The Gap fire, a couple of miles from the line

Thank you to everyone who has written or called to express concern. I shall update this post whenever there appears to be new news — assuming of course that the Internet doesn't go down again, along with the rest of the power grid! (The photo below, after the jump — click to enlarge — makes it clear why the power went out on Wednesday and Thursday nights, and for a while yesterday afternoon: thick smoke and ash wreaked havoc with Edison's main transmission lines.)

Update: 11:40 a.m. PDT, Wednesday
It looks as though we're in the clear. We at the coast, that is. The fire continues to burn in the back country, and the high heat inland and unpredictable winds mean that firefighters still face significant challenges. According to The Independent:

It appears possible that many of the hard fought gains of the past five days could be lost if today’s weather proves to be as potent as the forecasts predict. While there is no danger of the fire turning back and threatening those parts of Goleta which were evacuated earlier, should the fire breach the West Camino Cielo fuel break and move onto the north side of the mountains, this would expand the fire line dramatically.

Update: 10:15 p.m., PDT, Monday
The winds are still low; there was a heavy marine layer (the famous "June gloom" comes to July — anyone got a good rhyme?) overnight and into this morning; and the fire crews are expressing "cautious optimism." I was out doing errands this afternoon, and there was only a slight haze. The heavy gray clouds had dissipated. There were two small plumes of white smoke rising from the mountains; they looked to be coming from someplace behind the ridgeline.

The lights went out again this evening (at about 7:30 — you could almost set your clocks by these outages...if your clocks weren't electric, that is) but fortunately only for an hour and a half or so. Nothing for it but to hunker down with Nixonland and an Itty-Bitty Book Light. After a while I developed a bit of cabin fever (Pat's in Los Angeles at the Dodgers-Braves game) so I decided to go for a spin. Aside from the persistent haze, the only noticeable fire feature was a large gray rise of smoke coming from somewhere off to the north and west. No flames visible from here tonight.

During my cruise I had the radio tuned to the L.A. news station and heard that Hiroki Kuroda was pitching a perfect game for the Dodgers. Pat is a Braves fan, so that wasn't going to make her happy, but I thought it would be thrilling to be there for such an event. Alas, by time the lights came on and I was able to check the game's progress on television, the Braves had got a hit — so not only did her team lose, but no history was made after all. Bummer.

Update: 11:20 a.m PDT., Sunday
From the perspective of my house, if you didn't know something is going on, you wouldn't know something is going on. It's a bright, clear morning, comfortable and cool (though the weather report says more high temperatures are coming later in the week).

Good news — The Independent is reporting that the southern flank of the fire is contained. That puts the most populated areas out of harm's way. However, overnight the burn did get bigger, with winds pushing the fire further into the higher wilderness, north and west.

Update: 7:31 p.m. PDT, Saturday
On the 6 o'clock news KEYT announced that areas on the western side of the burn area have been downgraded from "mandatory evacuation" to "evacuation warning" — good news for the residents who can now return to their homes. (Map updates, however, are a little slow in keeping pace.) Firefighters have been working hard on the eastern flank; and say they're making good progress on the southern flank — a relief to us and our neighbors.

More good news: wind speeds are expected to be low this evening. And at the moment, in our immediate micro region (basically the coast), whatever wind there is is blowing from the south, which means more moisture off the ocean and a pushback against the wind in the mountain area, which still is coming out of the north and west.

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The "Gap" wildfire is our fire. We're only a couple of miles from the southern- and eastern-most perimeter of the fire as the crow flies. (See maps, below, under "More details.") But, unless things change drastically, we are safe.

There are, however, friends and acquaintances who are directly affected. Fortunately, as of this writing, no homes have burned, but there are mandatory evacuations and evacuation warnings over a considerable area. This time it is not the back country that is burning, as with the Zaca fire that raged at exactly this same time last year; now it is the front-most ridges of the Santa Ynez Mountains that are being consumed, the ones that construct the striking brown and green and purple backdrop to our seaside paradise.

There have been no new evacuation orders since 11 o'clock last night, which may mean that the huge number of firefighters and support aircraft (we are the #1 priority fire in the state, because of the number of structures in harm's way) may finally be having an effect. The sky above my house is relatively clear this morning, which means that the prevailing wind is not blowing toward the populated areas of Goleta and Santa Barbara — but that, alas, can change in the blink of an eye. The most deadly winds are the Sundowners.*

The fire is awesome, even beautiful, like a gift from the Devil himself.

This is from an e-mail I wrote to my son early yesterday (Friday) morning. (He's on a trip to the East Coast.)

I wasn't able to email earlier, because — as a result of the fire raging above Goleta, which has affected SoCal Edison's power transmission lines — we had another blackout. The one last night seems to have fried my computer — I happened to have chosen that moment to install an update to the operating system, and when the power came back on, the computer wouldn't boot. (I took it to Mac Mechanic today, and they say they can fix it, but not until next week.) Meanwhile, fortunately, I've got the laptop, and now that I've plugged it in to be our "server" we have the Internet again.

I don't mean to alarm you unnecessarily. You can check the current conditions of what they're calliing the "Gap" fire at the SB Independent or at KEYT. For now it's still up in the foothills, but damn, you can see the leaping flames from our driveway. Sundowners, of course, don't help. When the wind starts blowing the whole thing south and east, we get a pall of smoke and a coating of ash. The Painted Cave fire in 1990 [we weren't yet living in Santa Barbara] jumped the 101 and was stopped only at Modoc and Hollister [about a quarter-mile from our house] — and now Painted Cave is under an evacuation order. That one apparently came downhill at great speed, so we are just a tad edgy. (You can see by the timestamp that I'm in no mood for sleep.) [It was 4 a.m.]

When the lights went out on Wednesday night Pat and I decided to drive around to see how widespread the outage was. (Turns out it went from north of Goleta all the way to Carp!) We drove out to the airport, and could see the flames across the whole ridge. [The drive to the airport normally takes about 7 minutes.] It was truly eerie. The perspective may in fact be skewed, foreshortened — especially at night — but suddenly everything about our comfortable life seemed contingent. Sobering, to say the least.

Today I had to drive up to Fairview (the main pulse of the fire was centered in the lower hills north of Fairview at the time) and drove under an umbrella of dark gray smoke, tinged with orange and brown — like a low pall of smog, only raining ash. There was an otherworldly quality to it that gave me a deep chill.

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*Sundowners:
"The city's geography at the feet of the Santa Ynez Mountains has made it subject to sudden, extremely hot winds locally called "sundowners", similar to the more famous Santa Ana winds in the Los Angeles and San Diego regions. They are caused by high pressure drawing dry air from the inland side of the mountains, whereupon they can become superheated as they rush down the city's side. On June 17, 1859, a sundowner wind rushed through Goleta and rapidly raised the temperature to 133 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 56 degrees Celsius) in a matter of minutes. People were forced to take shelter immediately; when they emerged they saw that most animals and plants had been killed. It was the highest temperature recorded in the United States until 1913." [From the Wikipedia article on the City of Goleta.]

More details:

There are some stunning photographs in the L.A. Times. Firemen must be the most courageous people on what used to be "God's green Earth."

The Santa Barbara Independent (by far the best, most up-to-date source of information) has this interactive map pinpointing the loci of the various burn areas. If you zoom in, you can see that what looks from a distance like empty wilderness is, in fact, quite built up.

Here's a map I made showing Goleta (the orange marker "A") on the west and Carpinteria on the east — a distance of some 20 miles. This was the range of the power outage, which lasted about 5 hours, from just after 7 p.m. on Wednesday. Our house is approximately at the other orange marker. We are immediately to the west of Hope Ranch, which is some of the priciest real estate in Santa Barbara. (Fireman, save my mansion!!) My little neighborhood, which is rather rusticated — lots and lots of fruit trees, horses, and even a couple of cows — is laughingly called "Hope Ranch Annex."

Click for larger view(the map is not interactive)

Below is a closer view of the area around my house. Follow State St./Hollister Ave. (below the 101) about a third of the way in from the right. Find Arboleda Rd. Travel down to Nueces Dr. See the spike below the "N" in Nueces? That's a private drive — there are about six houses along one side of the driveway, a horse barn and corral on the other. We're at the very end. Rising from the back of our property is a low hill. There are houses up there too. But the hill gives us plenty of privacy; it is covered with dense foliage, gorgeous old California live oaks and eucalyptus trees. Hawks and owls nest in the trees. The nightime is filled with the croaking of frogs from a nearby creek, and the chirp of crickets. It is so beautiful — a constant pleasure. Until, in circumstances like these, you think of how dangerous all that beauty could become...how dangerous beauty has become to so many who chose to create neighborhoods in the steep terrain of the Santa Ynez foothills.

A saving grace: we are close enough to the ocean here to get some high humidity overnight. (In the spring there is often in the mornings what in May is termed "May gray" and in June "June gloom," a layer of low fog from the sea that burns off by mid-day. It is usually not welcome. It would be very welcome now.)

For anyone who wants to compare maps, note Cathedral Oaks Road, at the top. That is the southernmost point of the evacuation zones; it is a principal line of defense. You should be able to find it on the interactive Independent map.

Click for larger view (the map is not interactive)

A passing observation: In praise of our California drivers I want to note that — during our drive to the airport and the university — we and every other car, in the absence of traffic lights, stopped at every crossing and treated each as though there were four-way STOP signs, alternating rights of way with drivers coming in from the side, just as we've been taught. To the best of my knowledge, there weren't any road accidents reported during any of the outages.

Posted by EDN on July 5, 2008 at 12:56 PM in California | Permalink

Comments

OMG! My dear Ellen, I pray that catastrophe is averted. I checked the map of the warning and evacuation areas and I wouldn't be as sanguine as you are if that fire was creeping my way.

Every year it's the same thing in California: mudslides in the winter caused by loss of vegetation from wildfires in the summer. Rinse and repeat. And throw in a few earthquakes for fun.

Please keep me posted, if at all possible. I'll keep checking the LATimes as well.

Is your evacuation bag packed? Just in case.

Posted by: Chiaroscuro | Jul 5, 2008 1:39:55 PM

Wonderful post.I am updating with the evacuation order and warning areas, extent of the fire, information kiosks, and other points of interest. I checked the map of the warning and evacuation areas and I wouldn't be as sanguine as you are if that fire was creeping my way.Feel free to leave comments on the map if there are any features you would like to see.

Posted by: newport driving school | Feb 18, 2009 4:54:09 AM

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