CNN news 2013-06-18 加文本

cnn news 2013-06-18

We are live on the power lines in Coloradoand you see up close why wild fires like nothing else in nature are. Also,tonight California's dream of hi-speed bullet trains is turning into a slowmotion multibillion dollar nightmare. Guess what, your tax dollars paying someof the freight. Later, why is this man smiling while today's murder trialBoston's Whitey Bulger, my old neighbor, laughter out loud as witness describeda chilling death threat allegedly made, yet he still a hero to some. I willtalk to another old neighbor about why.

We begin though in Colorado where crewshave a good day, but still very far from containing the largest wild fire everseen in the state. High temps, high rain not helping and your houses about 400of them now in ashes. Worse each of these serves as a kind of tinderboxcatching sparks then fueling the flames onward and those flames move fast.

Watch this footage from British Columbia.It's amazing perspective. One frankly, you are not supposed to see and stilllive. Watch out quickly that temperature shoots up from 100 to nearly 900degrees in less than 15 seconds. If you were standing here, this would be thelast thing you ever see.

In a moment, you hear from people who getnearly that close time and time again as job award for some as a calling.

First, the latest on this fire right nowfrom Martin Savidge who joins us live from Colorado Springs. Martin.

Evening, John. Yes, we are standing outsideof the incident command center. This is centrally where they have been callingthe shots on historic fire for the last three days and most of that time thenews has not been good. But today, finally, finally there is at least a glimmerof hope and a lot of that has to do with the fact well would the weather. Andthe weather had been a problem for so long. Now sadly, the weather has turnedout to be actually a pretty good thing today. It was cloud overhead. That's howstarted off. That's good for a number of reasons. It drops the humidity levels,actually raises those, drops the temperature and wind. The wind has subsided somewhat.That was the best of all of them. Late this afternoon, the sky has opened up.Now, we should tell you that when you get rain like this. It is a good thing asfar as helping to douse some of the hot spots, but the problem is, it brought alot of lightening and that is a huge problem in this area. Because even thoughthe ground has been dampened, much of the brush is tinder dry. And so even oncethe rain has passed by. It means that fuel is eventually going to dry out,pretty quick here John. And as the result of that, it is possible that we couldbe back into a high threat fire circumstance in just a matter of hours afterthe rain. But we were out there today. There are no walls of fire. Let me justput that to risk. But what they did today was that they were able to getcontainment at about 30 percent. That is of course very good. Yesterday theywere practically at zero and there are, also known news they had been able toat least call off some mandatory evacuations, at least for Colorado Springs. Atleast for some folks, they can't begin to go back home. Not for those who havebeen in the most devastated areas. They are going to have to wait a while. But,for those areas on the fringe that were evacuated as precautions, those peoplecan start to go back home.

The other good news is forest fire crew canbegin to get some risk but I will warn you John this fire is not out by anymeans. 30 percent containment means 70 percent of it is not under control andeven though it is down to hot spots that have to be mopped up, any one of thosecould flare and there are neighborhoods, subdivisions packed that are on theouter edge of this fire that they could still be threatening. So good news,turning a corner, significant progress but remember, there had been at leasttwo deaths and there are fears more deaths could be discovered as people andauthorities move into these neighborhoods after the flames. John.