[Noozhawk’s note: First in a series of articles on wildfire and Santa Barbara County. The goal is to examine a range of issues that may help the understanding of how to live with wildfire in an explosive environment.]
It’s close to 4 p.m. on Nov. 25, 2019, and it’s been a good day.
I’m looking forward to the Monday night game between the Los Angeles Rams and the Baltimore Ravens in an hour or so.
To top it off, we’re having barbecued chicken and roasted corn for dinner. Nice!
I’m just about to start salivating when I hear the ominous tone emanating from my PulsePoint app.
The app is a godsend for news reporting in that it sends alerts out to users at the same time that dispatchers are sending the call to whatever emergency crews are needed for whatever the emergency should be.
It’s one I’d recommend to anyone in Santa Barbara who wants instant alerts for wildfire starts or other natural disasters.
Fire on the Mountaintop
The dispatch is simple and to the point: “Vegetation Fire, East Camino Cielo.” It’s just after 4 p.m. It quickly becomes tagged the Cave Fire.
Looking at the PulsePoint map, I realize the fire is on the top of the Santa Ynez Mountains near Windy Gap, about a mile east of the Painted Cave community.
A few seconds later, I see a note from my Noozhawk message group saying simply, “Looks like it’s going to be a bad one.”
I reply back that I’m on my way up, and am out the door.
Monday Night Football is now the last thing on my mind, and dinner will have to wait.
As I drive up Highway 154 toward San Marcos Pass, the wind increases steadily. It’s howling at the pass, a steady 28 mph, with gusts into the 30s.
With a humidity at less than 20 percent and the vegetation turning crisp after six moths of summer heat, even in late November the hillsides are ready to burn.
Controlled Chaos
What appears to be a chaotic situation is in reality the beginning stages of an attempt to establish an anchor point from which firefighters can start to build a perimeter around the blaze.
Attempting to do so on the slender width of East Camino Cielo presents a host of challenges, the least of them that the narrow, twisty roadway offers few spots to park off the pavement.
The good news is that, with the wind blowing toward the ocean, firefighters are able to hold the crest and keep the fire from moving down into the backcountry.
The bad news, unfortunately, is that it may reach Foothill Road in the next few hours.
Déjà Vu All Over Again?
Despite these heroic efforts, the fire overwhelms the firefighters’ attack as the wind continues to drive the flames downhill.
The main edge of the wildfire is now deep into the west fork of San Antonio Creek and moving in the direction of homes in the Cieneguitas Road area.
It is now 6:08 p.m. Evacuations are underway for several thousand homeowners who live in this area.
Below me the hills are on fire and there are flames on both sides of the road as I make my way through the thick smoke.
The Cieneguitas neighborhood may be safe for now, but those in the San Antonio Creek area appear to be in harm’s way.
Could this be on the way to becoming the next Painted Cave disaster?
Repeating Patterns
Thankfully, an hour later, with the last of the sundowner winds having died down, the fire’s advance toward Santa Barbara is over for now.
But ominously, over the next hour, the fire begins to advance back up the hill, a pattern that has occurred in most of the recent front country fires, from the 1990 Painted Cave Fire to the 2008 Gap Fire and the Jesusita Fire in 2009.
(Will Macfadyen / Noozhawk video)
Huge Flames and a Sigh of Relief
I wake up Tuesday wondering if the Painted Cave community will be threatened again as it was during the Jesusita Fire, or if it will make its way more directly to the crest and possibly open another front on the back side of the mountain.
At 8 a.m., as I work my way up Painted Cave Road, there is smoke on the hill and pockets of flames here and there.
By 10 a.m., the pockets of fire have grown in size, and the flames lengthen to the point that they’ve become a wall of flame.
By 2 p.m., the fire front is massive as it reaches East Camino Cielo, with flames larger and more terrifying than I’ve ever seen.
Behind me, Air Tanker 910 unloads a massive amount of fire retardant on the back side of Camino Cielo should the fire cross over that mountaintop road.
Amazingly, without an upward wind to drive the fire over the summit and breezes from the Santa Ynez Valley pushing over the crest, what were 100-foot flames a few minutes ago quickly begin to dissipate.
Camino Cielo holds.
Fading Memories
A day later it rains, for the first time in almost a half-year.
The storm drops enough to put out the fire, but thankfully not so much as to cause flash flooding or hillside damage.
We dodged a bullet. We got lucky.
The day after the storm is Thanksgiving. Those who have been forced to evacuate are back in their homes.
Roasted turkey is on the menu, and there are three NFL games on TV to choose from.
The terror and the fear that so many experienced a few days ago are starting to fade from memory.
Despite dodging a bullet this time, many questions remain. Why a fire so late in the season? How did it start?
What role did the buildup of brush create? Didn’t the Jesusita Fire burn through this area just a few years ago? Why did the wind shift?
If it hadn’t, were the homes vulnerable to burning? And most of all, will we be prepared for the next wildfire?
The New Reality
It is now close to a year since the Cave Fire began, and on Dec. 4 we’ll be commemorating the third anniversary of the start of the catastrophic Thomas Fire that burned more than 440 square miles of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.
This summer marked the 30th year since the Painted Cave Fire.
With millions of acres ablaze in other parts of California, there is concern about when or where the next one will occur locally, and if we’ll be as lucky as we were last November.
“The fire triangle is what we live and die on,” Santa Barbara County fire Division Chief Rob Hazard said. “That includes weather, topography and fuels.”
While topography remains the constant, weather and fuel play much more dynamic roles in understanding fire behavior and preparing for it.
“In the past, the fuels have always been what we focus on over time,” Hazard added. “We have this cycle where we engage in massive amounts of defensible space work, and homeowners up in the hills are weed whacking and cutting back bushes and grass and trying to become more safe.
“And then it rains and everything breeds up again. And so it’s this constant cycle with the vegetation where it becomes flammable. It rains and becomes nonflammable, and it repeats and repeats.”
Weather Anomalies?
The same cannot be said of the third leg — weather.
When it comes to weather, Hazard noted, “Awareness of weather, understanding of weather and the ability to predict it, is the most important tool we have.”
Yet it may be the most difficult to deal with.
Due to what some are calling the climate crisis, it appears that weather patterns may be creating more extreme conditions, which in turn may make it much more difficult to predict how they will affect fire behavior.
While some believe this may be due to anomalies that aren’t predictive of a future trend, others are concerned the changes reflect a new reality that could lead to even more intense wildfire seasons.
According to Crystal Kolden, assistant professor in management of complex systems at UC Merced, the trend is toward hotter summers, longer periods of drought and a fire season that now covers most of the year.
Recently, Kolden served as a consultant to the Montecito Fire Protection District after the Thomas Fire.
“The South Coast has gotten quite a few degrees warmer in the fall,” she noted. “So those warmer temperatures are causing the vegetation to become more stressed, and if it’s hotter, that means it’s easier for fires to burn and harder for firefighters to contain those fires.”
Summer of Mega Firestorms
The scope is staggering: In the space of the past two months, the forests have exploded. By acres burned, we’ve experienced five of the largest wildfires in the state’s history.
And most of them continue to burn.
They are burning in the day time, they are burning in the night time, and they are wearing out the armies of firefighters who are battling them.
Recently, I circled the Bobcat Fire in Southern California when it appeared to be mostly contained. At 30,000 acres, this would have been considered a big fire a decade ago.
As of Oct. 11, the fire had exploded to 115,796 acres. It is 92 percent contained, but not before threatening the Mount Wilson Observatory once again, and terrorizing the Yucca Valley. Yet it pales in comparison to those in Northern California.
In the Napa Valley, the Glass Fire is the most recent wildfire to explode from a few acres to more than a thousand within a few hours, stretching firefighting resources even more.
Santa Barbara’s Fire Season
Thus far, this summer has been a relatively quiet fire season locally.
Though we’ve had similar heat over the past few weeks — 106 degrees at our house in the Hidden Valley area and even hotter temperatures in the Santa Ynez Valley — we haven’t experienced the type of fire behavior those in Northern California have.
That may change in the coming weeks, as it appears we’re in for more high-intensity heat.
Why No New Fires So Far?
“That isn’t unexpected,” according to Montecito Fire Protection District Chief Kevin Taylor.
“The northern part of the state may be on fire,” he explained. “but in Southern California, it isn’t until later in the year when the chaparral has dried out enough to be ready to burn.”
It turns out, contrary to what you might think, chaparral isn’t prone to burn, even on the hottest of the summer days we’ve experienced recently.
Nor does it until the fuel moistures dry out to a critical point. Past experience has shown Taylor that the critical point when the chaparral is prone to burning is when the live fuel moisture (LFM) is at 60 percent or lower.
“Depending on the winter rain, that’s normally in late August or September,” he told me. “That’s also when the fall santa ana wind conditions begin to dominate.”
We’ve just reached that point in the Santa Barbara area, with LFMs in the high 50 percent range in the front country and low 50 percent range in the backcountry.
At this point, any fire will have the potential to become a conflagration. Add wind to the mix, and all bets are off.
Next: Santa Barbara Fire History. Lessons from the past: a look back at our recent fire history and what they tell us.
— Noozhawk outdoor writer Ray Ford can be reached at rford@noozhawk.com. Click here for his website, SBoutdoors.com. Follow him on Twitter: @riveray. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook. The opinions expressed are his own.