The morning of Thursday, Nov. 13, 2008, seemed like so many others of our mid-autumn days — the kind that makes Santa Barbara such a wonderful place to live.

The marine layer we often wake up to in the gloomier months was gone, replaced by a light blue sky that contrasted perfectly against the shimmering outline of the mountain backdrop.

The air warmed enough for t-shirts and shorts by mid-morning, and the feeling was more like that of an early September day than the middle of November. It was, by any ordinary measure, a beautiful day. 

Seeing the Signs

But despite this, the signs were already in place that could lead to another explosive front country wildfire.

The past several years — and three straight dry ones — had left much of the front country loaded with fuel. Prior to this, it had been almost two decades since the last big fire, the Paint Fire in 1990, and no fires of significance in the mountains behind Montecito.

Just the past June, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had declared a statewide drought, the first in the previous 17 years, and locally rainfall records indicated that from July through early November, essentially no rain had fallen or too little to make any difference.

Weather Alerts in Effect

On the morning of Nov. 13, despite the spectacular weather, indications were that conditions could change, and not for the better.

Nearby Red Flag Warnings were in effect for some areas of Southern California with the potential for wind gusts up to 60-70 mph possible in the mountain areas of Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Though Santa Barbara wasn’t included in the warning, the Montecito remote weather station known as “MTIC1” was posting numbers that had already met the criteria for a red-flag declaration in parts of the front country, with relative humidity near or below 10% and temperatures close to 85°F.

Surprisingly, the school day at Westmont College was relatively normal, with regularly scheduled classes in session all afternoon, and it seemed like just another day on campus — at least until just before 6 p.m. when the Tea Fire began its downhill run, with Westmont directly in its path.

At 638 Las Alturas Road, homeowner Jerry Siegel spotted the fire burning above Westmont College at 5:45 p.m.

“It seemed so small and far away that I didn’t think much about it,” he remembers. “My wife even wanted to take the dogs out for a walk.”

Instead they decided to stay home and keep track of the fire.

Just above on Camino Verde, another homeowner by the name of Dagmar was looking out of her windows toward the mountains and watching the fire come closer and closer.

Just that day, she had 12 pieces of antique furniture delivered to the house and she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“I was in a complete state of denial,” she says. “I didn’t want to think it could reach my house.”

But a few minutes after 7 p.m. both homeowners realized they could stay no longer.

“As I backed out of the driveway I could see the eucalyptus tree at my neighbor’s house beginning to catch on fire,” Siegel tells me.

An Evening of Terror

Despite the morning’s pleasant weather, sadly, by early evening it would become a night of terror and one of the most destructive wildfires Santa Barbara has ever experienced.

The damage done in less than six hours: 210 homes burned to the ground, eight Westmont College buildings destroyed; 15 faculty residences gone; and 1,940 acres charred.

An hour later, when I reached the entrance to the Westmont College campus, I had no idea what the power and fury of the sundowner winds could do in such a short time. At the upper entry to the campus, I could see a palm tree almost directly above me beginning to burn.

Within minutes, the fronds had been torn off the palm and scattered like out-of-control tiki torches throughout the entryway. I’m concerned about heading in, but I spot then Los Padres Forest Battalion Chief Mark von Tillow, and follow him in, sticking as close as I can to his truck. 

Several hundred yards ahead of the fire, there is an intense red glow that fills the sky and silhouettes oak, sycamore and palm trees, and a few hundred yards further, I begin to feel the full force of the wind and the orangish red embers flying across the road in front of me.

To left left, cars are on fire: first a solitary Toyota Tacoma, then a sports car, and in the parking lot beyond more and more on fire.

The sounds are intense: howling wind, the sound of explosions — who knows what they are — fill the air. I reach another intersection and head downhill.

A house on my left is about to catch fire. On my right the roof of another house is just beginning to burn. Further down the road, several more structures are completely engulfed. 

It is the worst disaster I’ve ever experienced, that is until I move over to the eastern part of the Riviera, where the fire is just beginning to burn homes.

Burning the Eastern Riviera

By the time I reach the intersection of Alameda Padre Serra and Las Alturas Road, it is 9:30 p.m.

A third of a mile up Las Alturas from APS, I spot the first brush on fire, then turn another corner and see a house ablaze at the corner of Las Alturas and Alisal Road. The house is a complete loss, and beyond it the roof of another is just starting to catch on fire.

Over the next several hours, I wind my way up Las Alturas to Rincon Vista, past 638 where Jerry Siegel’s home has been reduced to ashes, and up to Camino Verde, where firefighters make a valiant effort to save Dagmar’s home. 

Dagmar’s place is at the very end of Camino Verde, off on a small driveway that hides it from the main road. The heat is almost unbearable, but that does not stop two firefighters from dragging the hose a bit further so it can reach her front door. 

“Give me power!” one of them shouts and the other relays the message back to the engine crew.

Suddenly the hose grows taut as it fills with water, and with the flick of a wrist the water begins to flow. Though it is too late to save the home, the quick action may have kept the homes above it from burning.

The Common Denominator

By the next day the fire is completely contained, though it will be days before the recovery can begin given the intense amount of heat still contained in the homes that have been lost. 

The Tea Fire is not the first major front country fire, and it will not be the last.

The list is long, beginning with the 1964 Coyote Fire, which I witnessed personally as a student at UC Santa Barbara, and others over the years that became a part of my 1990 wildfire book: the Romero (1971), the Sycamore (1977) and the Paint Fire in 1990 among others since.

There are far too many stories to recount: of homes destroyed, families that have lost everything and communities disrupted.

More than a thousand homes lost over the last 60 years. The causes are many, but what is common throughout are the sundowner winds that serve as the accelerant. 

Asking the Why

After each fire, the question often asked is why. Why couldn’t we have known this would happen? Why here along the crest and no another part of the mountains? How will others know when the next one will come or where it will hit?

In the example of the Tea Fire, forecasters at the time understood the ingredients for sundowner winds coming together were present the morning of the fire. But what they could not do — what no one can yet do — is say exactly where and how hard a sundowner will strike.

The pressure readings that signal sundowner conditions work like odds, not guarantees. Even on the rarest nights, when the numbers reach their most extreme values, damaging gusts arrive in the Montecito hills only about three evenings out of four.

On the fourth, nothing happens at all. The Tea Fire itself makes the point: The night after the fire started, forecasters expected even stronger winds. They never came.

The Harder Question

The harder question is why a sundowner hammers one canyon and leaves the next one nearly calm. The answer is that these winds don’t pour over the Santa Ynez Mountains like water over a dam. 

They behave more like a wave breaking on a beach — and where that wave crashes depends on tiny details high above the ridge: the exact direction of the winds a mile up, the height of a temperature layer capping the mountains, the depth of the cool marine air pushing back from the ocean. 

Shift the winds aloft by just a few compass degrees, and the whole windstorm slides sideways, from the slopes above Santa Barbara to the hills behind Montecito. 

Forecasters can tell you the surf will be dangerous tomorrow. They cannot tell you which wave will break on which rock.

Catching Up

The science, though, is catching up. The Tea Fire itself has prompted a National Weather Service study that gives forecasters their first hard numbers tying pressure readings to the odds of extreme winds above Montecito — guidance that did not exist in 2008. 

A UCSB team led by climate scientist Charles Jones has since used decades of high-resolution computer simulations to show that sundowners are not one phenomenon but three distinct regimes — western, eastern, and Santa Barbara. Each favors different slopes under different setups, which helps explain why one community’s windstorm is another’s quiet evening. 

And in the spring of 2022, the Sundowner Winds Experiment brought research aircraft, lasers and weather balloons to the mountains in the largest field campaign ever aimed at these winds. 

The early results confirmed how local and abrupt sundowners really are — stations a few miles apart recording wildly different winds — while revealing the role of the ocean’s marine layer in switching the winds on and off. 

The goal of all of it is the forecast Santa Barbara has never had: not just “windy tonight on the south slopes,” but which slopes, how hard, and when.

That can’t come soon enough.