by the middle of next week, officials say at least 12,000 people a day will receive the covid jab here. but it is not enough. we've got to increase the pace and distribution and the administration of these vaccines. the reality is we need to get these vaccines out of the freezer and get them into people's arms. this is a scene that is playing out around the country, around the world. but america's so—called 0peration warp speed has failed to live up to its name, at least as far as distribution of the vaccine is concerned. joe biden says, when he takes over from donald trump on wednesday, he'll launch an ambitious plan to roll it out fast. he said efforts so far had been a dismalfailure. our plan is as clear as it is bold — get more people vaccinated for free, create more places for them to get vaccinated, mobilise more medical teams to get the shots into people's arms.

he is promising 100 millionjabs in 100 days, 100 mass vaccination centres around the country and mobile units to get into areas that are hard to reach. the president—elect also had a blunt warning for americans — things, he said, would get worse before they get better. parts of the uk saw heavy snow overnight. a met office amber weather warning is still in place across the east of england. police in norfolk said reports of collisions were burdening "already stretched emergency services" and have urged drivers not to make unnecessaryjourneys. now it's time for a look at the weather with ben rich. good evening. the start of the weekend brought snow for some of us, much of that turned back to rain and then cleared away during saturday. and for sunday, it's looking like a drier day. should be fine for most places

with some sunny spells. there will be some showers around as well and through this evening and overnight we will see showers drifting south—eastwards out of scotland and northern ireland, down into parts of england and wales. long clear spells too. not an especially cold night. one or two places will get cold enough for a touch of frost and maybe some ice. into tomorrow, a lot of sunshine to be had, particularly across england and wales. a few showers for north west england, north west wales. northern ireland and scotland will see more in the way of cloud at times, particularly into the afternoon, where showers will start to merge into slightly longer spells of rain for some parts of scotland particularly. still some snow over the very highest ground. temperatures about where they should be for the time of year, 6—9 degrees. as we head into the coming week we will see some heavy rain at times and that will bring with it the risk of flooding. hello, this is bbc news with martine croxall. the headlines... a further 1,295 people have died in the uk,

according to the latest covid figures. but the number of new infections has dropped to its lowest level so far this year. stricter covid restrictions come into force in scotland, with changes to takeaway and click—and—collect services. india launches one of the world's biggest covid vaccination programmes. the government hopes to inoculate 300 million people in the coming months. president—electjoe biden sets out plans to speed up immunisations in the united states, promising to vaccinate 100 million people within his first 100 days in office. germany's christian democrats have elected armin laschet as their new leader — a key moment in the race to succeed angela merkel as chancellor. now on bbc news, our world tells the extraordinary story of the holidaymakers who found themselves trapped by an almighty wildfire at mammoth pools in california's sierra national forest. a warning this programme contains images some viewers may find distressing.

0n the labor day holiday weekend in september 2020, california was struck by its largest single fire on record, the creek fire. as tornadoes of fire ripped through the sierra national forest, hundreds of holidaymakers were stranded at mammoth pool reservoir.

using footage shot at the scene, this is the story of the campers who were left with no way out. get in the lake! everybody get in the lake! get in! run! get in the lake! run! everybody, get in, get in, get in! get in! we were gearing up for a scorching hot labor day weekend as a strong ridge of high pressure sets up. # kmj!# splash the weather that weekend was absolutely beautiful. we could not have asked for a nicer weekend. the atmosphere was —

it was poppin�*, i guess you could say, if that's the right word. the — there were a lot of people. it was busy. music, food, the barbecue smells in the air, blue skies — it was any vacation anyone would've asked for. 0ur favourite spot is the creek that runs through the campground. there's a rope swing that the children have learnt to love to swing off of over the summer. liz had driven to mammoth pool with her daughters emmeline and dixie, aged nine and 11. this was our fifth trip up there, this summer. as a teacher, i'm like, "let's go explore, let's go see nature." our first trip up there, emmeline caught some frogs, and was going around chasing toads and frogs and lizards and just — the wildlife. they were camping with their cousin, chris. we were all having a good time, we werejust enjoying ourselves. mammoth pool, yeah, is a very, very special place. i've been going up there

since i was about seven days old, and 49 now, so been going up there for a very long time. it was fairly calm, not a lot going on. weather was mild. and rather warm. local sheriff tyson pogue was just three months into his newjob. the day started out like any other day — i was at home with the family, relaxing, looking forward to a quiet weekend. a small fire had been reported to melissa wise of the us forest service. i first heard about it on friday, september 4. it was a fire that would need to be investigated, and so i was tasked to be the investigator. on friday evening, it was a quarter of an acre, when it was reported. by the morning of saturday, it was 600 acres.

at 10am that morning, the fire was still more than ten miles away, in neighbouring fresno county. what we could see, way in the distance, directly opposite where we were, is a little, small plume of smoke — so small. anybody who would see that would think nothing of it. you would almost think maybe it'sjust a campfire. and we were like, ok, that's still plenty of ways away. - we just continued with our morning. we wanted to go check out the lake, right? it's — it's — it's the first day of our vacation, the sun's out, it was beautiful. we all hopped in the boat, and we just were putting around the lake, throughout the coves, and doing some swimming.

the wind did start to pick up, and it was actually pretty forceful wind, at this point. i received a phone call that morning, shortly after noon, letting me know of a fire that was actually in fresno county that they were worried was going tojump over the sanjoaquin river and travel into madera county, and this was causing them some concern. the small plume definitely had grown in size. the entire blue skies i mentioned were starting to be filled with these clouds. you still saw all the people down there by the boat dock, radio, barbecue, playing — nobody was freaking out, nobody was leaving, nobody was packing. 10-4. during the whole time, i was listening to the radio, listening to what's going on with the fire, where it was moving. i heard somebody come across the radio.

and so at that point, i knew it was going to be bad. the fire had now spread into madera county, and sheriff pogue�*s area of command. we had deputies rushing up there with lights and sirens to evacuate the area. this is a very rural area. generally speaking, forest fires move fairly slow — they take a long time to travel. i would say that my concern level was — was somewhat low, but ratcheted up rather quickly. we were all very relaxed, just kind of like, "alright, there's a fire, but we don't really need to be concerned about it, yet — just be aware of it, be aware of our surroundings." and camping up up there is much as i have, it comes with the territory.

so we thought we had a more time than we did. the cloud — the smoke, it started injust a snap of a finger, and it literally took over the sky. mammoth pool was quite far away from where this was burning. - however, once the deputies. were on scene, they could see how quickly this| fire was moving. it was throwing spot fires 5—8 miles in front of this fire, - which was greatly concerning. down on the fire line, cal fire firefighters were taking orders from battalion chiefjustin mccomb. you would try to plan and get ahead of the fire. by the time you would implement the plan, the fire was ready on you, and you would have to pull back and reassess. itjust seemed like you would punch, and the fire would punch back. you would try to get ahead of it, and it would get ahead of you. fuelled by dead trees and severe drought, the fire

was advancing rapidly towards the holidaymakers. i got on the radio and contacted madera county and said "we need officers to start evacuating." this was when we had to make an adult decision. i'm not even kidding you. we all agreed, "let's get the heck out of here right now, let's get out of here." you would think that people would receive an evacuation alert, an evacuation notice. we never received anything. and i — i don't know why. the sheriff is responsible for evacuation in the event of a wildfire. communication with people at the lake, it — it was a problem. cellphone service kind of comes in and out, so it's real difficult for us to let them know this fire

is coming, and really, they're all on their own. you know, that's — that's upsetting for us, and is very hard to deal with. emergency services raced to rescue the campers before it was too late. i continued up forest—81, which is going towards mammoth pool, and ran into a wall of flames. we need a new option, we need a helicopter, we need anything to get eyes up there, because our access was cut off. how do we get these people out? initially, we reached out to highway patrol and the fresno county sheriff's office — both of them have helicopters.

for them to come back and tell us that they're not able to access this area is quite concerning. everybodyjust kind of fleeing to the lake. the fire was surrounding us by that time, already. the heat of the flames is something that i'm — i'm never going to be able to forget. and we got down — oh, man. sorry. we got down to the lake and i can remember the trailer fish—tailing all the way down — that's how fast were going down there.

the fire was behind us, beside us, in front of us, and we knew we were — all of us were in trouble. jeremy and his family were trying to get back across the lake to their cars. 0ne second there was no fire, just smoke. the next second, you're in the boat and you have fire on all sides of you. you're like, this is absolutely unreal — this is unreal, this isn't happening. nobody would ever expect something to happen so fast. all of a sudden, you can't breathe. i mean, the smoke started getting so bad my brother had his two little kids, he made sure they were down on the floor of the boat, put the blanket in the water, rung it out, put it over, so they can actually breathe. and as we're getting closer closer to the boat dock, the place was engulfed.

the whole place, completely engulfed in flames. nearly 1000 firefighters were deployed to battle the blaze. it was a defeating feeling, i wanted to help them any way we could. we were thinking of getting some of our fire bulldozers and try to open up the roadway, it was just not a realistic approach. we didn't have a whole lot of good options to help them. all i could think about was getting help to those people. the smoke just billowed, it billowed over the lake, bad. i mean, it was bad, the heat was bad. you actually felt the heat, it was hot, very hot. people had begun seeking refuge in the water. i felt like that was how we were going to die, just then, thinking, this is how we're going to go out.

this is going to be the end of us, there's no way we're going to get of this. we were on vacation, what, just a couple of hours before we were at a waterfall. now we're trapped 360 by a fire. and it's like, how do you explain this? how do you explain what just happened, right? it's no coverage, nobody�*s coming to save us, what's going to happen? are we going to fall asleep and die of the smoke? we didn't know. we definitely didn't think we were going to get rescued, because there was no — nobody knew anything. with the fire closing in, the sheriff had one last roll of the dice. that was one of those points in your life where you realise, this is serious. this is going to be a big deal.

he requested help from the california national guard. i've been on plenty of missions where there's a bad guy out there who wants to make sure that you're no longer flying. i've had plenty of things launched at me, or shot at me. this, the fire, was by far the most dangerous thing that we've put ourselves into knowingly. but firefighting aircraft on the perimeter of the blaze reported bad news. we were in communication with the planes who were working the fire, and those planes essentially were relaying back to us that conditions were — it was not going to be possible to get any type of aircraft in there. it was no visibility, the fire was too dangerous, there was just no way it was going to happen. i mean, it's a fire of apocalyptic proportions here. we made the decision to go

in there and do this. piloting command joseph rosamond's chinook was accompanied by a black hawk. we had neverflown in or around a fire using night vision goggles and we definitely had neverflown inside the fire at night. that's what really made it really intense. the pilots flew into the wall of smoke. everything that could be on fire was on fire. if you would think of the apocalypse, right, that's what it looked like. by saturday night the creek fire had spread over 43,000 acres. there were embers coming up from these pockets of fire throughout the valley. man, if something goes wrong now, there's nothing that we're going to be able to do. we're probably all going to die. we heard a noise in the distance, and it was quickly identified that this wasn't just a helicopter, this was a chinook.

somebody knows we're here. my co—pilot finally pointed out at his ten o'clock position of the aircraft that he saw a bunch of flashing lights — hazard lights, headlights, from the group of people that were at mammoth pools. we did the landing, it kicked up a ton of dust. it completely browned out the visuals, the visibility went down to zero for a while. and you've got the national guard coming out, totally in full tactical gear with their infrared vision. "women, children, injured first." and theyjust started piling people on. i got back to the trailer, told liz, and said, - you and the kids need i to get your asses on that chopper and get out of here now. - i said, go and live, i if i don't make it out, i don't make it out. i turned around and i looked back and there was a family sitting in the seats that i could see, a mother with a couple of her kids, that were the same age

as my kids. and that really hit home with me, and i had to tell myself, all right, don't look back anymore, because we need to focus on what we're doing. it was super noisy. they were giving out earbuds, but... i, um, was the first one to get onto the floor because i was in the very back. that night the chinook and the black hawk flew three rescue missions out of mammoth pool. the ride back to the military base, it had to be many, many miles of just fire. fire. nothing but red embers and flames. it was like looking into hell. 2112 survivors were flown to safety on overloaded aircraft. but a handful of people still remained at mammoth pool — among them, chris. they would not take my dogs, so i didn't get on the aircraft.

and my dogs, you know... basically, they�* re our family. at six o'clock the following morning, melissa assembled a team to complete the rescue. we have a mission, there are still people left. we're getting to them and they're going to know that they're being rescued. i led the guys, i said, "here we go. this is a team, let's go." and we started to make our way down towards the mammoth pool reservoir. when we got up the following morning, it was so smoky you couldn't see a trailer in front of you. that's how bad the smoke was. they were afraid that we were all going to get smoke inhalation. they were afraid we were going to die from it. the time was... there was no sense of time at all.

that afternoon, a local firefighter paused his work to look up at the sky. sunday the 6th, it's 2:30 in the afternoon. we haven't seen sunlight for quite some time. we cut over 60 trees on the roadways to get down there. we didn't reach them until about 7:30, 8:00pm. all of a sudden i start seeing flashlights. i and i'm like, holy sort, the forest service! - that's when we knew, that's it, we're getting out of here. - once we got down to the boat launch, we had people there that were very happy to see us. and so we lined everyone out, telling them, once you start to go through the fire — that you will have to go through — then you continue to go. don't stop. in convoy, the final survivors drove out to safety,

along with chris and his dogs. i said, we're almost out of here. i said, be patient. be patient. we're almost out of here. it was certain death. that's exactly what it was. we were lucky to get out alive. completely lucky to get out alive. after three and a half months, the creek fire was finally contained on christmas eve. 26 people had been injured. in my a0 something years of living here, in my 20 years of working in the forest department, i've never seen anything like it. it's my understanding that it broke the california record for the fastest—moving fire. and all of that in little madera county. i can't imagine what those

people went through. it'sjust, i'm sad for the forest, because all the forest is gone. my girls are doing 0k. my youngest still, still gets nightmares, still wants- to sleep with me and be extra close and clingy to me. - i think the emotional- and mental is going to take us a little bit longer. president trump gave medals tojoseph rosamond and the national guard pilots for their bravery. more than 4 million acres of california burned in 2020. trump blames the wildfires on poor forest management. we say, you've got to get rid of the leaves, you've got to get rid of the debris, you've got to get rid of the fallen trees. but president—elect biden sees wildfires as a symptom of one of america's greatest challenges. the damage from climate change is already here. unless we take urgent action, it will soon

be more catastrophic. in the western us, human caused climate change has nearly doubled the area burned by wildfires since 1984. the president is changing, and the wildfires will keep burning. this isn't the first fire we've heard of and this is not the first fire season. there's a good chance that something like this will probably happen next year, or the year after, right? because it's a regular thing with california. how many more acres of forest do we have before it's just, like, god — there's nothing left, right?

hello. the start of the weekend brought snow for some of us but much of that snow turned back to rain before clearing away during saturday. you can see this stripe of cloud here on the satellite picture. some milder airfollowing on behind, and some clearer skies too. we have had some sunny spells today, speckled shower clouds also drifting towards the north—west. and through this evening and tonight, some of those showers across northern ireland and scotland will work down across england and wales. they will mostly be rain showers at this stage, some snow mixing in over the highest ground but it will not be a desperately cold night. some eastern spots will get down to freezing or a touch below. there could be one or two icy stretches but not a particularly cold start to sunday morning compared with some we have seen recently. and it will be a dry day for many with some spells of sunshine. there will be some showers around as well, though, one or two through north—west england, parts of north—west wales, a few more for northern ireland and scotland. some of these showers will be wintry over the highest ground in scotland, say above 500 metres,

and then as we head into the afternoon, some more persistent rain and mountain snow will push in across some of scotland. temperatures pretty much exactly where we would expect them to be at this time of year, 6—9 degrees. it won't feel too bad in the sunshine although it will be quite windy, especially across northern areas. and then through sunday night you can see this line of wet weather with some mountain snow, which just continues to wobble around across some parts of southern and central scotland as we get on into monday. elsewhere, a lot of drier weather to start the day but cloud amounts will increase from the west and we are likely to see some rain into south—west england and wales by the end of the afternoon. those temperatures, 5—9 degrees, maybe ten across the far south—west of england. now, as we head deeper into the coming week, low pressure will take charge of our weather. various frontal systems spiralling around these areas of low pressure and that means for some there is going to be quite a lot of rain. this is the amount of rainfall we expect to accumulate over the next five days. where you see the green and even white colours here across some western areas,

that's where we will have some pretty high rainfall accumulations, maybe in excess of 100 millimetres of rain for some. so with the ground already very wet, that could bring the risk of flooding. it is going to turn mild, particularly down towards the south for a time. the signs are it could cool off a little by the end of the week.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. a sanitation worker becomes the first person in india to receive a covid vaccine — as the country begins the world's biggest vaccination programme. calls for more support for the uk's travel and tourism sector — after the government imposes tougher restrictions on arrivals to keep out new strains of coronavirus. the veteran ugandan leader yoweri museveni is declared the winner of the presidential election, after a campaign marked by allegations of unprecedented violence and intimidation. and a team of nepalese climbers are the first to reach the summit of the world's second highest mountain in winter.