that is what is at stake when you look at the cumulative effects of a spill like this. >> jacob ward reporting. >> an all-out rescue is under way in north-east china after a series of explosions at a warehouse, these are some of the first images from the aftermath of the explosion. the area resembles a post apocalyptic scene. thousands of cars were incinerated. 12 hours later you can see smoke rising from the scene. so far, 17 people are confirmed dead. hundreds injured. doug brown is there with the latest on the explosion. >> even china is unused to scenes like this. sudden and deadly explosions jolting a busy port. large firele balls incinerated buildings and cars. some people say it felt like an earthquake. >> i was sitting, after watching a film. i had my window open, and i heard a rush of air, followed by a second much larger rush of air sounding like a shock wave. i looked outside and saw the smoke. >> officials say the multiple destinations were caused by exploigss in the warehouse, close to a residential area. others describe hazardous materials. at first, local hospitals str

>> jacob ward in lake county california. daniel is a spokesperson with cal fire and joins us on the phone from sacramento. good to have you with us. there were indications earlier that the rocky fire jumped a fire line intended to contain it. what is the latest how many homes are threatened? >> actually, today we have seen cooler weather. actually la little bit of rainfall and higher humidity giving us a window of opportunity to increase the containment and progress on the fire. the fire yesterday was very active. it did jump over highway 20 an area we were trying to keep the fire south of. today, because the window of opportunity, our crews made good progress, and we are hoping to continue overnight. the temperatures are headed back up. >> i have read that 7,000 structures are threatened and it's a massive blaze. the problem you are dealing with now is erratic winds are making it difficult to fight. >> absolutely for the last several days we have seen the winds blow in several different direction pushing the fire to the nor

jacob ward has more from san francisco. >> it's a canadian vaccine, funded by canada norway britain - an extraordinary international collaboration, the w.h.o. pushed this through. it was a coming together of nations and organizations for the betterment of humankind in the midst of a terrible crisis results have been extraordinary. not only have they managed to develop the vaccine where it should have taken over a decade. the results are extraordinary. of 2,041 given the vaccine, none of them developed symptoms after 10 days. essentially they developed an immunity. that is a 100% fictive result. that -- effective result. that is extraordinary, we never see it. imagine what this could have done. the early stages of the outbreak the first patient zero was a 2-year-old who passed it on to a grandmother, other family members, and left to another pre-februarying tur when a midwife and hospital worker were treated, and from there the outbreak claimed 11,000 lives in several countries. if huh given this vaccine to half of those people it could have broken up the transmission chains cut off th

jacob ward explains. >> just over the riming, you can see behind me, it is literally hell on earth. the firefighters be deal with not just the local challenges of terrain and local climate they're fighting against global forces. >> the western states of the u.s. are on fire. northern california is the latest casualty. >> we just passed a checkpoint where residents are no longer able to go. we are driving into a 60,000-acre blaze that is defying all traditional expectations firefighters would have about a wildfire in northern california at this time of year. >> the rocky fire should have peaked after two days, but at that point the firefighters found it gaining strength, not losing it. five days in, there is no sign this is going to do anything but get bigger. >> the fire behavior is extreme. the people fighting the fire, a lot of seasoned veterans are saying this is off the charts. >> decades of drought have killed or dried out the vegetation here, creating an unprecedented amount of fuel for this fire. >> this is what the firefighters are trying to defend, highway 20 a two lane bla

jacob ward is liver in durango -- live in durango. >> it's yord to come to this -- extraordinary to come to this place which two weeks ago saw a vivid surge of this stuff that came o through the anna muss river carrying lead, cadmium, waste products from a mine 60 miles up stream. now it seems normal. people are fishing, you see rafters and kayakers go buy. the life of the community is the river. people are eager to get back to it. what is extraordinary is to talk to the fishermen and scientists and hear how used to the question of the safety of mines, and the leakage of bad stuff out of those mines, how used to it they have become. here is how a leading group here described the trouble that they have seen over the years. >> hundreds of thousands of fines, and the next still is waiting to happen in a community near you. until we address the problem and provide a mechanism to add capacity to the few that can do the mine clean-ups, we have missed the mark. >> the difficulty is the organization, mining, fishermen and all the stakeholders can't get involved in large-scale clean-up of the min

jacob ward is there and has the latest. >>reporter: firefighters have con verged on northern california. they're from departments all over the state and when they get here they find out it's a whole different world. one captain drove more than 600 miles from san diego to get here and was assigned a task immediately. >> we're headed out to interstate 20 to the biggest priority of the rocky fire. yesterday it jumped highway 20 burning north. >> there's a large, big pocket of green in here and has the potential to make a strong push. >>reporter: firefighters in the united states work with a command system called ics. it's an agreed-upon structure and brings hundreds of departments together at any time. >> it doesn't matter where you're from, you don't have to worry about your budget. you can walk into here and say i need a hose, a helicopter if you need to. the point is to keep departments from feeling they have to hoard resources and protect their turf, territory. it's known as mutual aid. so you borrow what you need and brin

jacob ward, thank you. and over the mast months, new york city has been trying to contain an outbreak of legionnaires' disease. and health officials have traced it to tooling towers. all of them have to be registered and inspected on a regular basis, and gin es is here with us. >> reporter: new york city would be the first in the nation with this kind of legislation. we went to the south bronx and we spoke to one business owner that had his building's cooling tower inspected. the cooling tower is now clean. and he's eager to show that it tested well. testing is going on across the city. this is one or two of the cooling thundershower that the mayor ordered inspected and disinbefected after the largest leg an airs outbreak in the city. so far four of them have come back testing positive. >> now we're going to put our attention into preventing anything like that in the future. >> reporter: he says this tower has been here for 20 years, and the maintenance person comes every two months. but before it wasn't be

jake ward jakour science and tey editor jacob ward has more. >> this is oakland, california, families are moving here it's gentrifying. but oakland has a gun problem. so much that the oakland pd has implemented a policy called trop-spotter. there is a lot more gun fire than anyone thought before. perhaps three or four times as many gun shots are being fired than police reports would have had us believe in the past. that means children in this community are in some cases being exposed to more gun fire than an active duty soldier would have been, during a deployment in afghanistan or iraq. what effect is it having on those kids? it turns out a growing body of science shows it's changing the architect othearchitecture of t. children are holding the trauma inside. stress can affect brain development, your ability to pick up language development, and higher statistic incidents of things like cancer, diabetes, hypertension based on being exposed to gun fire at an early age. at a time later tonight, we'll examine the invisible wounds of children exposed to gun fire. >> we are asking w.h.o. h

jacob ward is in durango colorado with more. >> if you were to pull up in a tour bus, having not known what happened, you would have understood that this stuff had come down the river, lead, cadd by my um -- cadmium coming from the mines. scientists are grappling with the long term effects. there's no front line agency that can tell you with a bling red light that the water is toxic or dangerous. instead, it's the long term effects that people get to look at closely. in this case, the home is that this will draw attention to the need for better ongoing monitoring. >> and so in one respect this spill was a good thing. our water quality has been going down because of heavy metal concentrations increasing, yet we haven't had a lot of action. i hope this will catalyse actions. but without addressing it, then i would expect the heavy metal levels to go up... >> if there were another . >> they talk of 300 gallons a minute coming out of the mines. the problem according to several people that we spoke to is you cannot go in and begin to clean it up. doing so takes on a liability that few are w

jacob ward visited the front line. >> the united states is in the grip of a heroin and opioid epidemic. the prings drug that peopl prict thousands of americans are given for perfectly legitimate reasons. the reason you die from an overdose, the opiate binds to the brain and turns off autonomic reactions, literally you forget t forget to breathe. that's how a heroin overdose kills you. we've had available this, narcan, that knocks and severs that connection. it's incredibly unpleasant, you go into an automatic withdrawal if you are an addict. but people are brought back to life. there is a mural that explains the entire concept. someone does heroin, overdoses and somebody comes along with narcan, injects their friend and brings them back to life. this mural touches on sort of a sensitive topic about it and this is something we're going to be exploring is thanks narcania, the superhero armed with narcan. i don't know if there's anything to live for but at least now i'll get the chance to find out. the united states has been hostile to the whole notion of drug use our system is built on o

jacob ward visits the front line to get narcan out to as many people as po possible. here is the thing to understand, the reason you die of an overdose is not anything about the drug itself other than it overwhelms the brain. it binds to the brain and turns off functions. the automatic commands that your brain delivers to your body like breathing. you literally forget to breathe. that's how heroin overdose kills you. fortunately we live in an era where scientists have secured that. we have narcan. naloxone. it knocks the opiate off your brain. it's incredibly unpleasant. you go into automatic withdraw, but it does restore breathing. people are brought back to life. in francisco there is this mural that explains the whole content. someone does heroin, has too much. they overdose and then a friend, family member, fellow drug user comes along with narcan, injects their friend, and brings them back to life. this mural touches on a sensitive topic about it. this is something that we're going to be exploring. thanks to narania. i don't know if there is anything worth living

jacob ward looks at that history. >> you'd be forgiven if you thought only would involve a small fraction of its members not really be a core issue for this organization. but the truth is the relationship between the apa and the military goes back over a century. in world war i the apa was used to refine recruitment techniques figure out which soldiers were apt for combat, which should be combat pilots that sort of thing. by 1919, the top ranking official in the apa was in fact top ranking military psychologist. and a relationship sort of blows old between the two organizations that was very mutually beneficial. in world war ii the apa was used as a offensive tactic trying to figure out how to figure out prisoners of war and funding went with all of that. by 1952, 78% of funding for the apa came from the department of defense. in the cold war it was used for things like insurgencies. isolation, sleep dep ra depravation. and in 1954, the stanford prison experiments had to be cancelled after six days because the participants took to their roles a little too zealously. now the thing that ver

two of them, jacob ward and allen schauffler gracious enough to tape on the way to assignments, covering the mine spill near the colorado river. >> this is the water front in seattle, this is the double-decker highway quarrying cars north to south, south to north across the water front for half a century, other than i 5, it's the only other major north-south corridor in the city. they shouldn't be on the highway, it's dangerous, damaged in an earthquake 15 years ago and has been replaced. the via ducts will be torn down, a tunnel dug under the city of seattle to carry the traffic. it's dug by the largest tunnel machine, behind the right cover named bertha, it was stuck, going nowhere. and we are getting to the point where we can fix bertha, getting the repair parts under ground and tunnel northward. the project is about three years behind schedule. as for the budget. the entire project budgeted at 4 billion. the tunnelling - no one is saying how much over budget the budget might be in 2018. on the counter time line, no doubt the cost and who pays it is something we can figure out in the

jacob ward is in colorado. >> if you were to pull up in a tour bus, having never been here before, and knowing nothing about the recent history, you would think there wasn't anything that had gone wrong here in the last couple of weeks. much less this stuff has washed down this river. of course scientists are trying to grapple with what has happened here. the surge of this stuff has moved through here, but the question now is what are the long term effects. the water here is toxic or any way dangerous, instead it is the long term effects that people get to look at, in this particular case, the hope here is perhaps that this will draw attention to the need for better on going monitoring. in one respect, this was good, and that is that our water quality has been going down. we haven't had a lot of action, i hope this will catalyze this. >> when you speak to the fishing community, which is one of the main stays of this place, they talk object almost exhaustive terms about what it is to keep the minds that are upstream and downstream from here. 300-gallon as minute coming out of these mine

jacob ward is in lake county near the epicentre of a fire consumering 6,200 acres. jake, the fire is still growing. >> it is. if you look at the ridge behind me you can see the smoke line over the ridge is hell on earth. the firefighters here are fighting a number of conditions that are specific to this area tough terrain in the rest of it. they are fighting global forces >>> the western states of the u.s. are on fire and northern california is the latest casualty. we passed a checkpoint past which residents are no longer able to go. we are driving into a 60,000 acre blaze, defying all the traditional expectations that firefighters have about a wildfire in northern california this time. the rocky fire should have peaked after two days at that point the firefighters found the fire gaining strength not losing. now, five days in there's no sign it will do anything but get bigger. >> the fire behaviour is extreme. people out there fighting the fire seasoned veterans are saying that this is off the charts extreme. >> decades of drought killed or dried out the vegetation

jacob ward has the environmental impact report from colorado. >> if you before to pull up in a tour bus having never been to this place before, and knowing nothing about the recent history, you would think there wasn't anything that had gone wrong here in the last couple of weeks. much less that this stuff has watched down this river just two weeks ago. a mix of led, other sort of waste minerals that come out of the mines that are just 60 . but scientists are trying to grapple with just what exactly has happened here. it seems as though the worst of it the surge has moved through, the question mow is what are the long term effects. nobody likes to pay for monitor, there's no front line agency here that can tell you of a sudden blinking red light that the water here is toxic, or is in any way dangerous, instead, it is the long term effects that people get to look at more closely, in this particular case, the hope here is perhaps that this will draw attention to the need for better on going monitoring. >> in one respect, this is a good thing, and that was that our water quality has been g

jacob ward is there. >> firefighters are-year-old on northern california. they're from democrats all over the state and when they get here, they find out it's a different world. >> yesterday the fire jumped highway 20 burning north. >> there's a large big pocket of green in here. if that is established it's a chance to make a big push. >> i.c.s. is basically an agreed upon structure a way of bringing hundreds of departments together at a moment's notice. >> this is the equipment warehouse. if you need a nozzle, clamp or piece of equipment you come here. it doesn't matter where you're from. you don't have to worry about your budget. you can say i need a hose, requisition a helicopter if you need to. the whole point is to keep these democrats from feeling they have to horde resources protect their turf or territory. the concept is known at mutual aid. you bring it back, emergency lending library for fighting wildfires. >> the system does away with rental and does a hierarchy on qualifications best suited for each fire. >> here, i'm a division chief here i wor

jacob ward looks at that history. >> you'd be forgiven by thinking that a vote of the american psychological association and the american military would only involve a few members and the relationship between the apa and the military goes back over a century. in world war i the apa was used to refine recruitment techniques figure out which soldiers were apt for combat, which ones should be combat pie lots, that sort of thing. -- pilots and that sort of thing. a relationship that sort of blows old between the two organizations that was very multiple beneficial. in world war ii about apa was used as an offensive tactic to sort out things like the nazi mentality and try to figure out how best to control prisoners of war and funding went with all of that. by 1952, 78% of federal funding for psychology research in the united states came from the department of defense. in the world war it was used to decipher things lie insurgent dismurntcies. like insurgencies. the stanford prison experiment in which students were recruited and divided dwoo into two groups, prisoners and guards. the students took

science and technology correspondent jacob ward reports. >> reporter: this is what they are thinking about. a hellish derail. urn fightable fire -- unfightable fire. 43 cars oil tankers and accordians together in flames firefighters arriving without the know how or equipment to stop it. >> at that point we create something that will not reclose. don't ever push down on these vacuum breakers. >> reporter: for the last two years more than 10,000 firefighters from across the country have gone through this intense and technical training. >> we take it to the next step which is the real-life hands on - as real as we can get it training. >> they are preparing to deal with a new threat. north american crude oil. newly pulled from the ground. rolling through american towns. >> fighting a fire like this is not like fighting a structure fire. you can't come in and spray it at the flames you need a special foam to have effect on the flames and our average fire department would not have the foam. you need a special technique, if you spray the foam at the flame, you spread it. they learn about ba

jacob ward. al jazeera. berkeley california. >> and coming up next on the broadcast, nasa's darkest days. wreckage from two shuttle disasters go on display for the first time. >> a forgotten chapter for the history books. oklahoma's all-black towns that continue to honor the tradition of black cowboys and the legacy of overcoming the greatest odds. >> oklahoma was once home to 50 all-black towns. founded by freed slaves in the mid 1800s. some of those communities remain. they're vibrant but their populations are dwindling. now the state is recognizing 13 of the towns and the history of those who forged their own paths in the name of freedom. heidi zhou castro reports. >> go get him. >> they call it christmas in july. the one weekend a year when this historically all-black town of clear view, oklahoma population 50, booms with a thousand inviters. >> it's really like christmas this time of year when you see all the people come back home, smiling faces. >> this rodeo honoring the black cowboy tradition was fou

jacob ward is on the river in colorado. jake. >> reporter: tony, it's an amazing scene to be here. you wouldn't know that this place was a vivid toxic orange two weeks ago, and the residents have come out and the spirits are high in one sense, but they're mixed in another. here's the leader of the boating community here, described the purpose of this parade when we spoke to him. >> the parade, this is our celebration a little bit. i mean it's not so much of a celebration. but it's really more like the wake. the river is not dead, but we're getting together and we have had a rough week. it took a big emotional toll on the town. >> tony, the mixed feelings are everywhere in the community right now, and there's a lot more going on than the question of it being a dirty day on the river or not. there are 230 mines in the state of colorado that the officials say are already leaking enough toxic materials as the spill every two days, and there are 23,000 mines across the state, most of which they have no idea of the condition. so when you think of the dangers of that, there's no way of kn

jacob ward is in durango, colorado. jake?porter: john, if you were to get off of a tour bus here for the first time with absolutely no experience of this area, you would look at this river and you would think nothing of it. you certainly would not know that two weeks ago, this was the >>> this problem and provides some other mechanism to add capacity to the few who legally can right now do these mine clean-ups, we have really missed the mark. >> john, it's easy to look at this and just think, well, this river is healthy again. researchers are saying that the big plume of bad stuff has passed through here and been diluted on its way downstream all the way to things like lake powell, the second largest reservoir in the united states. the thing about it, however, is that there is no system for truly monitoring this on a realtime basis. monitoring of waterways like this is very expensive and, from a policy perspective, is sort of unsexy. when we spoke scientists about that, they said they hope this crisis will somehow point up th

. >>> that was jacob ward reporting. still ahead washed away.s devastated by the worst flooding myanmar has seen in decades. plus this. >> reporter: we are watching a powerful typhoon right now making its way across parts of taiwan flooding, mood slides, land slides a major problem and the threat is still going to continues. more on that in just a moment. >>> and they call it murder ball. the best wheelchair wrigley players in the entire world compete for gold at the pan am games, check it out. >>> tie whop is taking a direct hit from the strongest storm to hit the planet this year, making land on the east coast packing sustainssustains winds of 120 miles per hour and gusts of up to 150 miles an hour, one area has already been inundated with more than 40-inches of rain and it doesn't even stop there. flooding mudslides and up to a billion dollars in damage is still expected to continues. so for that we bring in our meteorologist kevin with more. >> meteorologist: this is going to be a big story through the weekend. and it is now saturday morning

jacob ward, al jazeera, lake powell, arizona. >> former president jimmy carter revealed he has cancer. doctors discovered the cancer after carter had liver surgery. he is 90 and the second oldest former living penalty. he said he plans to receive treatment at emery health occur in atlanta. the white house wished be president carter a fast and full recovery. >> on the agenda today, the u.n. secretary general plans to talk to his mission chiefs and commanders after out of thing the top official in the central african republic. that official faced repeated accusations that peacekeepers have been committing sexual violence against civilians. >> workers will rally in new york today. >> breaking down the iranian nuclear deal, we'll speak to two people on opposite sides, a former general who san diego padres the plan and former diplomatic with grave concerns. >> in one month, congress votes to approve or reject the nuclear deal with iran. opponents are pouring tens of millions of dollars into lobbying efforts attacking it, while supporters have spent substantially less on advertising cam pai

jacob ward that details. >> august 7, 2008 in this san francisco group home for people dealing with mentalllness, the resident social worker be checked in on teresa. she has schizo affecting disorder. she ordered the social worker out of her room, telling him she had a knife. he called a non-emergency number asking for help to transport her to hospital for a 5150, the code for a psychiatric evaluation. two police officers arrived and entered her second floor room, finding her on her bed. they say she threatened them, they retreated to the hall, she closed the door on them. then they forced their way back in and shot her at least five times. >> the last one was pretty much -- i'm trying to think of the words, execution style to her temple. the doctors and surgeons said that it was a miracle she survived each one, let alone all of them. >> after she was shot here, her family filed suit against san francisco. the question now in the courts is whether the police are in fact violating the civil rights of the mentally ill under the americans with disabilities act by going after them in an aggres

jacob ward looks at effects kids can experience. >> he remembers his childhood in richmond, californiae krakow contain arrived. >> everybody was middle class and it was nice. after crack hit, it was the worst scene that you ever want to see. you're hearing gunshots every day to where somebody could let off a 100 round drum of bullets and a kid wouldn't even flinch. >> in 2014, the united states saw more than 11,000 homicides with a firearm, 1.3 homicides per hour, but 911 calls are how official gunfire statistics are compiled. that's just what's reported to police. here's what gunfire in the u.s. really looks like. there are at least three times as many shooting incidents, 4.4 per hour. data reveals for every shot we know about, there are 25 to 50 bullets we don't. >> unfortunately when somebody fires a gun, people call 911 only 20% of the time, so the first challenge is that four out of five times, nobody knows it happened, except the person who pulled the trigger. >> to get a better sense which what's happening on their streets, city's like richmond use microphone from shot spotter,