Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of a two-part history of the 1971 Romero Fire. Read the first story about the firefighting efforts here.

The Romero Fire begins as a deliberate act of arson during extreme fire weather. It grows into a 14,500-acre blaze that threatens the Carpinteria Valley, consume homes and watershed, and demands nine days of sustained firefighting before it is contained.

Its deepest legacy, however, is the loss of four men in a sudden firestorm in Santa Monica Canyon: bulldozer operators Thomas Klepperich and Leonard Mineau, and firefighters Delbert DeLoach and Richard Cumor, who served as their swampers.

Their names are now inscribed at the rebuilt memorial near where they died. The site was restored after the Thomas Fire burned through the old Romero scar in December 2017 and destroyed the original crosses that had stood there for decades.

The Romero Fire was not an accident. It was deliberately started at a time when Santa Barbara County’s front country was exceptionally dry, hot and vulnerable.

What happened after the ignition was a devastating illustration of a hard truth that remains relevant today: The person who intentionally starts a wildfire cannot control where it goes, whom it threatens or who it kills.

The Arsonist

In 1971, Pat Russ is an arsonist. He is a drifter, living mostly in his camper truck, which is outfitted with a color TV to entertain him while he is on the road. There is no place he really calls home.

For him there never really has been a home. His early life is spent in Rochester, New York, sharing a house with his mother, 18 brothers and sisters, and his grandfather — who, tragically, is also his father.

Like many others who have a history of pathological crime, Russ is both the result and a victim of sexual abuse.

The fires set by Russ may have been a passionate cry for help or a means to gain some sense of control over his life, or possibly revenge.

“He grew to like the way fire looked and smelled and sounded,” says Diane Swanbrow in an article which appears in Los Angeles Times Magazine on August 16, 1987. “He liked the comfort and the warmth he got from the flames. But mainly, setting fires gave him a sense of power.”

Russ is driving north toward San Jose on Oct. 6, 1971, when he turns off Highway 101 near Goleta and begins traveling local roads. According to later accounts, he is looking for a place isolated enough, steep enough and thick enough with brush to give a fire a chance to run.

He finds it near Bella Vista Drive, between Romero Canyon and Ladera Lane, above Summerland. Patrols have passed through the broader area that morning and again about an hour and a half earlier.

But at about 3:30 p.m., no one sees Russ stop, light the fuse of a homemade incendiary device and throw it from his vehicle.

He then continues north.

A Man’s Motivation

“See, I could build a fire and burn up anybody I wanted,” Russ says of his motivation, “If I was mad at my mother, I could destroy her without touching her physically. I’d pick out a box and say, ‘This is you,’ and watch the fire destroy it. And after the fire went out, the problem was solved.”

After high school, Russ figures, why not make this compulsion his living? For more than a decade he travels around the United States, hiring out as an arsonist. It is not a risk-free life, however.

By age 40, he has spent nearly half his life in institutions. He spends seven years in Attica State Prison in New York for fires he sets in his home town of Rochester, one of them causing $6 million in destruction.

In the 1960s, after leaving Attica, Russ travels to California to try another line of work —there have been too many close calls. By this time he is married, has two daughters, and feels it is time to settle down and have “the perfect middle-class life” everyone in Southern California is supposed to have.

Obtaining a job at Knott’s Berry Farm, he begins to put down roots.

Perhaps if all had gone well, Russ might have had a chance. But he and his wife have serious disagreements. Eventually she leaves him for another man — not any man, but his brother.

“I felt I’d been dealt a losing hand,” he tells Swanbrow, “and somebody was gonna pay.”

The urge to use the torch began to build inside him once more.

Heading Into Difficult Territory

The Romero Fire is reported at 3:57 p.m. by Howard Fenton, who sees it burning deep in Picay Canyon.

Because the fire begins in a difficult, uphill location behind Summerland, its smoke is not visible from the La Cumbre Lookout until several minutes later. By then, the fire has already established itself in critically dry brush.

By the morning of Oct. 7, the Romero Fire has burned through Toro Canyon, from East Valley Road to the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Some 3,600 acres are blackened, and the greatest immediate threat lies east of the canyon, above Carpinteria.

The terrain presents firefighters with a difficult problem. This is especially true of the bulldozer operators who are tasked with cutting the access routes for the crews to follow, and containment lines that they hope will hold the fire in check.

The steep mountain wall above the Carpinteria foothills offers few ridges where a fire line can be built, and there is little country where bulldozers can safely work. It is extremely dangerous work.

Air tankers pound the eastern edge of the blaze, trying to reduce its intensity long enough for the crews on the ground to establish a defensible line.

To support these efforts the dozer crews are sent into Santa Monica Canyon.

Their assignment is to construct a pincer line along the eastern side of the fire, beginning near the base of the mountain and angling upward toward the ridge. If the crews can connect that line, they may pinch off the fire before it can make a stronger run toward Carpinteria.

It is a difficult assignment, but one that offers the clearest available chance to establish control in country otherwise nearly inaccessible to machinery.

Four bulldozers, each with a two-man crew, are assigned to the work. The operators drive the machines while their swampers assist on the ground, clearing brush, guiding equipment and helping keep the work moving through dense chaparral.

By Thursday evening, there is reason for guarded confidence. A marine layer has eased fire behavior in some areas, and the official forecast calls for light downslope winds. Earlier predictions suggest that humidity may rise overnight and that fog may form below the fire camp by morning.

In Santa Monica Canyon, the fire appears largely reduced to a ragged, smoldering perimeter, with occasional flares in brush too dense for men to enter directly. Above the canyon, air tankers make their final drops before darkness, putting retardant ahead of the fire’s most active edge. The wind is gentle and from the southwest.

The dozer assignment remains hazardous, but it does not appear hopeless. The crews have a defined objective, air support has been working the fire and the weather forecast gives no warning of the violence about to come.

The Blowup

At about 9 p.m., the crews are running low on fuel and preparing to head back to the valley for a shift change. As they start out, the operators continue widening and improving the access track they have cut earlier.

At one point, the four bulldozers descend a spur ridge into Santa Monica Canyon, working abreast to improve access before beginning their climb back toward the main line.

Then the wind changes and Santa Monica Canyon becomes a much more dangerous place to be.

Severe down-canyon winds begin howling with far greater force than forecast. They are turbulent and extremely dry. The eastern flank of the fire comes alive, especially along the lower slopes where the eight men and their equipment are working.

What has seemed like a manageable nighttime assignment becomes a blowup: a sudden, violent surge of flame, heat and smoke. Contemporary accounts describe a firestorm so intense that it creates a vacuum-like effect, pulling already superheated air from the canyon.

Veteran dozer operator Jimmy Ames senses the danger almost immediately. He warns fellow operator Jerry Hotchkiss that they have to get out of the canyon and return to the ridge. Ames begins working his machine uphill.

The timing is cruel. The men have gone down the spur ridge to improve access, and the fire’s sudden transformation leaves them confronting terrain that limits both movement and visibility.

Their escape routes are no longer theoretical lines on a map; they become immediate choices made in darkness, smoke and rapidly escalating heat.

Ames reaches higher ground and watches the headlights of the tractors disappear inside the flames. Jerry Hotchkiss and Leonard Kaiser run down through the canyon, trying to outrun the advancing fire. The front catches them, but both survive despite severe burns.

Thomas Klepperich and Leonard Mineau, the dozer operators, go uphill with firefighters Delbert DeLoach and Richard Cumor, the swampers assigned to their equipment crews. The ridgeline offers the better prospect of safety, but the firestorm overtakes them before they can reach it.

Death Knoll at 2 a.m.

Searchers find the four men several hours after midnight. Three are beneath their tractors, following the survival practice taught at the time. The fourth is found about 15 feet away near a collapsed Edison tower, brought down by the extreme heat.

A charred watch recovered from one victim has stopped at 10 p.m., the apparent time of their deaths. The fire’s heat and smoke strip the canyon of breathable air; the men die before flames reach them.

The blowup is not the result of a casual or reckless operation. The men are assigned to a critical line because the terrain above Carpinteria offers few alternatives.

They are working under a forecast that suggests a manageable night, then are caught by a sudden, dry and powerful wind event that turns a difficult fire into an unsurvivable one.

After the Blowup

At first light, the fire still threatens Carpinteria. Fire boss Ben Lyon shifts resources toward keeping the blaze out of the urban area; the southeast flank remains about two miles from downtown.

The work continues despite the previous night’s tragedy, with crews, hotshots, dozer operators, air-tanker pilots and support personnel fighting to hold the fire on the slopes above the valley.

The Romero Fire ultimately crosses the Rincon firebreak but does not cross Rincon Creek. By the time it is contained, it has burned about 14,500 acres; it is declared under control on Oct. 16, after nine days of firefighting.

But for those who work the fire, its lasting meaning is fixed in Santa Monica Canyon and the story of the memorial that now honors Klepperich, Mineau, DeLoach and Cumor on the western side of the canyon.

Four Names in Stone

In the years after the Romero Fire, firefighters mark the Santa Monica Canyon death site with four white crosses. They stand in a remote and difficult place, a reminder not only of the 1971 tragedy but also of the danger faced by people who work on fire lines where conditions can change in moments.

The crosses endure for decades. In April 2017, firefighters reinforce the aging markers with new white crosses.

Then the Thomas Fire comes.

Six days after it begins in December 2017, the Thomas Fire sweeps across the Romero Fire scar and burns the memorial site. The four crosses are destroyed. The loss is symbolic as well as physical: a place that has honored four men for nearly half a century has itself become part of another major South Coast wildfire.

Restoring the Memorial

The response is to rebuild. With donations from neighboring property owners and the help of local fire agencies, volunteers and firefighters, more than 25 people return to the site in 2019 and create a more durable memorial: a circular setting with four inscribed stone markers, one for each man, around a central bench bearing the words, “Romero Fire, 1971.”

I have the privilege of helping build that new memorial. The work is demanding, especially in such a remote location, but it is also an act of remembrance. It restores a place where families, firefighters and others can pause to recognize what happened there.

The Romero Fire begins with a deliberate act by one man. It becomes a disaster shaped by drought, wind, steep terrain and the limits of firefighting technology. But the story does not end with the man who starts it.

It ends with Thomas Klepperich, Leonard Mineau, Delbert DeLoach and Richard Cumor—and with the enduring effort to ensure that their names, their work and the sacrifice they make on that October night are not forgotten.

Two Years Later

Nearly two years after the end of the Romero ire, after Russ is arrested in Orange County on a similar arson case, he confesses to setting a number of Southern California fires, including the Romero Fire. He is indicted in 1973 on murder charges arising from the deaths of four men in Santa Monica Canyon.

Russ’ reported explanations for his fire-setting describe an attraction to fire and a desire for power—an ability, in his words, to destroy someone symbolically without confronting that person directly. His difficult personal history may help explain the behavior examined by mental-health professionals and the courts, but it does not excuse it. In a landscape as dry and wind-prone as Santa Barbara County’s, deliberate ignition carries consequences far beyond the person who strikes the match or lights the fuse.

Russ is found not guilty by reason of insanity on four counts of second-degree murder and is returned to Atascadero State Hospital. The legal resolution does not change what the Romero Fire has taken from four families, their fellow firefighters and the larger community.