest Service.
And, first, I want to share an update on where things stand now as we know it.
One, over the past few weeks, state and local and federal firefighters were able to prevent the largest fires from moving into new areas. In other words, they’ve been able to contain the fires. Fourteen percent containment in the Pacific Palisades has been — that’s how much has been contained. Thirty-three percent in the fire in Pasadena. Ninety-five percent in Sylmar. And the fire in Ventura has been 100 percent contained. And that’s progress.
That said, that was a heartbreaking weekend for a lot of people in Los Angeles. Ash was raining down like snow. Homes burned to the ground — thousands of those homes are gone. And we learned we lost more of our fellow Americans.
So, let’s say again to the people Los Angeles: We’re with you. We’re with you.
And, you know, al- — although the federal government is going to cover 100 percent of the cost for the next 180 days for things like firefighter overtime pay, debris removal, temporary shelters, it’s going to cost tens of billions of dollars to get Los Angeles back to where it was.
So, we’re going to need Congress to step up to provide funding to get this done. And we’re going to get that done, God willing.
Over the next few days, we’re expecting strong wind gusts that are — could move — be — you know, more fires — more fuel for fires. And I’m continuing to direct the federal government to do everything possible with — everything we possibly can to help California.
I’ve sent equipment to Los Angeles, including helicopters, tanker planes, and fire engines. And our allies in Canada and Mexico have sent 130 firefighters and emergency responders, as the team knows.
I’ve asked Bob Fenton of FEMA to help — he helped Hawaii after the Maui fires — to take the lead in coordinating the federal support and debris recovery and removal in Los Angeles.
And the first step of that is coordinating between FEMA, EPA, and the Army Corps of Engineers to remove the ha- — to remove the hazardous debris before you can get in and remove it all. And that hazardous debris includes things like propane tanks, electric vehicles, and battery (inaudible).
Then, the monumental task of removing the rest of that debris can begin, but it’s a monumental task.
And I’ve activated 500 Marines from the base in Pendleton to stand by and help in search and rescue, airlift support, and food and water distribution.
And I want to be clear: We’re not waiting until those fires are over to be — to start helping the victims. We’re getting them help right now, as you all know.
People impacted by these fires are going to receive a one-time payment of $770 — a one-time payment — so they can quickly purchase things like water, baby formula, and prescriptions. So far, nearly 6,000 survivors have registered to do just that and $5.1 million has gone out.
And I encourage everyone — everyone who has been impacted to get assistance. Go to Disaster- — DisasterAssistance.gov or call 1-800-621-3362. Let me repeat that number: 1-800-621-3362.
Before I turn this over to Vice President Harris, let me say again to all the incredible firefighters and first responders: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Los Angeles is the City of Angels, and you’re now the angels — all of you. You’re the angels, literally, saving people’s lives, and we owe you.
And we owe your families, who are also in harm’s way and you’re still going out and doing your job.
To the people of Los Angeles: Thank you for sticking together, for helping one another through an unimaginable loss. And I want you to know — and I mean this — I want you to know we have no higher priority than the safety of you folks in Los Angeles. We’re going to keep doing everything possible to help you get through this.
And, Vice President Harris, I now turn it over to you.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr. President.
So, what is happening in Los Angeles is truly heartbreaking, and there’s an extraordinary amount of trauma that so many people are experiencing through loss of life, loss of their homes, loss of normalcy.
And what I would ask is that, on this day seven of the fires, in the midst of the extraordinary exhaustion that everyone is feeling on so many levels, that we stay vigilant.
The next 48 hours, as we will hear, are very critical. The winds are going to pick up, with wind gusts that may reach as much as 70 miles per hour.
And so, this is the time that everyone must be vigilant. Follow whatever orders you are receiving from your local authorities. If you are in any area where you may be called to evacuate, collect your belongings that you would want to take in the tragic event that you have to evacuate, and — and please be ready and prepared in that event.
Lots of people who still have a home who are under evacuation order, I know you want to get back home, but this is a time to be patient. There is still so much work that firefighters, police officers, FEMA, and others are doing that is about search and rescue. The work that still needs to be done to ensure the safety around utility lines — this work is still very much in progress. And so, it’s critically important that to the extent you can find anything that gives you an ability to be patient in this extremely dangerous and unprecedented crisis, that you do.
But I — I’d echo what the president said: We have seen acts of courage, heroism, building of community, people looking out for strangers. And we applaud and are in awe of the generosity of spirit that we are seeing throughout the region.
And so, let us just always, again, thank our firefighters, our police officers, our first responders for what they are doing to personally sacrifice so much for the sake of others.
Thank you.
DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Thank you, Madam Vice President.
We’ll now go to the U.S. Forest Service chief, Randy Moore, who’s out in Los Angeles.
Chief Moore, over to you.
CHIEF MOORE: Thank you.
Mr. President, Madam Vice President, the situation remains very dynamic, with immediate threats to life and safety.
One important thing to name is that, unlike what we normally will think of with wildland fires, where they’re often on the landscape for weeks, these incidents are — come from urban conflagrations — whereas once the winds are over and if containment continues to increase, we would expect these incidents to move rapidly from fire suppression to recovery.
Now, in terms of the weather, we’re expecting a period of elevated to critical fire weather risk through Wednesday, as the vice president had indicated, and we’re expected to have red flag warnings in effect for strong gusts of winds, low humidity, and very dry vegetation for much of Los Angeles, Ventura, and neighboring counties.
We’re also expecting to have moderate Santa Ana winds, which begins today — later today through Wednesday. And as the vice president had indicated, we’re looking at frequent winds of about 20 to 30 miles per hour, but gusts in anywhere from 50 to 70 miles per hour are very likely.
Right now, our biggest concern is new starts. And with this wind event or new growth on the Palisades or Eaton fires, these are high possibilities. So, our personnel are working really hard to strengthen the existing containment lines.
And also, from Monday through Wednesday, we’re looking to have minimum relative humidities, which is expected to remain in the upper single digits, somewhere around 20 percent. So, what that’s basically saying is that the vegetation will continue to stay dry.
And by Friday, we expect several degrees of cooling and a large increase in humidity Friday into Saturday. So, this is the good news on the back end of that — that wind.
In terms of fire activity — so, the Forest Service remains in unified command on the Eaton Fire; the Lidia Fire is no longer active; and the Hurst Fire is no longer in unified command, as threats are minimal on those two fires.
Now, regarding the Eaton’s Fire, it’s holding at about 14,000 acres. Containment has grown yesterday at 27 percent to 33 percent today, and there’s no new growth, which is the good news. However, our fighters are reinforcing that perimeter, and we’ll have to hold that under these challenging conditions through Wednesday.
We’re looking at nearly 40,000 structures remain threatened, and early remote sensing is reporting a number of structures have been destroyed. And we are in the process of doing damage assessments by ground-truth and to see what we’re — we think that we’re seeing from the air.
There’s eight confirmed civilian fatalities as a result of this fire. And, as of yesterday, there were 50 crews, 375 engines, 16 helicopters, and over 3,400 personnel that was assigned to this fire.
The Hurst Fire is 95 percent contained, spread is minimal, and it has calmed down, and the repopulation started yesterday. We still have about 100 firefighters out there doing what we call “mop-up duties.” That’s where if they seeing smoke, to put the fire completely out. So, we’ll continue to patrol the area and do mop-up activities.
We continue to support the Palisades Fire. We’re having moderate fire behavior that persists. We currently have about 23,700 acres that are burned, and the fire is about 18 percent contained as we speak. There’s also two confirmed civilian fatalities on that fire as well. We currently have about 115 crews, 540 engines, 44 helicopters, and 5,123 personnel that are assigned to this fire.
To date, we’re successfully filling resource requests for both initial tag and incident support. And as of this morning, there’s about 9,000 firefighters that are assigned to these large fires that we’re talking about here.
Now, this does not include the many who’s assigned to their home units or pre-positioned to their different units to provide initial attack on new starts. And we continue to have firefighters coming from all across the country, relieving some of the firefighters who has been pressing really, really hard, and we’ll continue to mobilize personnel as well as equipment.
Now, aviation resources that is operational as of this morning. We have four Forest Service and one Cal Fire area supervision modules. These are for the lead planes that are going in, guiding the large planes. We have 12 air tankers. We have 18 water-dropping helicopters. We have three water scoopers.
And all eight of the Department of Defense Modular Aerial Fighting Firefighter Systems tankers are at south ops or down in this area. Seven of them are in service, and we’re still working on one that has some mechanical problems on the tail of the — the plane. That’s expected to be fixed and operational later this evening, so for activity — for duty tomorrow. So, tomorrow, we’re looking to have all eight that are in operations. And, as I said earlier, we have seven that are operating now.
A request for assistance has been sent, as I mentioned earlier, to our Canadian partners, looking at mobilizing two of the CL-415 water scoopers. They are expected to clear customs on Wednesday, and they’ll be available after they clear federal inspections and check rides.
You know, it’s important to — we’re talking about aviation. It’s really important to emphasize that aviation resources cannot fly safely when the winds are high, like what we’re talking about, so this is a situation that needs to be continually monitored. And I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to closely coordinate among all partners in managing aircraft in this limited airspace.
Our national airspace coordinator is heavily engaged with all of the people that are concerned, looking at safe operation of our aircraft in this area.
And, you know, we’re working with Cal Fire to e- — evaluate the offers that we’re getting from our international partners. And this thing is — is dynamic and is rapidly changing. But given where we are in the year, we have very little competition for firefighting resources nationwide, and so we can still draw upon untapped federal, state, and local firefighting resources.
Our initial tag rate continues to be really high. You know, we’re staffing firefighters 24/7. To give you an idea, we have about — right at about 2,000 federal firefighters that are in station for what we call “quick response emerging fires.” That’s the new starts.
To give you an idea of how successful this group of people are — this group of firefighters are: Since January 6th, we’ve had 235 new fire starts, and we have kept many of those, just about all of it, down to five acres or less.
And I say that because that’s pretty significant, considering the — just the four large fires that we’ve had and the damages this is causing. This team of firefighters — both state, local, federal, and others — Tribes — have kicked back 235 new starts of fires.
So, we’re — we’re looking at moving into post-fire recovery at some point. So, the efforts are already underway. We’ve already provided post-fire imagery maps to the state’s watershed emergency response teams, as well as the federal response team for both the Eaton Fire and the Palisades Fire, and we’re in the process of also doing the same thing for the Hurst Fire.
Now, these post-fire images that we are providing is — they’re — they’re basically soil burn severity, which a team uses to produce a soil burn severity map. So, we can look at the type of reclamation activity that needs to take place after the fire.
The Forest Service is also coordinating with our fellow USDA agencies, including Rural Development, Farm Service Agency, and Natural Resources Conservation Service to provide an integrated effort for long-term recovery needs.
And our Research Department is also working with the city of Los Angeles and other water providers to provide some ash contamination modeling for water users.
So, we’re likely to have boots on the ground of these teams by Thursday morning, after the red flag incidents subsides.
End of report.
THE PRESIDENT: Randy, is there any more support the federal government can be providing to support to the firefighters doing this heroic work? Anything else we — we could be doing?
CHIEF MOORE: I — I think — when you look at the amount of aircraft, I think we provided everything that’s been asked for and that’s needed.
In terms of firefighters, we have what we call “U2Fs” — U — “UTFs” — that’s “unable to fill.” We don’t have any unable-to-fill positions that have been requested to date.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
Madam Vice President.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Randy, if, God forbid, the — the fires go beyond Los Angeles County, given the — the surge of resources into Los Angeles, what is your level of confidence that we’ll be able to get the resources to any neighboring county in — in time?
CHIEF MOORE: I’m confident that we’ll be able to get the resources. We have access right now to about 15,000 firefighters that are not currently being used, that’s not needed. So, if things got out of hand, and let’s just say that the wind conditions blew the fires back out into the wildland, we do have firefighters pre-positioned in a lot of different areas to look at that initial attack.
And I mentioned the 235 fires now that these same groups of people have been able to bat down to about 5 or 6 major fires.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Good.
THE PRESIDENT: Can I ask one more question, Randy? Are you hearing any misinformation that’s going out, false assertions that are being made about the state of the effort to fight the fire?
CHIEF MOORE: Well, I mean, there’s always rumors with large fires like this, Mr. President. And one of the — the — one of the things that everybody wants to know is how did these fires start. And until the team of investigators conclude their investigations, we don’t really know.
And so, there’s a lot of speculation out there about how these fires started, but there’s no proof to validate a lot of these rumors that we’re — we’re hearing.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Thank you, Randy.
And now to Administrator Criswell from FEMA.
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: All right. Thank you, Liz.
Mr. President, Madam Vice President, you know, at your direction, I was on the ground there on Thursday and Friday. I had an opportunity to meet with incident commanders at both the Palisades Fire as well as the Eaton Fire.
And, again, I think you see the images on television, but it just doesn’t compare to what you see in person — right? — when you see the devastation, when you talk to the family members, when you talk to the community members and they talk so much about how proud they are of their community.
And I think one of the things we’ve talked about a lot is, you know, they say the community is gone, but the community is there. The community’s spirit will continue to exist.
And we had that long conversation with the Pasadena mayor when I was there, and it was, you know, really telling on how — how proud they are of these communities.
And so, that’s why, as Randy and his teams are continuing to try to put out these fires, FEMA’s programs are in place to help support all of these families that have been impacted.
I think, right now, we have about eight shelters that are still open. The shelter numbers have been remaining at about 700 to 800, you know, day over day, which means there’s a lot of people that are staying with family and friends or they’re staying in hotel rooms. And so, that’s one of the things we can cover. It’s one of the programs through the major disaster declarations. We can reimburse these families for the hotel costs that they’re experiencing now, in addition to giving them that Serious Needs Assistance of $770 for, like, clothes. They just need to buy clothes. They left with nothing.
I mean, so, those are the first kinds of infor- — not information, but resources that we’re going to be able to provide to so many families.
And in addition to the just over 6,000 that you mentioned, Mr. President, that have already gotten the Serious Needs Assistance, we’ve got almost 33,000 that have registered for assistance. And this number goes up a little bit every day, but we think it’s going to continue to rise as we can get into the communities.
We have our Disaster Survivor Assistance team members that are going out into the community. You know, they normally walk door to door. In this case, the fires are still burning, so they can’t. And so, we have them in the shelters, but we’ve also put them in the public libraries, where we know people are probably going to help register to get information.
And then we’ll continue to work with the mayor and the governor on other places where we can send our folks so we can reach the people that haven’t gotten into the system yet. And so, we’ll continue to work with them to make sure that we can support them as they register for assistance.
And some of them are already getting notices and letters, you know, that the information has been received but it’s not final yet. There’s a lot of confusion about that right now, and we recognize that.
THE PRESIDENT: Explain that a little more.
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: So, when somebody registers for assistance and they have not submitted all of their documentation, like what their insurance company is going to pr- — cover or not cover, they’ll get a letter from us saying, “You’re not approved yet.” They’ll —
THE PRESIDENT: Can they get a letter if their — if they have no home, how do they get a letter?
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: It’s through email. So, they get an email notification —
THE PRESIDENT: I — I just want to make sure we (inaudible).
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: Yeah. They get an email notification to check their case and that it’s been updated. But we want them to know that it just means we need the — the rest of that documentation.
So, I’ve directed my team to start calling every one of these families that have already gotten this type of a notification so we can make sure that they know that, “Hey, we just need more documentation. We want to work with you and help you through this.” Because it’s traumatizing, right? And then to have this bureaucracy, you know, limit that, we w- — I’m trying to take away the bureaucracy, at your direction. That’s “how much can I get rid of?” This is one of the things we’re going to do is add that personal touch and call all of these families that have already received this notice so we can get them the assistance that they’re eligible for and help them upload the documentation that they might need.
THE PRESIDENT: You hear it reported by the press that there’s misinformation being put out there by — from some sources or even people identifying themselves and going on the air saying such and such.
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: Are — are you seeing much of that, and does it have an impact on the — on the public?
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: We are seeing some of that, similar to what we saw in North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Milton.
We even saw somebody put out a way to spread a message through phones that said FEMA is going to provide three years of coverage for hotel rooms, which was completely false and not sent by us.
And so, our external affairs team works hard to put out the right information. And we work with the community to try to get the trusted voices within the community to help get the right message out —
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: — and know who they need to go to in order to get this process started.
And, unfortunately, there’s a lot of people that try to take advantage of these families that have lost everything, try to apply for assistance on their behalf, try to get them to apply on a false website. Those are the things that we see in almost every disaster. It just continues to get worse and worse, it seems like, disaster after disaster.
THE PRESIDENT: I think that’s right.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Given that the winds may pick up tonight and the evacuation geography may change, how are individuals and families going to be alerted if they are now required to evacuate, especially if it happens during the night?
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: Yeah, that’s something that the state and the county have a system to do a wireless emergency alert. It’ll go right to their cell phone if there’s an evacuation order for their area. And even if somebody drives into the area, it will let them know that they are in an evacuation zone.
When I was there, my phone would go off when I would drive into the different areas — when I would drive into Pasadena — saying, “This is an evacuation zone. You need to leave.”
And so, that alert system goes out, and they have their own provider that sends those out. It’s all directed at the county level.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: And then, do you know whether the requests that have been made of the federal government, local, state — are they all being met or are there any that have yet to be met?
ADMINISTRATOR CRISWELL: So, all of the firefighting requests that are going through Randy and all his folks are all being met.
We are starting this planning process for the — the recovery, and we’re pre-positioning some resources, like food and water, closer to the area if they need it.
California’s resource — they’ve got a lot of resources, and so they have plenty that they’re drawing from their own stockpiles right now and don’t need ours, but we want to make sure, if they do, we have ours ready to go.
And so, anything that the state has asked for outside of the fires that FEMA would provide, we’ve been able to meet all of those requests.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Liz, do you have —
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you.
THE VICE PRESIDENT: — anything to add to that?
DR. SHERWOOD-RANDALL: Thank you very much. I’m all good.
So, with that —
AIDE: Thanks, guys. Thank you, press.
6:40 P.M. EST