president biden: all right. ok. can you guys hear us? >> yes, we can hear you. president biden: all right. look. we are headed into the second week is -- of wildfires in california these wildfires are , the worst in california history. and vice president harris and i

are about to meet with secretary mayorkas, fema administrator fema regional administrator, , regional administrator, and the chief of u.s. forest service. i want to share an update on where things stand now. over the past few weeks state and local firefighters have been able to prevent the largest fires from moving into new areas. in other words, they're able to contain the fires. 14% containment in the pacific palisades have been contained. 33% in the fire in pasadena. 95% of sumo, and the fire in ventura has been 100% contained. that is progress. that said, it 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 of los angeles, we're with you, we're with you, and you know, although the federal government is going to cover 100% 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. we will get it done, god willing. over the next few days, we're expecting strong wind gusts that would be more fuel for fires. i'm continuing to direct the federal government to do 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 coordinated between fema, epa and the army corps of engineers to remove the hazardous debris before you can get in to remove it all. and that hazard debris includes things like propane tanks, electric vehicles, battery. 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 a base in pendleton to stand by to 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 start helping the victims.

we're getting them help right now, as you all know. people impacted by these fires are going to receive one-time payment of $770 one-time payment, so they can quickly purchase things like water, baby formula, and prescriptions. so far, nearly 6000 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 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 for all the incredible firefighters and first responders, thank you, thank you, thank you.

los angeles is a 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. we owe your families who are also in harm's way, and you're still going out and doing your job. the people of los angeles, thank you for sticking together, for helping one another through an unimaginable loss, and i want you to know, 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 and i'll turn it over to you. vice president harris: 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 7 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 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 the 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. i am the what the president said. -- i echo what the president has 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.

>> thank you, madam vice president. we will now go to the u.s. forest service chief randy moore, who's out in los angeles. chief moore, over to you. >> 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 would think of as wildland fires where they're often on the landscape for weeks, these incidents are 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. in terms of the weather, we're expecting a period of elevated to critical fire risks through wednesday as the vice president 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 mph, but gusts in anywhere from 50 to 70 mph are very likely. right now our biggest concern is new starts. with this wind event, it's a high possibility 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 humidity which is expected to remain in the upper single digits somewhere around 20%. so what that basically means 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 wind. in terms of fire activity, so the forest service remains in unified command on the eaton

fire. the lydia fire is no longer active, and the hearst fire is no longer in unified command. the 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% to 33% today. and there's no new growth, which is the good news. however, firefighters are reinforced 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 a number of structures have been destroyed. we are in the process of doing damage assessments to see what we see from the air. there are 8 confirmed civilian fatalities as a result of this fire, and as of yesterday there were 50 crews, 375 engines, 16 helicopters, and over 3400 personnel that was assigned to this fire. the hearst fire is 95%

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 they see smoke to put the fire completely out, so we're continuing 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% contained as we speak. there's also two confirmed civilian fatalities on that fire as well. we currently have about 115 crews, 540 engines, 440 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, and as of this morning there's about 9000 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 are prepositioned to their different units to provide initial attack on new starts. we continue to have firefighters coming from all across the country relieving some of the firefighters who have been pressing really, really hard, and we'll continue to mobilize personnel as well as equipment. aviation resources that are operational as of this morning. we have 44 services and one cal fire area supervision modules. these are for the lead planes that are going in guided the large planes. we have 12 air tankers. we have 18 water dropping helicopters. we have 3 water scoopers. and all 8 of the department of defense modular area fighting firefighter assists tankers are at souths down in this area. 7 of them are in service, and we're still working on one that has some mechanical problems on the tail of the plane.

that's expected to be fixed and operational later this evening. so for activity or duty tomorrow. so tomorrow we're looking to have all 8 that are in operations, and as i said earlier, we have 7 that are operating now. a request for assistance has been sent 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. when we talk 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 evaluate the offers that we're getting from our international partners, and this thing is dynamic and it's rapidly changing, but given where we are in a year, we have very little competition for firefighting resources nationwide, so we can still draw upon untapped federal, state, and local firefighting resources. our initial attack rate continues to be really high, you know, we're staffed in firefighters 24/7. to give you an idea, we have about 2000 federal firefighters that are stationed for what we call quick response emergent fires. that is the new starts. to give you an idea of how

successful this group of firefighters are, since january 6 we've had 235 new fire starts, and we have kept many of those just about all of it down to 5 acres or less. and i say that because that's pretty significant considering just the 4 large fires that we've had and the damage that it's causing this team of firefighters, both state, local, federal, and others tribes have kicked back 235 new starts of fires. so we are looking at moving into post fire recovery at some point. the efforts already underway. we've already provided pulse 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. and we're in the process of also doing the same thing for the hearst fire. now these pulse fire images that we are providing, 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 us 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 flags subside in the report. president biden: randy, is there any more support the federal government could be providing support to the firefighters doing this heroic work? anything else we can do?

randy: i think when you look at the amount of aircraft, i think we've provided everything that's been asked for and that's needed in terms of firefighters, we have what we call utf that's unable to feel. we don't have any unable to fill positions that have been requested to date. president biden: thank you. vice president harris: randy, if god forbid the fires go beyond los angeles county, given 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 time? randy: 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 fire back out into the wild land.

we do have firefighters prepositioned in a lot of different areas to look at the initial attack, and i mentioned the 235 fires now that the same groups of people have been able to back down to about 5 or 6 major fires. president biden: 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? randy well, i mean, there's : always rumors with large fires like this, mr. president. one of the one of the things that everybody wants to know is how 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 start, but there's no proof to validate a lot of these rumors that we're hearing.

president biden thank you. :>> thank you, randy. and now to administrator chris fema. >> 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? and you see the devastation. i mean you talk to the family members and 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 that they say the community is gone, but the community is they are and the community spirit will continue to exist. we had that long conversation with the pasadena mayor when i was there, and it was, you know, really telling on 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 8 shelters that are still open. the shelter numbers have been remaining at about 700 to 800, 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. so that is the one of the things we can cover. it's one of the programs through the major disaster declaration is 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're left with nothing. those of the first kinds of resources we will be able to provide to so many families. and in addition to the just over 6000 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 can get into the communities.

we have our disaster survivor assistance team members that are going out into the community, 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 will continue to work with the mayor and the governor and other places where we can send our folks so we can reach the people that haven't gotten into the system yet 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. so when somebody registers for assistance and they have not submitted all of their documentation like what their insurance company is going to

cover or not cover, they'll get a letter from us saying you're not approved yet. president biden: they have no home. how are they getting letters? >> it is through email. they get an email notification. 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 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 limit that, 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.

president biden: it has been reported by the press that misinformation is being put out there by from some sources or even people identifying themselves on the air saying are you seeing much of that does it have an impact on the public we -- are you seeing much of that? doesn't have an impact on the public? >> we are seeing some of that. similar to what we saw in north carolina after hurricane celine, hurricane milton. we even saw somebody put out a way to spread a message through phones that said fema is going to provide 3 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. we work with the community to try to get the trusted voices within the community to help get the right message out and know who they need to go to. in order to get this process

started and fortunately 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 in 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. vice president harris: 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? >> 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. -- 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, we 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. vice president harris: 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? >> all of the firefighting requests that are going through randy and all of his folks are all being met. we are starting this planning process for the the recovery, and we're prepositioning some resources like food and water closer to the area if they need it. california's resource, they 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 that 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. vice president harris: liz, do