Hello all, this is Christoph from The New York Times. For our latest video, we took a closer look at one specific wildfire on the West Coast of the United States. The Almeda Drive Fire in southern Oregon stands out among the many fires because of the high number of homes and businesses it destroyed: More than 2,300 homes burned down in less than 24 hours on Sept. 8. I wanted to find out why this fire, which burned a smaller area compared to some of the other wildfires, turned into one of the most destructive ones. I used satellite images, social media posts, first responder radio traffic and text messages shared with me to reconstruct what happened.

“The fire moves so quickly that some residents who left their homes for work aren’t able to return.”

My house burned down earlier this year in February. Almost everything we owned was destroyed. Furniture, keepsakes, souvenirs from countless trips, priceless family and baby photos, all gone. I can not imagine what each of these families are going through. My heart goes out to them.

This fire initially broke out just north of my home. It's so surreal how many people I know lost their homes while mine remained

I lost my home in that fire.

My heart goes out to all of these people. I am a survivor of the Paradise Camp Fire that took out our entire town of 15000 homes and businesses. Our entire town of 22, 000 people ecsaping Paradise through flame filled streets and roads. Many tragically died a terrifying death. . It has been 2 years now and we are still waiting for the nightmare to end. The battle with the Insurance Companies and the Electric Company that caused the fire has been dragging on since November 2018. Many of us forced to live in Limbo until PG &E and the Insurance Companies finally compensate the losses. My prayers go out to all of you.

Should have millions of views. Nope, I am sitting here on day 3 of the upload and KZread has merely shown independent journalism to 77k people,

I’m there right now and the whole town is a grey pile of rubble

Addicted to NYT Visual Investigations - thank you for the hard work, the insight is truly stunning.

Prayers sent over there much love from New York

Whomever started this fire is never gonna come forward now. Even if it was an accident.

So devastating.

I would hate to be the person that the investigation finds to be responsible for this fire...😬

It’s been 7 months and many of us have not been able to rebuild yet. We lost close to 100 animals, we raised chickens, ducks, geese, and turkeys. My parrots died and a horse. They gave us no evacuation notices. We got a message to stay in our homes 1 hour after our home burned. The poor fire department people were devastated as water ran out and they desperately tried to save lives.

Man-made fire... Well, It should be considered as a crime

Nice reporting on this. I really appreciate the in-depth look.

A couple things made this fire a worst case scenario. The first was wind, the second was dryness. The video mentions the wind, but it was a lot worse than it says. The rogue valley has seasonal fall wind storms that will shift from a typical NW flow to an extreme South-East flow, reaching speeds up to 30MPH with gusts up to 45-50MPH. It's very common for these wind storms to uproot trees and cause damage to homes. The Almeda Drive Fire started at the very beginning of a wind storm, making it fast and impossible to keep up with for the whole week the fire burned.

What most people don’t know is that during this fire there were multiple other fires happening at basically the same time all in Central Point and eagle point and in central point all the fires were along the green way and the green way stretches along i5. I think someone was Traveling up and down the greenway setting fires because in CP there were multiple fire in the same location at different times. Gnarly times

This is excellent reporting. Kudos to the reporters.

i dont think I'll ever forget that day. sleeping waiting to go to work that night, only to have under 90 seconds to get what i could before the power was cut, and the smoke enveloped my home. freaky stuff