A woman was injured after falling from the bluffs at the More Mesa open space in the Goleta Valley Tuesday afternoon, the County Fire Department said.

A bystander on the beach reported that an elderly woman fell from the bluff and landed on the beach, about 80 feet below, at 12:41 p.m., County Fire Capt. Scott Safechuck said.

The More Mesa open space includes trails along the bluff edge.

Responding firefighters used the stairs near Austin Road to access the beach and carry the woman up to the road, Safechuck said.

She was transported to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital by American Medical Response, and a fire medic rode in the ambulance with her, Safechuck said.  

No further information was available about the incident or the woman’s condition.

This is the second bluff fall in the past week, coming three days after a UC Santa Barbara alumnus died after falling from the bluffs of Del Playa Drive in Isla Vista.

Jacob William Aladar Parker, 23, of San Diego, was visiting friends during the All Gaucho reunion weekend.

His death is the 14th fatality from an Isla Vista cliff fall in recent decades, and the second one in the past year.

Safechuck said his department is encouraging people to intervene when they see others who are standing close to bluff edges, and advise them it can be a dangerous place to be.

“We believe that can be done just using kind words and community awareness in addition to efforts we’re doing with fences and putting warning signs up,” Safechuck said.

“Not everyone feels it’s going to happen to them. Anyone who goes near the cliff, most of them don’t believe it’s going to happen to them, that they’re going to fall off,” he said. “People trip and fall every day and that can happen next to a cliff. The repercussions of falling off a cliff can be fatal.”

County firefighters responded to both of this week’s bluff falls and Safechuck said, “it’s difficult for our members to continuously see something that’s so easily prevented.”

County Supervisor Calls Out IV Property Owners Over Fence Heights

County Supervisor Laura Capps, who represents the Isla Vista community, said Parker’s family visited her office and were “understandably incredibly shocked” by his death.

“We lost another young life,” she said at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting.

Parker graduated from UCSB last year “and he was happy to come back to Santa Barbara for alumni weekend to see his old friends and hang out where he used to live along the bluff,” Capps said.

In social media posts this weekend and her comments Tuesday, she called out Isla Vista property owners for not raising fence heights to 6 feet, including at the property on the 6600 block where Parker fell.

A higher fence may have prevented the accident since Parker reportedly tripped, Capps said.

“I implore those who own properties, 74 of them along the bluff, to do the right thing by our kids, raise those fence heights and put in basic, common sense precautions,” she said.

“We’ve had 14 (deaths) and we cannot have any more.”