Call it a journalistic Spidey sense - when you've covered a story for so long, the littlest details could be hints of bigger things to come. It was so dry, like, my eyes were drying out, and my throat was drying out. And I did notice - because I covered so many fires, I noticed how much fuel there was. I mean, the brush was really high on the trails. There was a lot of stuff to burn, and I knew that we would be in for something. I just didn't know it'd be to this scale.
BAKER: It was one of those stories you can't look away because if you even blink for a minute, you're gonna miss something really important. And so I just was up the whole night. Many Morning Edition hits and many newscast spots - things were happening so, so, so fast. And trying to, you know, determine whether or not this is something that's going to turn into a major national news event and whether or not I'll have to deploy. The wind's starting to really kick up, guys.
Then an early morning flight to a city on fire. SIEGLER: As soon as the pilot came on to say that we were starting our initial descent, across the LA basin, you could see the two big fires, and we just descended into a black plume of smoke, and it smells, and it's really just kind of ominous.
And it's that moment - I feel like I've done this so many times. It's this mix of - you're like, OK, these are the last few minutes of calm I'm going to have. I don't want to sound too hippy-dippy, but sort of, you know, take a breath or two and get ready.
BAKER: At that point that he was flying in, I was desperately trying to catch an hour's-long nap because I had already been awake for, like, 28 hours. And then you woke me up, and you were like, my car isn't working. Can you come pick me up? So laughter Liz had to come and bail me out, and we basically left a rental car, like, behind the police lines, not in the fire, certainly far enough And today, we're kicking off a new segment filled with those kinds of details, a reporter's notebook.
