nbc's mike dtaibbi leads off th discussion. >> reporter: fort collins, colorado, 14,000-acre behemoth, and growing one day later. >> you never have everything you'd like to have. but you could have had everything in the world. >> reporter: what the high park fire did was to drive winds along timber past the best efforts of a dozen air tankers and choppers and hundreds of firefighters on the ground. hundreds were evacuated, some already knowing what was lost. >> my house is gone. and now i'm not going to have a home. and i have no place to go. >> reporter: this wasn't the old wildfire stretching the resources that poured in from around the country. while colorado was one alarming hot spot, new mexico's little bear fire became another when a stubborn blaze that had been con taped for days was whipped by fresh winds across some 10,000 additional acres. hundreds more evacuated here. along the dpufl coast, rain. hurricane-caliber rain without the hurricane. a foot and a half in pensacola in one day. it flooded shopping malls and turned shopping malls into lakes. in alabama, two inches of r