Happy New Year! Sugar Bowl + NHL Winter Classic Excitement | ARC Seattle

Welcome to Arc Seattle. We bring you content that is relevant, authentic, and about the community. Thanks for being with us on this New Year's Day. I'm Steve McCarron. And I'm Tyra Majors. Happy New Year. We begin with the hottest topics on our feeds right now. Trending right now, the Winter Classic. Seattle is ushering in a new year with a historic NHL Winter Classic event. Fans are waking up excited and ready as the Kraken will come face-to-face with the Vegas Golden Knights at T-Mobile Park. All right, Husky fans, you ready today? The Dogs are in New Orleans this morning getting ready to take on the Texas Longhorns. Can the team stay undefeated today? We will see. I hope so. I do too. And a massive fire rips through a vacant building in Seattle. The new video posted on social media and the impact this fire could have on nearby buildings. What a scene that was this morning. Let's get back to the NHL Winter Classic. The field at T-Mobile Park is now an outdoor hockey rink. This is really neat. The Seattle Kraken are ringing in 2024, taking on the Vegas Golden Knights in a matchup of expansion teams. So the Kraken are the newest team in the league and the Golden Knights are the second. They've been around since 2017. And that's actually T-Mobile Park right there. I can't even tell. It's a little foggy out today. Yeah, just because of our weather. And hockey fans are excited to watch these two teams face off. So this is a heat map that you're looking at right now. What this does is it shows where people are talking about the Winter Classic on social media. As you see in the upper left-hand corner there, a lot of people in the Seattle area are posting about the Winter Classic today. So the NHL also sharing a teaser trailer yesterday ahead of the game. All water themed. That's what they're all about. Now let's talk a bit about transforming T-Mobile Park. It's really been incredible to see. There's a sinking ship at the center field along with a vessel wrapped in tentacles. And all sorts of piers, boats, and docks are also set up there. So this took 20 gallons of water, 17,000 feet of plywood, and thousands of feet of electrical wire to make this all happen. Puck drop is at noon. There's also a free event happening at the Lumenfield North Lot today. The NHL Fan Village features tons of activities, giveaways, food, and a special appearance from the Stanley Cup. We've been seeing Como's Mo Hyder there all morning having a ton of fun previewing kind of what fans can get into. I think the one big draw for me on top of like sort of feeling the NHL fan experience is to have a picture with the Stanley Cup. How cool would that be? It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It is, especially knowing Seattle's history with hockey, with the Metropolitans all the way back in the early 1900s. And now we have the Kraken. And it's just a really cool time I think for Seattle. This is making history for sure. And the fact that it's free. Yeah. Fans can be a part of history for free. Yeah. You don't have to spend the money on the tickets to go to the Winter Classic today, but you can go check out some of that free stuff in Soto. Yep. And that's not the only sporting event we're keeping an eye on today. The Huskies are in New Orleans this morning to take on the Texas Longhorns in the Sugar Bowl. Even as a Coug, I'm excited about this today. So the Dogs are the first Pac-12 representative in this game in the final year of the conference. As we know, we know a lot is changing next year. But as exciting and elite as this bowl game is, the goal for Texas and Washington obviously today is to win it and land that spot in the national championship game next week. From the Superdome, we heard from quarterback Michael Penix Jr. who said they put in the work this week. They are ready. But right now, he's just focused on the game and not what could come should the Huskies remain undefeated. Listen in. I don't really think too far ahead and I don't really think too much behind. You know, obviously, I can't forget my past because, you know, it allowed me to get to where I'm at today. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't change my route for anything. You know, I feel like everything I've been through, you know, allowed me to, it shaped me into the person I am today. Staying true to his roots. Check out the reaction this morning on social media. People are waking up excited and ready to see the Huskies shine and hopefully take the season all the way to the national championship game in Houston. Now, this is my favorite picture. Dubs is ready. The beloved mascot is in New Orleans today, too. Have you met Dubs before in person? I have. Yeah, I've actually taken a picture with him. Oh, that's amazing. He's a great pup. That brings us to our poll question today. You can scan the QR code on your screen to vote. What are you Dubs chances in the college football playoffs? 60.8% say Huskies win it all. 14.6% say lose in the championship. 12% say end of the line tonight. 12.7% say go Cougs. Now, you mentioned those Cougs. They feel strongly about their Cougs. The game starts at 545. I'm optimistic. They've done so well. Head coach got coach of the year. Kaitlin DeBoer got AP national coach of the year. Yeah, so it's been, I mean, things are just going in their favor, I think. You know, they have all the right pieces put together, and I really think that this could be their year. Maybe not win the national championship, I don't know, but at least make it into the national championship game. And what a statement that would be for UW's football program as they get ready to make the big change to a different conference next year. We threw in the go Cougs thing, you know, and I know that there's a lot of hate between UW and WSU. I'm cheering for the Huskies today. I want them to win. I just think it would be a great thing for Seattle and a great thing for UW. That's really big of you, Steve. Thank you. It's a hometown team. It is. Yeah, I don't think you're going to put on some purple, but. Absolutely, no. But you want them to win. Okay, that's good enough. Yeah. Our coverage of the Sugar Bowl continues coming up in our next half hour with Deep End. Yeah, today we're going to be joined by sports director Nico Tamirian. He's in New Orleans right now covering the Sugar Bowl all day long. Nico will give us a look at the intensity of this matchup and what's next for the Dawgs if they remain undefeated. All right, go Dawgs. And crews are now investigating the cause of a massive building fire in Seattle's First Hill neighborhood. Firefighters responded just before five o'clock this morning to this large fire at a four-story building. This is at the intersection of Ninth Avenue and Madison Street. At one point, the fire was upgraded to three alarms, meaning a lot more firefighters were called in because of how dangerous these conditions were. And firefighters took a defensive approach. So instead of going in, they fought that fire from the outside. Aaron Darby, who lives nearby, says this is not the first time there's been a fire in that particular building. First, I heard sirens. Then I checked online and saw that they were, it was the building that burned last year here at Vito's. I don't remember when it was, but it burned before. Well, we checked to see who's talking about this on social media. David Nelson replied to Seattle's FirePost on X, writing, not Vito's again. And another user had this to say, why has the officially empty schedule for demolition building been allowed to stand for months? This is the second fire. Then there was the fire at Ninth and Union months ago. Building owners need to knock them down before squatters set them on fire. That comment, I mean, speaks for a whole lot of neighbors and just people in all around Seattle. We've seen multiple vacant building fires, especially, you know, covering on KOMO Morning News. People are tired of it. Yeah, they are. And what was kind of sobering about watching this one unfold on our sister station this morning as that fire was burning was people who live in some of those nearby buildings were essentially looking out their windows, looking sort of down at that building while this huge plume of smoke and those big flames were just pouring out of this vacant building. We know that firefighters had to bring in a ladder truck to potentially rescue somebody on the second floor. But it spread very, very quickly. And to think about those folks that were just in some of the nearby buildings watching this thing unfold from above, talk about a scary situation and the fact that they've dealt with a similar situation before. There has to be some question raised about, you know, why wasn't something done to maybe prevent something like this from happening again? I don't know. Right. And like that user wrote on X, why aren't these buildings being taken care of? Why are they being torn down? All certainly questions that I think we can ask city leaders, for sure. For sure. Well, still ahead, we're taking a look at the stories you know and love from our sister station. What Eric Johnson has to say about his beloved segment, Eric's Heroes, and what motivates him to keep bringing the stories to viewers. We're also going to talk with Lee Stoll, who joins us in the deep end to talk about that massive vacant building fire we just spoke of and the dangers that firefighters face as well. Then in our second half, January is National Human Trafficking Prevention Month, the new initiative hoping to stop these crimes. And before we hit a break on this New Year's Day, let's check out some of the photos and videos that folks are posting on social media today. If those will pop up, maybe not. There we go. We have some outside shots, a lot of people taking photos of the sunrises, maybe enjoying the firework show, what you could see of it anyway, at the Space Needle. Or what is that person doing in the upper left-hand corner? Looks like they're blowing a horn, like the New Year's. Happy New Year. Okay, just a New Year's tradition maybe in their family, yeah. Beautiful shots, and keep posting them and we'd love to share them on the show here on RCL. We're back after this.