‘All hell broke loose’: 30,000 flee California wildfire

May 8th, 2009 § 0

‘All hell broke loose’: 30,000 flee Santa Barbara wildfire

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) _ Turning the horizon a lurid orange and raining embers on roofs as it advanced, a wildfire that has destroyed scores of homes in the hills menaced the celebrity enclave of Santa Barbara and other coastal towns Friday, and the number of people ordered to flee climbed to more than 30,000.

AP Photo | Keith D. Cullom

AP Photo | Keith D. Cullom

Authorities warned an additional 23,000 to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

Columns of smoke rose off the Santa Ynez Mountains as the 4-day-old Jesusita fire — fanned by “sundowner” winds that sweep down the slopes in the evening — blew up from 2,700 acres to 8,600 in less than a day, creating a firefighting front five miles long.

“It’s crazy. The whole mountain looked like an inferno,” said Maria Martinez, 50, who with her fiancé fled her home in San Marcos Pass, on the edge of Santa Barbara. The couple went to an evacuation center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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3 sidebars in 3 days: Santa Barbara wildfire

May 7th, 2009 § 0

While I covered the progress of the fire for the mainbar, I filed three sidebars:

Firefighters trapped in burning house

How the other half evacuates (after jump)

Evacuees long for normalcy of home (after jump)

Malibu firefighters trapped while battling Santa Barbara wildfire

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS  5/7/09

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) _ Battalion Chief Scott Smith’s yellow jacket reeked of wood smoke and his eyes were red with exhaustion at the Emergency Operations Center.

Earlier, one of his crews nearly lost its engine to the flames and Smith fetched them out of a burning home where they had taken shelter Wednesday amid a wildfire near Santa Barbara that had charred 500 acres and driven thousands from their homes.

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Grandma: Octuplets mom ‘obsessed’ with babies

January 30th, 2009 § 0

Octuplets’ grandma: Unmarried mom conceived all 14 babies in vitro, ‘obsessed’ with having kids

(Nadya Suleman’s mother sounded exhausted and exasperated when I reached her on the phone only days after the octuplets were born, but she shared a few emotional details before hanging up abruptly. This story went unmatched and kept my byline throughout the weekend.)

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ The woman who gave birth to octuplets this week conceived all 14 of her children through in vitro fertilization, is not married and has been obsessed with having children since she was a teenager, her mother said.

Angela Suleman told The Associated Press she was not supportive when her daughter, Nadya Suleman, decided to have more embryos implanted last year.

“It can’t go on any longer,” she said in a phone interview Friday. “She’s got six children and no husband. I was brought up the traditional way. I firmly believe in marriage. But she didn’t want to get married.”

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Man eats his way around the world in L.A.

January 2nd, 2009 § 0

AP Photo | Damian Dovarganes

Culinary tourist eats his way around the world in Los Angeles

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ Noah Galuten spent the past three months eating his way around the world – all within a day’s drive of his Santa Monica apartment.

The 25-year-old playwright was broke and unemployed when he decided to eat cuisine from a different country every day and write about it on his Web site, Man Bites World.

Galuten figured he could stomach 60 traditional dishes from a different country on consecutive days until he ran out of options and was sated. But the project took him further than he ever imagined, stamping his culinary passport with food from 102 cultures by his final bite of Slovakian poppy seed cake more than three months later.

That he could cross so many borders so close to home is both a testament to Los Angeles’ cultural melting pot and the help he got from strangers who invited him into their homes to share traditional meals.

“If there’s anywhere you should be more inclusive, it’s eating,” he said.

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Shakira, Bardem, Ferrera nominadas a Globos de Oro

December 12th, 2008 § 0

Shakira, Bardem, Ferrera nominadas a Globos de Oro

(I covered the Golden Globe nominations for AP’s Spanish language service, focusing on the Latino and international favorites.)

Por Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

BEVERLY HILLS (AP) _ Shakira y Javier Bardem fueron nominados el jueves a los Globos de Oro mientras que América Ferrera, quien ganó el año pasado el premio en su debut como “Betty la fea”, volvió a ser postulada.

Shakira se medirá por el Globo a la mejor canción con “La despedida”, que compuso especialmente para el filme “El amor en los tiempos del cólera”, inspirado en la novela homónima de Gabriel García Márquez.

Bardem, por su parte, competirá por el premio al mejor actor de reparto por su papel de asesino en la cinta de los hermanos Coen “No Country for Old Men”.

Y Ferrera volverá a medirse por el Globo a la mejor actriz en una serie televisiva de comedia por “Ugly Betty”, la versión anglo de la exitosa telenovela colombiana, producida por Salma Hayek para ABC.

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SoCal train wreck death toll rises to 17

September 12th, 2008 § 0

Train collision rocks quiet L.A. neighborhood

(I reported from the crash site until the sun rose with help from colleagues back at the office.)

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ A quiet neighborhood on the city’s northwest tip was transformed Friday into a scene of incredible devastation when a commuter train carrying hundreds of people home during the afternoon rush collided head-on with a freight train.

The engine pulling the sleek Metrolink commuter train from downtown Los Angeles to the suburbs collided with the Union Pacific freight, forcing it backward, crumpling the car behind it like a giant aluminum can and tossing passengers in all directions. The freight’s first several cars came to rest in a giant, jumbled pile that, from the air, looked strangely like a collapsed stack of huge toy blocks.

It was immediately evident that the injury toll would be high, and that there had likely been fatalities. Police and firefighters flooded the scene, threw ladders up the side of the crushed commuter car and began pulling dazed and bloodied commuters from the wreckage. More than four hours later, long after the sun had set, they were still at it.

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Stolen milk crates feed black market

July 23rd, 2008 § 0

Dairies crack down on stolen milk crates that feed black market for plastics

Ran on AP Business wire, in USA Today and in LA Times business section (without a byline)

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ For decades, college kids have used stolen milk crates as the basic building blocks of coffee tables and dorm room shelves.

Now, a new breed of crate rustler is cashing in by swiping thousands of the containers from loading docks and selling them to shady recyclers.

AP Photo

AP Photo

The containers are chopped into bits and shipped to booming factories in China to be made into a variety of products, from pipes to flower pots.

Facing an estimated $80 million in annual losses from the thefts, dairies across the country are moving to stop the plastic pilfering. In California, companies are even hiring private detectives and staging sting operations.

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Strike reveals lack of women writers

January 11th, 2008 § 0

As recent picket lines suggest, female writers are still relatively scarce in Hollywood

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

LOS ANGELES (AP) _ As Hollywood’s striking scribes ventured out to their picket lines over the last two months, it’s been plain to see – female writers are outnumbered by their male colleagues.

“I’m surprised when I see a woman on the picket line and I always wonder, Hmm, do I know her?’” said Sarah McLaughlin, who wrote for “That 70s Show.” “If I don’t know a woman writer personally, I know of them.”

Women writers on the picket line in Los Angeles

AP Photo | Ric Francis

Women make up 27 percent of television writers and 19 percent of feature film writers, according to the most recent Guild membership report from 2005, according to figures supplied by the Writers Guild of America.

Writers attribute the scarcity of women in their midst to tokenism, a tradition of bawdy humor in the writers room, and the dearth of women in key managerial positions.

Others say women have made significant strides toward parity in recent years, and feel increasingly comfortable working in an historically male-dominated field.

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Fighting wildfires with water balloons

November 27th, 2007 § 0

Engineers hope to fight wildfires by dropping huge water balloons

This story ran on AP’s national wire, the front page of the San Diego Union Tribune, the home pages of Yahoo! News and AOL, with video that I shot and edited.

AP Video:

Click to play AP Video: Firefighting water balloons

By Raquel Maria Dillon | ASSOCIATED PRESS

SIMI VALLEY, Calif. (AP) _ William Cleary believes aerial firefighting could become child’s play.

Five years ago, his son drenched him with a water balloon – and got him to thinking.

“He was three stories up and I was walking, and he still managed to hit me square in the head,” said Cleary, a Boeing engineer. “I thought, why can’t we be this accurate with water on fires?”

So he started working on a system to use giant water balloons to put out wildfires.

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Southern Utah’s ‘Lost Boys’

September 13th, 2007 § 0

Video thumbnail. Click to playVIDEO: Click thumbnail to play

AP’s Online Video Network sent me to St. George, Utah during the trial of fundamentalist Mormon leader Warren Jeffs to do a couple quick sidebars. I arrived late the night before and shot and edited this piece the next day. Then I did a local reaction piece the day after that.

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