Although the Jesusita Fire is nearly contained and evacuations have been lifted, questions about the blaze remain and many surfaced during Thursday night’s public forum with authorities at La Cumbre Junior High School.
Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Tom Franklin opened the meeting by listing local fires since 1955, all of which had occurred during sundowner wind conditions and in the front country.
Although California is in its third year of drought, he said local effects haven’t been particularly bad so far. The Jesusita Fire ignited the afternoon of May 5 amid high temperatures and uncharacteristic low humidity — perfect conditions for fire.
“What’s really unusual about this fire is the time of year,” he added.
Having a clearly defined fire season has proven impractical, Franklin said. “We stopped doing that this year, because we’re always in fire season,” he said.
Around this time of year, response crews are just wrapping up annual training exercises. “Our crew had just finished their training the day this fire had started,” Franklin said.
Santa Barbara City Battalion Chief Pat McElroy said an engine crew was on a call and noticed smoke on the mountainside. Multiple calls reporting the fire started coming in at that time as well. McElroy played audio from 9-1-1 dispatch, when a La Vista Road resident called in describing the fire. “It looks like it’s up either Northridge (Road) or the next mountain over, but it’s moving pretty fast,” she said.
Mark Schmidt, Santa Barbara County unified commander, described the sequence of events from when the fire began May 5 to the night if May 7 when most personnel were called to the scene. Shortly after the fire began about 1:30 p.m. May 5, “we recognized right away that we had a major fire on our hands,” he said. “The first hour we had 10 engines, two helicopters, a water tanker, a bulldozer and a hand crew.”
At 2:15 p.m., a county helicopter arrived, 10 minutes after being dispatched to drop water. At 2:36 p.m., a second chopper arrived 20 minutes after being dispatched. The second helicopter was delayed because it was standing by at Vandenberg Air Force Base for that afternoon’s launch of a Delta 2 rocket.
The county began to recruit resources through mass mutual aid. Seventy extra engines were ordered, as well as an air tanker and 11 hand crews. Only four air tankers were available statewide, Schmidt said, largely because it’s still early in the typical fire season.
Subsequently, law enforcement officials began to evacuate neighborhoods. At 6:43 p.m., an additional 50 brush engines were requested, which brought 200 personnel.
That evening, mutual aid resources begin to arrive, and the first hand crews reached the eastern flank of the fire by 10 a.m. May 6. Referring to the delay, Schmidt said “it had no road access, it was steep, it was brush choked.”
CALFIRE arrived on scene, and at 11 a.m. May 6, hand crews began work on the western flank of the blaze. At 3 p.m., the wind pushed the flames into Mission Canyon, and an hour later, 100 more engines and 400 personnel were ordered. At that point, Schmidt said, crews were seeing “extreme fire behavior” as sundowners hit, and structures were being lost.
On May 7, Thursday, resources peaked with 509 engines and 4,500 personnel. By that night, the fire began moving west, crossing Highway 154 and making dramatic runs.
Residents questioned why the fire continued after aggressive water drops were seen that Tuesday from the county’s two helicopters. Up at Lauro Reservoir in lower San Roque Canyon, helicopters began making water drops and laying down retardant quickly, but retardant is effective only for about 20 minutes, said Tom Berry, division chief of CALFIRE for Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
“Aircraft don’t put out fires,” he said. “People on the ground do.”
After the retardant has been dropped, it’s up to hand crews to follow up and help put out the fire. The Jesusita Fire started in an inaccessible area, so hand crews weren’t able to reach that area on foot until 11 a.m. the next day.
“They left at dawn,” he said. “It just isn’t safe to have them in that kind of terrain at night. We want to protect structures, but we can’t risk anyone’s lives.”
Franklin also addressed the issue when a question was asked about why the number of firefighters wasn’t increased before winds picked up on the first day.
“We did,” he said. “As it went on, we got those orders in.”
He suggested that perhaps the question should be why weren’t 4,500 firefighters ordered when the fire broke out.
“It would clog the system, and it just wouldn’t work,” he said. “We ordered them as we needed them, and as we could.”
One resident asked why the Santa Barbara Airport couldn’t be used as a base for air tankers. The tanker base at the airport was in “serious disrepair” a few years ago, said Peggy Hernandez, forest supervisor for Los Padres National Forest, and it was infeasible to reconfigure it.
No aircraft were based in Santa Maria, but they were able to reload at the air base under an Emergency Rental Agreement that has been in place since April, she said. Fixed-wing aircraft were able to get to Santa Maria in 10 minutes flying time, and Porterville, where many planes were rerouted at the beginning of the fire, is about a 20-minute flight, said CALFIRE Incident Cmdr. Joe Waterman. Rotor aircraft had similar flight times.
Franklin was tight-lipped about the cause of the fire, saying it is still under investigation.
Meanwhile, resident Larry Bickford talked about what he saw around the time the fire began. He was in the area about 1:45 p.m. with several other people and had a direct view of the fire.
“It appeared to us that there were three small fires right under the power lines adjacent to the utility access roads,” he said. After checking out the area with binoculars, he said they didn’t see anyone in the area, including firefighters, and the fire “grew exponentially by the minute,” he said. Rumors have been flying that the cause could have been someone using power tools to clear nearby trails.
Bickford also said residents on nearby Santa Teresita Drive had told him they hadn’t heard noise that would have indicated tools being used in the area.
“If someone coughs in that area, you can hear it,” he said. “No one heard a thing.”
The cost of the Jesusita Fire has reached $17 million, Franklin said. Santa Barbara County has suffered four substantial fires in the past 22 months, at a cost of nearly $160 million and about 260,000 acres.
» Click here to sign up for Noozhawk’s free daily e-Bulletin.
» Click here for photojournalist Isaac Hernandez’s pictorial chronicle of the Jesusita Fire, including an unofficial, house-by-house catalog of many streets in the burn area.
» If you have fire photos to share with Noozhawk, e-mail them to news@noozhawk.com.
» Click here for a related Noozhawk slide show from the first day of the Jesusita Fire.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show from the second day of the fire.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show from the third day.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show from the fourth day.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show from the fifth day.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show on the fire’s point of origin.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show from the aftermath.
» Click here for a Noozhawk slide show of recently added photos.
— Noozhawk staff writer Lara Cooper can be reached at lcooper@noozhawk.com.
