Calls started coming in about a structure fire along Leetsdale Drive, between South Forest and South Hudson Streets, at 6:45 p.m. Friday, Denver Fire Department Chief Desmond Fulton said.
The cause of the fire remained under investigation on Sunday.
Most of the building at 5337 Leetsdale Drive, which property records show was set to be a 283-unit luxury apartment complex called Harker Heights, had collapsed Saturday afternoon.
The fire is expected to continue burning inside the building through the weekend, blocking firefighters from entering to investigate the cause or search for victims, Division Chief Robert Murphy said during a Saturday news conference.
“I don’t know if any of us have seen a fire on this scale in our careers,” Murphy said. “I’m in the 30th year of my career, and this is the first five-alarm, almost six-alarm fire that we’ve ever had. We have had other large fires, like the Glendale fire and Emerson Street fire, but they never reached the capacity in terms of firefighters that this one did.”
Two people were injured early Saturday morning when flames engulfed a motorhome in Adams County, according to the fire department.
Firefighters responded to reports of a grass fire in the 2900 block of E. 78th Avenue at 6:20 a.m. Saturday, according to Adams County Fire Rescue. When crews arrived, they found a motorhome on fire.
A video posted by the fire department shows a destroyed vehicle, with flames continuing to burn items inside. Firefighters pried part of the home open with an axe to douse the inside with water, the video shows.
Adams County firefighters responded to a second mobile home fire just after 8:30 p.m. Saturday in the 6800 block of Ruth Way, according to the department.
No injuries were reported, but crews rescued five puppies from the burning structure, fire officials said.
Swiss authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the managers of the bar where a fire at a New Year’s Eve party left 40 people dead and more than 100 injured, authorities said Saturday.
The two are suspected of involuntary homicide, involuntary bodily harm and involuntarily causing a fire, the Valais region’s chief prosecutor, Beatrice Pilloud, told reporters. She said the investigation was opened on Friday night and that it would help “explore all the leads.” The announcement of the investigation did not name the managers.
Investigators said Friday that the deadly fire was caused by sparklers on Champagne bottles, which ignited the ceiling of the crowded bar around 1:30 a.m. Authorities planned to look into whether sound-dampening material on the ceiling conformed with regulations and whether the candles were permitted for use in the bar.
Officials said they also would look at other safety measures on the premises, including fire extinguishers and escape routes. Videos shared on social media showed people screaming as dozens raced to escape through narrow exits. Parisian tourist Axel Clavier, 16, told the Associated Press on Thursday that he forced a window open with a table. Another witness told the British newspaper The Daily Mail that bar patrons used chairs to break windows as the flames swirled.
“It was a real flame coming out. It was coming out and … in fact, people were running through these flames,” he said.
The Valais region’s top security official, Stéphane Ganzer, told SRF public radio Saturday that “such a huge accident with a fire in Switzerland means that something didn’t work — maybe the material, maybe the organization on the spot.” He added: “Something didn’t work and someone made a mistake, I am sure of that.”
A flower with a note is laid after a fire broke out overnight at Le Constellation bar on Jan. 1, 2026, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.
Harold Cunningham/Getty
Nicolas Féraud, who heads the Crans-Montana municipality, told RTS radio he was “convinced” checks on the bar hadn’t been lax, the broadcaster reported.
Asked whether the tragedy could have been avoided, Swiss Justice Minister Beat Jans replied that officials could not yet answer and “we know that the world needs an answer on this question.”
An “unbearable” wait for answers
The process of identifying the dead and injured continued on Saturday, leading to an agonizing wait for relatives. Many of the bar’s patrons were in their teens to mid-20s.
The severity of burns has made it difficult to identify the dead and injured, requiring families to supply authorities with DNA samples. In some cases, wallets and any identification documents inside were turned to ash.
On Saturday, regional police said the bodies of four victims — a boy and a girl, both 16, an 18-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman, all of them Swiss — had been identified and handed over to their families.
Several injured people still haven’t been identified.
Laetitia Brodard, whose 16-year-old son, Arthur, went to Le Constellation to celebrate the New Year, held out hope that he might be one of them.
“I’m looking everywhere. The body of my son is somewhere,” Brodard told reporters Friday evening. “I want to know where my child is and be by his side. Wherever that may be, be it in the intensive care unit or the morgue.”
Mourners gather to leave flowers and candles at the scene after a fire broke out overnight at Le Constellation bar on Jan. 1, 2026 in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.
Harold Cunningham / Getty Images
On Saturday, she told French broadcaster BFM TV that “we, parents, are starting to get tired … and anger is starting to rise.”
“It’s a wait that destroys people’s stability,” said Elvira Venturella, an Italian psychologist working with the families. “And the more time passes, the more difficult it becomes to accept the uncertainty, not having information.”
Swiss officials said Friday that 119 people were injured and 113 had been formally identified.
On Saturday, Italy’s ambassador to Switzerland, Gian Lorenzo Cornado, told reporters he had just been briefed by local authorities that the number of injured stood at 121, with five not yet identified. He said 14 Italians were being treated in hospitals. Swiss police have said the injured included more than 70 Swiss nationals and over 10 each from France and Italy, along with citizens of Serbia, Bosnia, Luxembourg, Belgium, Portugal and Poland.
Cornado acknowledged “a lot of stress,” but said it was right for authorities to share information only when it is “accurate and 100% sure.”
Ganzer, visiting the site along with Jans, called the families’ wait “unbearable,” and said officials’ top priority was providing them the “legitimate answers they are waiting for.”
Mourners and well-wishers bearing flowers flowed to makeshift memorials outside Le Constellation, some consoling one another with hugs as they shed tears. “RIP you are all our children” one handwritten note said.
DENVER — A massive fire that tore through a three-story apartment complex under construction in Denver on Friday evening was still smoldering Saturday as crews battled hotspots.
The blaze erupted at the Harker Heights building site at around 6:45 p.m. Friday near S. Leetsdale Drive and S. Forest Street, forcing street closures, evacuations and injuring one firefighter. No other injuries were reported. S. Leestdale Drive remains closed between S. Forest and S. Holly streets.
Evacuations were issued for residents behind the construction site on Friday evening due to heat from the fire. Officials said 12 families stayed at an emergency shelter overnight from Friday into Saturday, but the shelter closed around noon on Saturday.
“We just all were rushing into the car, and my dad was grabbing drinks because we didn’t know if we were going to have to stay out of our house all day,” said an evacuee.
The fire has caused significant air quality concerns, and nearby residents were advised to stay indoors.
“I would try to find a way to avoid breathing in this smoke. It is not good for you. Wear a mask or just get plain, get away from it. There’ll be smoke generating from this for a while,” said Robert Murphy, operations division chief for the Denver Fire Department.
The fire continued to spread eastward through the unfinished structure throughout the night. More than 150 firefighters worked to control it.
Denver
Apartment construction site fire took up ‘a complete city block’ in Denver
Fire officials said the flames engulfed an entire city block, causing significant damage to the structure and multiple pieces of construction equipment. They said that several nearby homes and businesses may have sustained exposure damage, such as heat or smoke impact. Power outages in the immediate area were also reported.
A full damage assessment has not been completed. Firefighters said multiple sections of the building have collapsed, making it impossible to search for potential victims or determine the cause of the fire at this time.
Denver7
“There was a little bit of wind when this fire first came in,” said Murphy. “A fire of this size actually generates its own mini wind and starts pushing those embers out. When I arrived, those embers completely covered my car. That has since died down. That was when the fire was at its peak.”
He said the complex did not have any drywall to slow the fire’s progress, and was not yet outfitted with a sprinkler system.
“This has really reached the level of about a five-alarm fire, which is huge for Denver,” he explained.
On Saturday morning, AirTracker7 flew over the scene and captured video of at least 35 firefighters still battling flames in parts of the unfinished structure. Firefighters will work throughout the day and night to extinguish the fire.
Denver7
A nearby resident, Lauren McClelland, told Denver7 that they initially thought the entire area was on fire.
“I was scared,” said McClelland. “As I was driving, I was thinking that my neighborhood was on fire.”
Bryce Beamish
Another neighbor, Ila Bordelon-Walker, said she mistook the blaze for fireworks at first.
“I was actually taking a nap when I heard this really loud booming sound. Waking up, I thought it was leftover fireworks from New Year’s, so I just stayed in my room for a while,” said Bordelon-Walker.
In a statement Saturday, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston praised firefighters:
“Last night, our city witnessed true courage. Our firefighters ran toward danger when a huge fire broke out at a construction site in the Hilltop/Glendale area. More than 150 firefighters put their own safety on the line, and thanks to their quick response and bravery, families are safe and nearby businesses were protected. We are incredibly grateful to the Denver Fire Department today, and to the crews from neighboring districts who jumped in to support. We don’t know the cause, but the fire department will begin a thorough investigation. For now, we just want to say thank you,” Johnston said.
Massive apartment construction site fire in Denver burns into Saturday
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Investigators said that the deadly fire that tore through a popular bar in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana early on New Year’s Day was caused by sparklers on Champagne bottles, which ignited the bar’s ceiling. Ramy Inocencio reports.
Crans-Montana, Switzerland — Investigators said Friday that the deadly fire that tore through a popular bar in the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana early on New Year’s Day was caused by sparklers placed in Champagne bottles, which ignited the bar’s ceiling.
Police have said about 40 people were killed and dozens were badly injured. Most of the victims were just teenagers celebrating the holiday, and the intensity of the deadly fire has left authorities with grim work to identify badly burned remains, which they say may take days, as desperate families are left to wait for word of their missing loved ones.
Swiss authorities said Friday that 113 out of the 119 people injured had been identified.
Prosecutor-General Beatrice Pilloud said authorities have interviewed two bar managers to help them understand the internal configuration of the venue and its capacity. She said the investigation was still ongoing.
Video has emerged that shows the moment a man tried but failed to snuff the first flames in the basement of the Le Constellation bar with a white cloth. The fire swept upward, to the upper level of the building.
In videos posted on social media, people can be heard screaming as dozens raced to try and escape through narrow exits. Many suffered horrific burns and smoke inhalation, and dozens remained hospitalized on Friday across the country, as well as in neighboring France, Italy and Germany.
Some 36 hours after the disaster, which authorities say appears to have been accidental, at least two dozen people were still missing.
A flower with a note is laid after a fire broke out overnight at Le Constellation bar on Jan. 1, 2026, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.
Harold Cunningham/Getty
The facade of the bar was hidden on Friday behind a white barricade.
One survivor said bar staff had inadvertently sparked the inferno.
“One woman climbed onto another woman’s shoulders with two bottles and birthday sparklers were going off,” said 16-year-old French visitor Axel Cavalier. “She waved them too high, they hit the ceiling and it caught fire.”
Lucas Rebot, 24, told CBS News he and his girlfriend tried to get into Le Constellation at 1 a.m., about 30 minutes before the fire started, but were told the venue was full and were turned away. He said he had been at the bar a few days earlier and noticed at the time that the ceiling was covered in foam insulation, “like a music studio.”
CBS News’ partner network BBC News and France’s BFM TV published photos Friday that they said showed the moment the sound insulation on the ceiling was set alight just above people holding sparklers, as described by the witnesses.
Other witnesses have relayed similar information, though authorities have said only that there’s been no indication of an attack or explosion, and the cause of the fire remains under investigation.
“At no moment is there a question of any kind of attack,” Beatrice Pilloud, the attorney general for Switzerland’s Valais Canton, said Thursday, adding later that it was unclear how many people had been in the bar at the time of the fire, but that its maximum capacity would be one of the factors looked at as part of the investigation.
“For the time being, we don’t have any suspects,” she said when asked if anyone had been arrested. “An investigation has been opened, not against anyone, but to better understand the circumstances of this dramatic fire.”
Forensic police and other officials are seen at the site of a New Year’s Day fire that broke out at Le Constellation bar, Jan. 1, 2026, in Crans-Montana, Switzerland.
Harold Cunningham/Getty
Forensic experts, meanwhile, have begun using dental and DNA records to identify the dead.
Clavier said one of his friends had died in the fire and two or three more were among those still listed as missing.
“The first objective is to assign names to all the bodies,” Crans-Montana’s mayor Nicolas Feraud said Thursday, adding that it could take days.
Mathias Reynard, who heads the regional Valais government, said it was essential to carry out the work “because the information is so terrible and sensitive that nothing can be told to the families unless we are 100 percent sure.”
One of the first victims identified was a promising young Italian golfer Emanuele Galeppini, who was mourned by the Italian Golf Federation in a statement issued Thursday as “a young athlete who embodied passion and authentic values.”
Crans-Montana is a popular destination for skiing, but is also an international golf resort in the warmer months.
Italian outlet SportMedia said Galeppini, originally from Genoa, was 16 years old. It said his father was in Crans-Montana and had spent much of Thursday searching for information about his missing son.
A blaze at a packed bar in the Swiss Alps during New Year’s Eve celebrations killed about 40 people and injured 115 others, many of them seriously.
Cellphone video captured harrowing images of the tragedy’s first moments as flames swept across the wooden ceiling of the bar’s basement level, panicking partygoers who rushed to escape. The fire then rose up and engulfed the upper level.
The cause of the fire remains unknown, but two women told French broadcaster BFMTV they were inside the venue when they saw a waitress, who was being carried on a bartender’s shoulders, holding a lit candle in a bottle that ignited the wooden ceiling. The flames spread rapidly, causing the ceiling to collapse, they said.
“In a matter of seconds, the entire ceiling was ablaze. Everything was made of wood,” they said.
One of the women described a crowd surge as people frantically tried to escape from a basement nightclub up a flight of stairs and through a narrow door, noting that there were “about 200 people trying to get out within 30 seconds through some very narrow steps,” according to a BBC News translation.
Axel Clavier, a 16-year-old from Paris who survived the blaze, said he hadn’t seen the fire start, but did see waitresses arrive with Champagne bottles with sparklers.
He described “total chaos” inside the bar. One of his friends died and “two or three were missing,” he told The Associated Press.
In the early stages of the investigation, Valais Canton Attorney General Beatrice Pilloud said it was “totally unknown” how many people were inside the bar when the fire broke out, but said authorities would be looking into its maximum capacity.
The disaster echoed some past tragedies when deadly bar and nightclub fires broke out in the United States.
The Station nightclub fire
The Station nightclub fire scene in West Warwick, Rhode Island, in February 2003.
David L Ryan/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
The Station Nightclub fire took place in February 2003 at a club in West Warwick, Rhode Island. The fatal fire resulted in 100 deaths and over 200 injuries.
“We went out on a Thursday night to listen to music, drink some beers and have a good time. And a quarter of those people didn’t get to go home — ever,” survivor Linda Saran, who was severely burned in the fire, told CBS News in 2021.
The blaze ignited when the band Jack Russell’s Great White took the stage, and four large pyrotechnics were set off, sending flames up the walls and rapidly across the soundproofing foam. The nightclub owners had installed foam along the club’s walls and ceilings to combat noise complaints, but the foam was highly flammable, and the club did not have sprinklers installed.
The exits were also a safety issue. Inspection records showed that three months before the fire, the owners had been cited by the local fire marshal for having a secondary, interior door by the stage that opened inward, which violated regulations. They were told to take it down, but it was still up on the night of the fire.
Happy Land Social Club fire
News crews report on an arson fire at the Happy Land social club on March 25, 1990, in the Bronx borough of New York.
AP file photo
In March 1990, a fire at the Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, New York, killed 87 people and injured dozens more.
The cause of the fire was arson. A man, Julio Gonzalez, poured gasoline on the floor of the entryway and ignited it following a fight with his girlfriend.
The fire moved so quickly that a few victims still had drinks in their hands while others died hugging or holding hands.
The social club didn’t have sprinklers, fire alarms or fire exits. It was operating illegally at the time, as the city had ordered it to close because of the various building and fire code violations.
In the wake of the blaze, New York City tightened fire safety enforcement and stepped up efforts to shut down illegal clubs. Gonzalez was convicted of murder charges for the many deaths in the blaze.
Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire
Rescue workers are seen outside the Cocoanut Grove club in Boston, Mass., Nov. 28, 1942, after fire tore through the nightclub, killing 492 people.
AP
The Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire, the deadliest nightclub fire in U.S. history, occurred on November 28, 1942, at the Cocoanut Grove club in Boston, Massachusetts. A total of 490 people died, and hundreds were injured.
The cause was never officially determined, but the fire started in the basement and spread rapidly through the lounge and up a stairway that acted as a chimney. Many patrons were trapped inside because two exit doors were locked and the single revolving door at the front entrance was jammed with people attempting to flee the blaze.
The club was filled to more than twice its legal capacity when the fire started.
Combustible soundproofing material at the club was blamed for the rapid spread of the fire. The tragedy led to changes in building codes and standards — such as requiring revolving doors to be flanked by outward-opening standard doors — as well as medical treatment for burns.
“The impacts of Cocoanut Grove are already forever enshrined in the regulations, safety practices, the innovations and knowledge that have already saved countless lives,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said at a ceremony marking 80 years since the blaze.
Several residents of a senior housing tower in Santa Rosa were displaced following a fire that broke out New Year’s Eve, firefighters said.
Around 3 p.m., the Santa Rosa Fire Department was called to the Bethlehem Tower at 801 Tupper Street following a fire alarm call. Crews arrived within two minutes.
Upon arrival, firefighters found no sign of smoke or fire. Crews were told by building maintenance that there was a water leak on the 12th floor.
When firefighters reached the 12th floor, they found water coming out from an apartment. Once they opened the door, heavy smoke was found inside the apartment, prompting a second alarm.
Firefighters said a sprinkler was holding the fire in check and crews used hose lines to put out the fire.
Additional crews also evacuated residents on the 11th and 12th floors. Evacuees were evaluated for medical complaints and none were found, according to the fire department.
Officials said several apartments on the 12th floor and the floors below sustained water damage. A building inspector red-tagged the unit where the fire took place, while seven other units were yellow-tagged due to water damage.
The Red Cross was brought to the scene and worked with evacuees to find temporary housing.
Firefighters said the cause of the fire is under investigation.
According to Reiner Communities, which operates the property, the tower was built in 1973 and is the tallest building in Santa Rosa.
Dozens presumed dead after fire tears through bar at Swiss Alps ski resort – CBS News
Watch CBS News
Dozens of people are presumed dead and about 100 others are injured after a fire tore through a bar at a Swiss Alps ski resort, police say. Authorities are working to determine the cause, but do not believe it was an attack.
Crans-Montana, Switzerland — A fire at a bar in the Swiss Alps left many people dead and injured during New Year’s celebrations, police said early Thursday. Multiple people were killed in the blaze and many others were injured in the Alpine ski resort municipality of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, police said.
“The fire started around 1:30 a.m. this morning in a bar called ‘Le Constellation,’” police spokesperson Gaëtan Lathion said. “More than a hundred people were in the building, and we are seeing many injured and many dead.”
Investigators were working to determine the cause of the fire, police said.
A photo provided by the Valais Canton Police force in Switzerland shows members of the force outside a bar called The Constellation, in the Crans-Montana Swiss Alps ski resort, where a fire killed multiple people celebrating the beginning of the new year, early on Jan. 1, 2026.
Police Valais/Handout
“We’re just at the beginning of our investigation, but this is an internationally renowned ski resort with lots of tourists,” Lathion said.
The regional Valais Cantonal Police earlier released a statement saying there was a major response to the disaster by “police, fire and rescue forces” who focused on rescuing as many people as possible.
“The intervention is still ongoing. The area is completely forbidden to access. A ban on flying over Crans-Montana has been issued,” the police said, adding that a reception center and helpline had been established for impacted families.
The Crans-Montana community is in the heart of the Swiss Alps, just 25 miles north of the Matterhorn.
SAN JOSE – Firefighters on New Year’s Eve battled a blaze at an apartment complex in San Jose, according to authorities.
The fire was reported around 4:50 p.m. at the Del Coronado Apartments, located in the 5200 block of Camden Avenue, the San Jose Fire Department said in a social media post.
Multiple units were involved and residents were evacuated, according to authorities.
One person was taken to an area hospital for smoke inhalation, the fire department said.
The fire was contained around 5:35 p.m., according to authorities. The cause is under investigation.
This year, the fight over free expression in American higher education reached a troubling milestone. According to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, efforts to censor speech on college campuses hit record highs and across multiple fronts – and most succeeded.
Let’s start with the raw numbers. In 2025, FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming databases collectively tracked:
525 attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, more than one a day, with 460 of them resulting in punishment.
273 attempts to punish students for expression, more than five a week, with 176 of these attempts succeeding.
160 attempts to deplatform speakers, about three each week, with 99 of them succeeding.
That’s 958 censorship attempts in total, nearly three per day on campuses across the country. For comparison, FIRE’s next highest total was 477 two years ago.
The 525 scholar sanction attempts are the highest ever recorded in FIRE’s database, which spans from 2000 to the present. Even when a large-scale incident at the U.S. Naval Academy is treated as just a single entry, the 2025 total still breaks records.
Twenty-nine scholars were fired, including 18 who were terminated since September for social media comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Student sanction attempts also hit a new high, and deplatforming efforts – our records date back to 1998 – rank third all-time, behind 2023 and 2024.
The problem is actually worse because FIRE’s data undercounts the true scale of campus censorship. Why? The data rely on publicly available information, and an unknown number of incidents, especially those that may involve quiet administrative pressure, never make the public record.
Some critics argue that the total number of incidents is small compared to the roughly 4,000 colleges in the country. But this argument collapses under scrutiny. While there are technically thousands of institutions labeled as “colleges” or “universities,” roughly 600 of them educate about 80% of undergraduates enrolled at not-for-profit four-year schools. Many of the rest of these “colleges” and “universities” are highly specialized or vocational programs. This includes a number of beauty academies, truck-driving schools, and similar institutions – in other words, campuses that aren’t at the heart of the free speech debate.
These censorship campaigns aren’t coming from only one side of the political spectrum. FIRE’s data shows, for instance, that liberal students are punished for pro-Palestinian activism, conservative faculty are targeted for controversial opinions on gender or race, and speaking events featuring all points of view are targeted for cancellation. The two most targeted student groups on campus? Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA. If that doesn’t make this point clear, nothing will.
The common denominator across these censorship campaigns is not ideology – it’s intolerance.
So where do we go from here?
We need courage: from faculty, from students, and especially from administrators. It’s easy to defend speech when it’s popular. It’s harder when the ideas are offensive or inconvenient. But that’s when it matters most.
Even more urgently, higher education needs a cultural reset. Universities must recommit to the idea that exposure to ideas and speech that one dislikes or finds offensive is not “violence.” That principle is essential for democracy, not just for universities.
This year’s record number of campus censorship attempts should be a wake-up call for campus administrators. For decades, many allowed a culture of censorship to fester, dismissing concerns as overblown, isolated, or a politically motivated myth. Now, with governors, state legislatures, members of Congress, and even the White House moving aggressively to police campus expression, some administrators are finally pushing back. But this push–back from administrators doesn’t seem principled. Instead, it seems more like an attempt to shield their institutions from outside political interference.
That’s not leadership. It’s damage control. And it’s what got higher education into this mess in the first place.
If university leaders want to reclaim their role as stewards of free inquiry, they cannot act just when governmental pressure threatens their autonomy. They also need to be steadfast when internal intolerance threatens their mission. A true commitment to academic freedom means defending expression even when it’s unpopular or offensive. That’s the price of intellectual integrity in a free society.
Sean Stevens, Ph.D., is FIRE’s chief research advisor. He was previously director of research at Heterodox Academy.
The Minneapolis Fire Department is investigating what caused a fire at a home under construction in the Linden Hills neighborhood on Tuesday.
Crews were called to the residence on the 3900 block of Upton Avenue South around 3:30 p.m., according to the fire department. Upon arrival, firefighters found heavy smoke and fire. Crews also reported hearing popping sounds.
Fire officials say crews laid lines to the basement and began to search the home. However, firefighters evacuated the building and began to fight the fire from the outside after learning that propane tanks and gasoline may have been inside the house.
Several hose lines were also laid to protect neighboring homes from the flames. An MTC bus was used as a temporary warming shelter for neighboring residents and firefighters due to the cold weather, the fire department said.
As of Wednesday night, firefighters remain on the scene, working to completely extinguish the flames.
Denver firefighters responded to a house on Thursday night that was “fully involved” in a fire, extinguishing the blaze in the Globeville neighborhood in less than 15 minutes.
Division Chief of Operations Robert Murphy said the house, at 43rd Avenue and Cherokee Street, was vacant and no one was injured in the fire.
Denver Fire crews arrived on scene to find a fully involved house fire in the area of I-25 and I-70. Crews initiated a defensive fire attack on the vacant structure. No injuries. Fire investigators on scene to determine cause. pic.twitter.com/WD5Q8n8hRp
The Denver Fire Department got the call on a one-alarm blaze around 8:40 p.m. Christmas night, Murphy said, and seven trucks and emergency vehicles responded to the scene.
“There was nobody there when we got there,” he said. “We started attacking from the outside. There are still parts of the house standing, but it’s going to have to come down.”
GOLDEN TROUT WILDERNESS, Calif. — The first two miles were pleasant enough. The grade was mild, the forest serene. It was what lay ahead that worried me:
A 2,500-foot descent to Jordan Hot Springs, a spot in California’s High Sierra backcountry that has long had a hold on my imagination — an idyllic meadow with rock-dammed bathtub-hot pools.
Given my age and lack of recent high-altitude exertion, I could easily need a helicopter to get out.
But that was a secondary concern. I was most anxious about what I might see along the way. Would it be an affirmation of nature’s power of renewal or an omen of irreversible decline?
I was retracing my steps of 20 years earlier to a scene of mass death I had never been able to erase from my mind. At a small plateau alongside Ninemile Creek in the Golden Trout Wilderness Area, I had stood in a forest of black sticks standing on both sides of a steep canyon like whiskers on a beast too large to comprehend.
I had hiked to Jordan Hot Springs and the burn scar of the 2002 McNally fire to probe big questions of fire ecology: Are Sierra forests overgrown? Is fire management the unintended cause of destructive crown fires? Do forests reduced to blackened earth and charcoal trees recover?
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The McNally fire wiped out whole forests in 2002. What does it tell us today about the future of vast areas devastated by recent fires?
At that time, the questions proved too big. I never wrote a story.
But the image stuck. Year after year I would wonder, “What does that canyon look like today?”
It took another fire to turn that question into action.
I did not grasp from the TV images of the 2020 Castle fire how deeply it would affect me personally when I saw its aftermath with my own eyes.
It was two years ago that I took a nostalgic drive up Highway 190 into the mountains east of Porterville in the San Joaquin Valley. At the elevation where the oak and scrub give way to cedar, fir and pine, I had a horrific shock rounding a familiar bend anticipating a thrill I had felt so many times before.
Instead of my favorite Sierra vista, I saw total disfigurement. The road ahead, once hidden in a sheath of forest, is now a scar carved into the side of a landscape of exposed soil and the standing carcasses of tens of thousands of blackened trees.
Those last 10 miles up the Tule River Canyon had always been a spiritual climb for me, releasing the weight of urban life along with the Central Valley heat and enlivening my spirit with cascading streams, pine-scented air and anticipation of the road’s end.
I had been enamored of this view since 1962, when I first drove to the end of Highway 190 in Quaking Aspen to begin my summer job packing mules into the Sierra backcountry.
Now it was gone. So much beauty lost. Never to return?
The 2020 Castle fire left huge sections of Sequoia National like these standing dead trees.
(Daniel Flesher / LA Times Studios)
In the recent years of unprecedented wildfires, the public discourse has been filled with speculation that such a total tree die-off, combined with a warming climate, could irreversibly change a forest, leaving it barren of the conifers that dominate an alpine ecosystem.
I didn’t want to believe that. I wanted hope that in my lifetime I might see the Tule River Canyon once again as it was.
Thus arose the fanciful idea that a return to Jordan Hot Springs would allow me to see into the future by looking at the past. My purpose was aesthetic and emotional, not scientific. But if I was going to personalize nature, I thought it would be prudent to backstop my feelings with expertise.
I asked around and found a fire ecologist who has been studying the McNally fire almost since the embers went out. Chad Hanson, co-founder and principal ecologist of the John Muir Project and resident of nearby Kennedy Meadows, is the kind of scientist who returns to the field year after year and wades through waist-high underbrush to track the trajectory of recovery.
Hanson jumped at the opportunity to take a reporter off-road to see nature as he sees. He offered some advice that I understood better once we were on the trail: “Don’t wear shorts.”
On the first leg, a 650-foot drop to Casa Vieja Meadows, his commentary turned the hike into a walking lesson to reshape my view of the nature of fire and nature itself.
“To really grasp what’s happening in nature, especially after wildfires, you really have to think like a forest,” he said. “And forests don’t operate on human timescales, and they don’t operate the way humans do, especially when it comes to life and death.”
Hanson has a relationship with the forest that is at once clinical and lyrical.
“A standing dead tree is vastly more important to wildlife and biodiversity in the forest than a standing live tree of the same size,” he said. “A tree in the forest ecosystem may have two or three hundred years of incredibly important vital life after it dies.”
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1.A screen grab of an area of the 2020 Castle Fire that has undergone post-fire logging. 2.A screen grab of along the trail to Jordan Hot Springs a charred tree sits surrounded by White Thorn Bush.
A screen grab of trees charred by the 2020 Castle fire in this once-dense portion of the forest.
(Daniel Flesher / LA Times Studios)
Woodpeckers carve nesting cavities in the softer dead trees and broken-off snags, then move on each year, leaving behind homes for other nesting creatures, such as nuthatches and chipmunks. As the trees break off or fall, the downed logs become food and cover for earthbound species and eventually decay into nutrients in the soil.
Our maps showed we were walking through forest burned in the McNally fire, but what I saw around us made that hard to imagine. A canopy of Jeffrey pine, red fir and incense cedar shaded the trail. Except for the blackened bark on their lower trunks, there was no sign of catastrophic fire.
“That’s because there wasn’t,” Hanson assured me. The fire had passed through where we were walking. But the common descriptors “scorched,” “blackened” and “destroyed” did not apply.
“Most of the fire area is like this, where it would have killed a few of the seedlings and saplings but basically almost nothing else,” Hanson said. “It’s largely unchanged by the fire.”
It took nearly five weeks for the McNally fire to cover 150,000 acres. Much of that time, at night or when the wind was down, it moved at a human walking pace.
“The temperature drops and the relative humidity goes up, the winds die down, flames drop to the ground and it starts creeping along,” Hanson said.
A screen grab of a hillside heavily altered by the 2020 Castle fire.
(Daniel Flesher / LA Times Studios)
Several times as we walked, the canopy opened up nearby and Hanson stopped to point out a high-intensity burn where a burst of wind in the heat of the afternoon had lofted the flames into the living branches more than 100 feet above us. Some were an acre or two, some up to 50 acres.
A quarter century after the fire, each was a mini-laboratory of regeneration. My first impression was sunlight, a brightness that contrasted with the shade we stood in. Then brush, predominantly whitethorn and manzanita, interspersed in waist-high thickets. Then snags, standing dead trees broken off halfway up. Finally, patches of young conifer, some mere saplings, some 15 to 20 feet tall
The few trees that had survived the fire now looked like Christmas trees planted on top of telephone poles. For a year after the fire, Hanson said, they would have appeared dead with all their foliage scorched. But at the very top, surviving terminals had sent out new twigs in the next growing season.
Those were the starter trees that spread the seed that had germinated and was now thriving in the open sunlight.
At one burn, Hanson proposed that we make a side trip and wade through the brush up on a steep canyon wall where, he assured me, we would find even more saplings just breaking through. Knowing that we had completed less than half our descent, and that each step down would require a step back up, I decided to wait to see how I felt later in the day on the way back up.
Casa Vieja Meadows was a perfect Sierra scene: a half-mile plain of yellow-green grass, a ring of forest all around it, a cattleman’s shed across the way and tranquil Ninemile Creek running its length.
At the meadow’s end, the creek dived into a rocky canyon, the beginning of a 1,500-foot drop through patches of willow, cottonwood and fern.
When we reached that spot that has stuck in my memory for 20 years, my immediate reaction was disappointment. I saw no beauty, only a scar that was neither a forest of dead trees nor living ones. Only a few snags remained. The fallen trees must have been there — there had been no logging to remove them — but were submerged in the brush, out of sight. At most, a dozen or two pre-fire trees survived on both sides of the canyon.
From a belt of willow at the stream’s edge to the ridges above, both sides of the canyon were covered in gray-green hue of whitethorn extending as far as I could see toward Jordan Hot Springs, still a half mile beyond.
Here, Hanson preached a beauty based on the timescale of natural succession. Because of its size and severity, this high-intensity burn area will remain what is called montane chaparral for decades, he said. In doing so, it will give the greater forest ecosystem what it cannot survive without.
“That’s some of the best wildlife habitat,” he said, sweeping his hand over the horizon. “We’re not used to seeing it that way as humans where we see the flames go high and kill most of the trees. But it turns there are a lot of wildlife species in the forest that have evolved over millions of years to depend specifically on areas where most of the trees have been killed.
A screen grab of a hillside above Jordan Hot Springs where the 2002 McNally fire burned. There are early signs of conifer regeneration emerging among lower vegetation.
(Daniel Flesher / LA Times Studios)
“This is actually really important habitat for shrub nesting birds, for small mammals, woodpeckers, bluebirds, nuthatches, any cavity-nesting species. They depend on these patches where you have a lot of dead trees.”
Hanson assured me this vast landscape of brush was already making its return as a conifer forest. To see the evidence, we’d have to slog into the whitethorn to see the future. I shakily followed Hanson up a canyon as he worked his way through openings he said were likely blazed by foraging bears, then over a fallen tree trunk that crumbled under my steps.
I was gasping for air and having difficulty maintaining balance when he stopped.
Hanson began noting tufts of pine needles poking out of the waist-high brush around us. “One, two, three, four, five, six,” he said, counting as he went along. Farther up, he pointed out clumps of new conifers, some up to 18 feet tall.
The saplings just now poking their needles into the sunlight, and hundreds more that we would only be able to be seen on our hands and knees, will grow and propagate, he said.
“It’s going to keep regenerating every year, every decade after the fire,” he said. “There’s going to be more new ones coming in and the earlier ones are going to get taller and older. And that’s just classic natural progression.”
In a hundred years, they’ll be so thick they’ll block out the sun, and the brush, starved of energy to drive photosynthesis, will wither, and the shrub nesting species will move to a different mountain cleared by a later fire.
I had seen what I needed to see. All that was left was to fulfill a personal desire to return one more time to Jordan Hot Springs.
Through all my youthful explorations of the Kern River Canyon — my Yosemite without crowds — that golden-green meadow with its pools had been only an illusion for me. Named for the man who came across it blazing a trail from the San Joaquin Valley to the Mojave Desert in 1861, it was a storied place just beyond my horizon.
Several times I led mule strings to Soda Flat, a private outpost in Sequoia National Forest. The hot springs beckoned only 3½ miles away. But after 20 miles on the trail, duty to my livestock and to my client, Bakersfield realtor Ralph Smith, prevented me from indulging that fantasy.
So much has changed since then. The pack station at Quaking Aspen was demolished and relocated four miles deeper into the backcountry on logging roads. A paved road was cut into the roadless area east of the Kern River giving automobile access to the five-mile John Jordan Hot Springs trail.
My visual memory of Jordan Hot Springs from that 2005 hike has faded. The catharsis I felt then of finally seeing it after so many decades has not. At the stage in life when I know that my return to many places will be my last, I wanted to fix its image in my memory, to sit simply one more time and contemplate the beauty of this small spot in the universe.
It wasn’t to be.
A screen grab of an aerial view shows the scale of the 2020 Castle fire.
(Daniel Flesher / LA Times Studios)
Noting my fatigue, Hanson asked if I wanted to go on. With the sun on its downward arc and a 500-foot descent ahead to fulfill that wistful desire, he thought prudence dictated that it was time to turn home. I had to agree. It was a slow ascent. I couldn’t go more than a few hundred feet without stopping to sit and catch my breath. But I made it, just before dark — without a helicopter.
I never intended to settle the big academic and political questions over what’s the right way to care for a forest: Indigenous stewardship vs. forest thinning; post-fire logging and bio-mass extraction vs. natural decay and regeneration; fire control vs. natural selection.
Much has been written about that. Much more will likely be before I could report that a consensus is achieved.
I do have a preview of the Tule River Canyon a quarter century from now, and it won’t be the place I have known for so much of my life. There will likely be no vistas of forest canopy, no shaded glens with water cascading through a tapestry of conifers, pine sap spicing the morning air.
More likely, there will be mile after mile of whitethorn and manzanita, a few grandfather trees identifiable by their odd conical foliage high on spindly trunks, patches of vigorous young pine 15 to 20 feet tall, and saplings whose tops barely break through the brush.
From my new perspective, I’m still not able to call that beauty, but I can call it hope. I’m betting on one who crawls through the brush to find answers that it’s only the beginning of something that will take longer than my lifetime to reveal itself.
A 20-year-old was taken to the hospital after an Orange County deputy returned fire while serving a search.The sheriff’s office says deputies from the felony unit were stationed near the 2200 block of Buchanan Bay Circle around 9:40 p.m. Friday doing surveillance of a homicide suspect.Deputies were preparing to serve a DNA search warrant in a murder that happened earlier this week, when the suspect and a 20-year-old man exited the house.They say the 20-year-old opened fire at the deputies, hitting an unmarked vehicle, while the suspect tried to run back into the residence.A deputy returned fire, striking the 20-year-old shooter.Deputies rendered aid until paramedics were able to get to the scene and transport the man to the hospital, where he underwent surgery. Deputies say he will face charges for the shooting.The suspect in the homicide case was quickly detained and was questioned by detectives later Friday evening.No deputies were injured in this shooting.As is standard procedure, the deputy who fired his weapon is on temporary, paid administrative leave pending the initial FDLE review.
A 20-year-old was taken to the hospital after an Orange County deputy returned fire while serving a search.
The sheriff’s office says deputies from the felony unit were stationed near the 2200 block of Buchanan Bay Circle around 9:40 p.m. Friday doing surveillance of a homicide suspect.
Deputies were preparing to serve a DNA search warrant in a murder that happened earlier this week, when the suspect and a 20-year-old man exited the house.
They say the 20-year-old opened fire at the deputies, hitting an unmarked vehicle, while the suspect tried to run back into the residence.
A deputy returned fire, striking the 20-year-old shooter.
Deputies rendered aid until paramedics were able to get to the scene and transport the man to the hospital, where he underwent surgery.
Deputies say he will face charges for the shooting.
The suspect in the homicide case was quickly detained and was questioned by detectives later Friday evening.
No deputies were injured in this shooting.
As is standard procedure, the deputy who fired his weapon is on temporary, paid administrative leave pending the initial FDLE review.
San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. FILE photo courtesy OnScene.TV)
Firefighters battled a blaze suspected of having been caused by an unattended stove in a high-rise apartment building in downtown San Diego’s East Village Thursday.
Crews responded within five minutes to a fire reported at 5:19 a.m. Thursday at the Leo Apartment Homes at 715 15th St., at the corner of G Street near Makers Quarter, according to the San Diego Fire Rescue Department.
“When they arrived on scene they heard an audible alarm,” said Jason Shanley, SDFR spokesman. “A resident told them they had something in the oven on the fourth floor.”
Shanley said crews proceeded to the building’s fourth floor where they “confirmed there was a fire. It was an oven fire with zero extension. Crews knocked down the fire quickly and were on the scene for about an hour.”
Shanley said there were no injuries reported.
A total of 36 personnel were called to the scene including the crews of two fire trucks, five engines, two battalion chiefs, one medic and one rescue vehicle.
Makers Quarter is a multi-block urban live-work-play development blending residential, office, retail and open spaces.
A San Diego Fire-Rescue Department vehicle. FILE Photo by Alexander Nguyen/Times of San Diego)
Firefighters were battling a residential fire in Chula Vista Thursday.
The blaze was reported shortly before noon Thursday at 4021 Palm Ave., according to the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
Officials said there was heavy fire in the garage of the single-family residential structure.
“Firefighters are actively working on it. The garage is pretty well involved,” SDFR spokesman Jason Shanley said. “We’re not sure whether the fire has spread to the inside of the home. There likely will be smoke damage, though we haven’t been able to get inside the home yet.”
Shanley said three adults and three dogs were safely evacuated from the residence without injury.
The department said 28 personnel were dispatched to the scene along with five fire engines, one truck, two battalion chiefs, and one medic.
The cause of the fire was under investigation.
The Chula Vista Fire Department assisted in the firefighting effort.
At least two people were killed, and about 20 others were taken to hospitals, after a gas leak is believed to have sparked two explosions and a fire at a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Lilia Luciano has more on the victims and the investigation.
A La Jolla woman who previously pleaded guilty to trying to pay an undercover detective $2 million to kill her husband was found dead last week, authorities said.
Tatyana Natasha Remley, 44, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on Dec. 18, according to the San Diego medical examiner’s office. She died at Piazza della Famigia, a public square in the heart of Little Italy, on 523 W. Date St. in San Diego.
Remley’s body was found outside a bar, according to witnesses. Soon after the incident last week, police responded to the scene and covered her body with a yellow tarp.
David Ohara, an eyewitness to the incident, later described what he saw on X.
“I just witnessed a suicide,” Ohara wrote. “The young lady shot one time in the air and then turned the gun on herself.”
Court records show that Remley had two run-ins with the law, one dating back to 2023 and another in September of this year.
On July 11, 2023, Remley filed for divorce from her estranged husband, Mark Remley, who was 57 years old at the time. The couple, who married in 2011, produced an equine-human acrobatics show called Valitar.
The show, set to premiere at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, was canceled “due to poor ticket sales and artistic differences with some of the performers,” according to an article from the Coast News Group in 2012.
Some employees told the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2012 that the Remleys rushed the production and failed to pay performers for about a month.
But court records revealed that the couple was well off, owning six homes at one point. According to the Union-Tribune, Mark Remley bought his then-wife a $218,000 engagement ring.
However, signs of trouble emerged even before the divorce was filed. On July 2, 2023, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Office responded to a call of a fire at the couple’s $5-million home in the 4600 block of Rancho Reposo.
Remley, who was home at the time authorities arrived, had three guns and ammunition in her possession, according to deputies. She was arrested that day on suspicion of firearm-related offenses.
The cause of the fire was unknown at the time, but in September of this year, Remley was charged with felony arson. She was accused of setting fire to a structure and forest land. She pleaded not guilty to the charge, and was set to appear in court on March 3, 2026.
The following day, deputies received a tip that she was looking to hire a hitman to kill her husband, according to a previous Times report.
Remley met up with an undercover sheriff’s detective to hash out the plan on Aug. 2.
“She provided detailed information on how she wanted her husband killed and his body disposed,” the department said in a news release in 2023. “Remley brought three additional firearms and U.S. currency as a down payment for the murder.”
Remley allegedly offered $2 million in exchange for the slaying, authorities said.
In December 2023, she pleaded guilty to solicitation of murder and was sentenced to three years and eight months in state prison. She only served one year of her sentence, according to ABC 10 News San Diego.
In a final post to her Instagram account in October, Remley spoke about overcoming obstacles.
“I want to talk about how beautiful life is,” Remley said in the video. “Love yourself no matter what someone does to you. No matter how hurt you get.”
Remley celebrated her 44th birthday 10 days before her death.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a professional or call 988. The nationwide three-digit mental health crisis hotline will connect callers with trained mental health counselors. Or text “HOME” to 741741 in the U.S. and Canada to reach the Crisis Text Line.
