Welcome to the beat. We begin by covering these catastrophic wildfires that are raging across

Southern California. Officials say these wildfires are at this hour still growing. When you look at

measuring the containment of these very tragic and horrific scenes, you see people's homes burning

all the way to the ground, well, they are at zero percent containment right now. So this is a very

active and dangerous situation for people there. The death toll has hit five. Over 80,000 residents

ordered to evacuate. Over 1,000 structures like those you see on your screen, have now been

destroyed. The firefighters, bravely trying to deal with the emergency, are facing brutal

conditions. These are basically what they call hurricane force winds. So it's up to 100 miles per hour

in some of these areas. There is a lack of water supply from the hydrants, which have been basically

bled dry as the firefighters try to contain some of the fires where they can. The fires are

actually growing so fast a resident told NBC. He was caught completely by surprise.

We heard a voice yelling out here, fire, fire! And so we just jumped up. We weren't even asked to

evacuate, but this whole mountainside was blazing, and we said, we've got to get

out of here. I'm telling my wife, as we're driving out of here, is this us? Is this happening to us?

Because we were watching it on the news ourselves and saying, wow, what a tragedy. Look what's going on.

And boom, here we were.

Al-Tadena residents sprang into action using water hoses to try to protect their own homes from these approaching flames.

I saw you dousing yourself with water too. Were you getting burned by the embers that were...

Oh, it was all the radiant heat coming off of there. It felt like I was catching on fire a little bit. So I had to keep myself cool. I was freaking out.

I didn't want to panic.

Across the news channels where we've been monitoring this and we have people taking

the videos across the internet where people have already been sharing photos and videos

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