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Some residents of LA neighborhoods recently got a nasty surprise. FEMA, The Federal Emergency Management Agency, recently declared parts of LA to be flood zones. But, as correspondent Judy Muller reports, FEMA used 40 year-old maps as the basis for their decision. And the City of LA failed to intervene, even though FEMA gave them the chance. Now many residents are facing huge bills for insurance, and are blaming both federal and local governments for hanging them out to dry.

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Photo: Rick Wilkinson

Correspondent John Larson

Red's Ranch
I was standing in the middle of a bright, green marijuana farm, a patch worth about 19 million dollars, when I learned pot farmers might be ripping off Red Skelton. Not the famous comedian himself, because Red died a while ago, but his widow. She owns a nearby ranch. Pot farmers need water, I was told, a lot of water.

The Hunt for Water
We were in an illegal marijuana "grove" near Hemet, in an wilderness area know for illegal marijuana farms. Law enforcement busted several near here last year. Today they were had found four more. We had flow in with CAMP - The Campaign Against Marijuana Planting - the largest law enforcement task force in the United States.

Mark Reynolds, a Riverside County Sheriff's Investigator, came up to us in the grove and said he was going to try to find the water source. Marijuana needs up to gallon per day per plant in hot, dry climates. Almost all of it is stolen from natural springs, water mains, fire lines, private homes or ranches.

When a marijuana farmer want to start a farm, he first looks for water.

According to Reynolds, "Around mid-November they'll come out and start looking. The theory behind that is if there is water flowing in late November there is going to be water through out the year."

Then the growers will assemble their team, usually illegal immigrants from Mexico, brought in to prepare the land. Often the workers are under duress, their families threatened or frightened back in Mexico.

"We've actually arrested people that have told us straight up that they were brought up from (Mexico) specifically to tend marijuana, and we hear... how they were forced to come up, their families are being threatened and pressured," says Chris Jackson, the Regional Commander of CAMP.

The growers buy miles of rubber hose, tubing and drip lines - from big box stores like Home Depot. They carry it into the grow sites, often miles off the faintest trail, deep in the wilderness. They tap into a water source and then begin siphoning the water, sucking it through the hose with their mouths as they bury the line. They can run the line for miles, up over hills and down into canyons, burying it the entire way.

Photo: Rick Wilkinson

CAMP Regional Commander Chris Jackson, with Larson

" Its amazing how resourceful they are and how good they are at tapping into springs and then building reservoirs," says Chris Jackson, the Regional Commander of CAMP.

"They do it all without pumps, and get garden hose strength from two miles away."

Reynolds follows the rubber hose, pulling on it with his hands, ripping it out of dense scrub. It is rough going.

After an hour, he follows it into a large bush immediately adjacent to the Skelton Ranch.

He finds the pot farmers have installed different plumbing here, changing from rubber hose to buried a buried PVC pipe.

The pipe leads 30 yards onto the Skelton Ranch and taps directly into the ranch's well.

A Poisoned Well
"They did a sloppy job. You can see there's no back valve", says Reynolds as he digs down, exposing where the pot farmers cut in the ranch's water line.

The absence of a back valve means the pot famer's pesticides and chemicals may have backwashed downhill through the lines, and poisoned the drinking water in the well. All of which leads the investigator to believe the ranch owner knew nothing of pot farmer's theft of her water.

Small environmental disasters are increasingly common on marijuana farms. The growers use Mexican pesticides, illegal in the United States. The pesticides pollute ground water and kill wildlife.

Dave Sickels, and officer with California Department of Fish and Game says "We find dead rats, mice, and small animals all over the marijuana farms. They've been poisoned, and of course other animals have then eaten them, too"

And all the toxins go into the water table, along with fecal matter left by the growers. The clean-up comes out of taxpayers pocket's. It costs at least 10 thousand dollars per acre to clean up and haul out the toxic chemicals, rubber hose, and trash - over a hundred million dollars this season alone.

Reynolds finds the ranch caretaker, who explains Skelton's widow has been gone for five weeks. But, he has seen men in the bushes from which we just came. He tells us he saw men with bicycles early in the year and later, men with guns. He thought they might be hunters.

No Harvest No Pay
Reynolds explains usually several farmers will sit with the plants, living in rough camps for up to six months, fertilizing and watering the marijuana. At harvest time, they hire more workers, usually for about 200 dollars a day.

"We've seen up to six to ten to twelve subjects up there during harvest time. They clip the plants, they cut the plants they trim them they'll hang and dry them," says Reynolds.

The farmers usually get paid only when the crop is sold. Meaning: today's farmers are out of luck. In fact, on this day the CAMP team eradicates 4 marijuana farms, worth an estimated $60 million.

Camp's Chris Jackson says, "Not only are they out a paycheck, but this comes out of...the street dealers pocket... out of the middle man, and it goes way up to the drug cartels down in Mexico. So all the violence and interactions than you see with the cartels down there, this is taking money straight out of their pockets."

Residents in the foothills above the Los Angeles National Forest whose homes survived the fire last month are now girding for possible mudslides. A big Pacific storm is moving toward Southern California. The rainfall might help green things up and mitigate the drought, but it will almost certainly cause slides in some fire areas.

Some residents have spent thousands of dollars preparing berms, fences and other blockades they hope will keep the mud and debris from flowing into their houses. And some say they'll evacuate rather than chance being overcome by a lava of mud.

Scientists from the US Geological Survey have been sampling the soil across the 160,000 acres that were burned. They say heat and gas from the fire permeates the soil. That's formed what they describe as a waxy layer, just below the surface. That waxy layer can prevent water from soaking into the ground. Instead, it rolls down slopes, carrying mud, rock, trees and other debris along with it.

Residents near fire-burned areas can get advice and updates at a Web site established by LA County's Coordinated Agency Recovery Effort. There's also a special telephone number: 800-214-4020.

If you have pictures of the preparation going on before the storm, or of its aftermath, we invite you to share them, by posting your images to the SoCal Connected Flickr stream.

The Station Fire has now grown to more than 120,000 acres. Still, fire officials say the flame activity was somewhat subdued last night, due to an increase in humidity.

Firefighters are now expressing some cautious optimism that they may be getting a handle on the fire. But they're concerned that high winds may kick up this afternoon and increase the fire's activity.

We've updated our fire information page, and will continue to do so as the situation changes. And we'll be broadcasting the latest fire news on KCET-TV all day.

Atop Mt. Wilson, the Observatory and broadcast towers for some fifty TV and radio stations remain at risk. There are reports of fire retardant drops on the mountain top, but officials are not sending in fire crews. They say it's too dangerous. Roads are burnt out and crews could easily get trapped in the fire.

Fire officials are taking the Station Fire very seriously. So seriously that they flew in a 747 Supertanker for what was billed as its first drop over a fire in the continental United States. The plane is based near Sacramento and holds some 20,000 gallons of fire retardant.

Fox News caught the Supertanker during a drop.

The Station Fire is now truly massive. Latest reports estimate the flames have burned through more than 105,000 acres of the Angeles National Forest. The fire zone has more than doubled in size since yesterday.

The winds are picking up, causing worries that the fire will spread toward residential communities to the south and west of the Forest.

Firefighters have set some goals. They're trying to keep the fire west of Highway 39 and the Angeles Crest Highway, and north of the foothill communities from Sunland to Altadena.

New evacuation orders have been issued for residents in Juniper Hills, La Cresenta and Tujunga. Some residents in Altadena are now being allowed to return to their homes.

Air quality remains a concern, with air rated Unhealthy to Hazardous thoughout the West San Gabriel Valley. Meanwhile, the hot weather is expected to continue tomorrow, with a slow cooling trend as the week wears on.

The Station Fire is threatening broadcast towers on Mt. Wilson.  Most of LA's TV stations, including KCET transmit their broadcasts from the site. What happens if the fire damages or destroys the broadcast facilities on the mountain?

If you have cable or satellite you will continue to receive KCET and other local stations without interruption.

If you depend on over-the-air transmission, and the fire knocks out our transmitter, you may not be able to receive our signal. We're already working on a variety of plans to respond to that contingency. We may set up a temporary transmission facility, and offer streamed programming online, here at KCET.org.

These efforts may take some time, and require spending a good deal of money. KCET has always been committed to universal access. We hope the fire spares our transmission facilities. But if it doesn't, we'll do whatever it takes to make sure we are still there. For you.

In the past, some have criticized LA's commercial TV stations for their wall-to-wall coverage of major fires in the region.  Now, some critics are wondering why the major TV stations failed to offer much in the way of live coverage of the most recent conflagrations.

At social gatherings, church parking lots and online, people were complaining about the dearth of information on TV about the fires. Used to full-on live TV coverage, many turned to online sources, some really for the first time. Once again, Twitter has shown its value as an information tool. And for some near the front lines, online journals such as The Altadena Blog were good places to find info - much of it located in the comments section where residents share tips and the latest intelligence.

As the Web sucks away TV viewers, the fire itself threatens the transmitting towers the TV stations have built atop Mt. Wilson. Folks with cable and satellite won't lose their signals if the fire takes down the transmitters. But the LA area still has millions of viewers who get their signal over-the-air. They could be out of luck for a nice, long time. TV engineers say it could take a year or longer to rebuild the towers and other broadcast infrastructure on the mountain after a blaze.

There is irony here. Wildfires are the very kind of event that used to drive live TV news coverage. Now they threaten to further erode a business that, it seems, some commercial television stations just don't really want to be in anymore.

The return of Zac Sunderland from his sailing trip around the world.

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When a 70-foot commercial fishing boat sank off the coast of Catalina Island in 2006, it created a deathtrap for marine life. The eerie shipwreck - just a mile off the coast, but 150 feet deep - is shrouded by a 9,000-pound fishing net, which is now catching and killing sea lions, sharks, seals and dolphins.

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When 16-year-old Zac Sunderland told his parents he wanted to sail solo around the world, they didn’t send him to his room. They pulled out a map and started plotting the route.

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In southern California, coyote attacks against animals and people have been on the rise in recent years. Though not at crisis levels, this rapid increase raises important questions about how seriously to take the coyote threat. How much danger are our pets in? Should we worry about the safety of our youngest children?

We hear from state and local animal safety experts who explain why coyotes behave as they do, and how human development into their habitats has paradoxically increased the coyotes’ numbers. We’ll also see why trapping and killing coyotes may be counterproductive …and find out ways we can minimize the danger and frequency of coyote attacks against our cats and dogs. We’ll hear from a cross-section of Angelenos who’ve lost their pets to coyotes, as well as a mother whose two-year old son was attacked in a playground. The bottom line is that coyotes are here to stay, and that southern Californians have to find new ways of living with these unique wild animals.

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Watch the full episode:

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Southern California has long had a rocky relationship with water: To stay alive in this semi-arid piece of the planet, Angelenos have stolen it, plundered it and wasted it for nearly a hundred years now.

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Inspired by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal programs, it's the state agency that's been described as a combination "Jesuit seminary, Israeli kibbutz and Marine Corps boot camp." For over three decades, the California Conservation Corps has offered job training to thousands of once aimless young men and women and then put them to work planting forests, building trails and responding to natural disasters. The CCC's been applauded by both Democrats and Republicans as an example of a government program that works. combining liberal activism with respect for hard work and self-reliance. But despite the praise, the Corps existence is in peril because of the state's budget crisis. SoCal Connected profiles the mission of the corps, the young men and women who sign up, and the debate over whether California can still afford to keep the CCC.

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More on breeding and what it means for the elephants.

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SoCal Connected’s web team gave video cameras to 5 commuters and had them document their journeys to and from work. Lorena is a nanny in Los Feliz and takes two trains and a bus, every evening, to get home to her own kids in Santa Ana. Larry drives for over an hour, every morning, from Silver Lake to Santa Monica in his SUV. Bjorn walks, Camille bikes, and Carlos van-pools to his job in the O.C. See how Southern California gridlock affects each of their lives.

We'd like to add your photos and video of your commutes to our map next week. Here are two ways to contribute:

Shoot and upload a video to YouTube. Once your video is up, tag it with "KCETCOMMUTE" and send us a message at our Youtube account KCETOnline.

Shoot and upload a photograph to the SoCal Connected Flickr Group. No need for special tagging or messaging, just join our group and it to the pool!

Make sure your videos and photos clearly indicate where they where taken - intersection is great, but full street address is better - so that we know where to put it on the map!

The only thing that spreads faster than a wildfire is a viral video of a wildfire. Within hours of the first night-time fires in Montecito, burnt orange images of the images were cropping up on video sharing sites. We sent an expedition into the wilds of Youtube and brought back these images of California's most recent burn.

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