The new year could not have started more differently for people in southern California and people in the eastern United States. Both sides of the country started 2025 with extreme temperatures. One side is covered in snow and ice while the other is fighting against dangerous wildfires.
Emma Schleter, a sophomore at Gibson Southern, lives out in the middle of the countryside with nothing but rocks on her road and an icy view for miles.
“We had to drive really, really slow for a long time, and we still do,” Schleter said. “They don’t scrape the ice off of my road, so it is still kind of covered in ice.”
Though Schleter doesn’t drive, senior Ava Greene does, and the snow is not her favorite.
“I think it’s pretty, but it doesn’t make it fun to drive in,” Greene said. “I like it for maybe one or two days, and then I get tired of it. Like playing in it once is fun and seeing it when you wake up in the morning for the first time is cool, but then after that it gets old.”
Schleter feels similar, saying that she wears multiple layers of clothes just to keep warm. Not only is the cold an inconvenience, the ice on the road is, too.
“I will put my car in four wheel drive every time I drive because I get really scared when I feel like my car doesn’t have a lot of traction when I’m driving,” Greene said. “I will always go slower because you can’t really go fast on ice or else you’ll start slipping.”
While students at Gibson Southern fight against the snow and ice, Ryan Weddle, the battalion chief of the Monterey Park Fire Department in southern California, fights against the raging flames of the California wildfires.
“I was called on the morning of January 8, at four in the morning,” Weddle said. “That is when I reported to the incident command post, and I was assigned a geographic division of the fire.”
Weddle explained that they break up the fire into geographic areas starting where the fire started and then going clockwise around the incident with numeric divisions. So, if fire burns in a V pattern, they start on the left. That area is going to be Alpha, or A, then B, C, D, all the way around to Z. That way it orients all of the people responding at the fire to know the area where they are working.
“I was assigned to division C or division Charlie for the duration of the fire,” Weddle said. “So, I was responsible for all of the land and the structures in that geographic area, and I was responsible for up to 200 people. My title was division group supervisor, and I had numerous fire engines, crews, water tenders and bulldozers working under my command.”
As a division group supervisor, Weddle’s iPad and radio are his main tools. His iPad has all sorts of topographic maps that show where the fire is. The map gets updated at least twice a day by a plane that provides infrared mapping of the fire. The plane flies a pattern over the fire, and then it downloads all that information about the fire perimeter, for example how big the fire has increased, and that gets plotted on the map and updated for the firefighters.
“The other thing I have been using is my Starlink,” Weddle said. “I have two Starlink receivers on my vehicle: one that’s mounted to the vehicle, and one that I can take off the vehicle. I have to maintain constant connectivity to the internet, so Starlink is allowed for that. Then, my radios, I have radios in my vehicle, and then I have two portable radios so that way I can talk to those 200 people.”
Though Weddle’s main tools are his radios and iPad, other firefighters use a variety of different tools to put out fires. For instance, basic fire engines, hose, water and water tenders. If there is no water in the hydrants, water tenders go find water somewhere else and bring it to the engines. Then, there are hand crews who use tools like shovels, chainsaws and rakes to clear brush and vegetation away from structures. In addition, firefighters also use bulldozers that create an even bigger firebreak between the vegetation and structures.
One of the biggest challenges that Weddle faced are the strong winds that make the fires almost impossible to stop, but they take safety precautions, like issuing evacuation orders to keep the public safe.
“When we issue a mandatory evacuation order, it does a couple things,” Weddle said. “It provides the safety of the public exiting the affected disaster area, and then it allows us (the firefighters) a little bit more freedom to move and operate without having to worry about people driving fast down the street or people walking up through our operations with no proper safety clothing on, ect.”
From fire to ice, from east to west, people in the United States are taking steps to ensure their safety from these extreme temperatures.
“It is so cold that I always wear two pairs of socks when I go out,” Schleter said.
