The Fire This Time

Santa Barbara welcomes back an old acquaintance

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
7/6/08

Congratulations to the government of Colombia on the hostage rescue. Any operation that is pulled off successfully and without a single shot being fired or anyone hurt, and at the same time makes an outfit like FARC look like utter fools, is “A” number one in my book.

BBC News interviewed a man who announced he wasn’t going to vote for Obama until he knew where Obama “stands on this pledge of allegiance thing.” It’s discouraging to realize that the future of the country rests on the acumen of such morons. The economy is disintegrating, the country is in two unjustified occupations that are bleeding it dry, and all this fool is worried about is if the candidate is willing to dutifully chant to the flag.

Other good news: Jesse Helms is dead. He represents much of what has gone so terribly wrong with America. The moral and intellectual descendent of aristocrats and slavers, he fought hard against nearly every principle that is important to America: individual rights, the rights of all people to fundamental rights, and he fought all his life for the ability of corporations to take over much of American life. The man was a vile waste of human skin, and his departure can only be America’s gain.

Like everyone, I’ve been anxiously monitoring the fires, especially the most dangerous one, the Gap Fire, that is burning in the Santa Ynez mountains above Goleta. (And for the ignoramatrons at CNN, that’s “Go-lee`-tah” with a long “e.”) Firefighters there are facing the usual problems of steep terrain and bone-dry chaparral, and a threat that is fairly unique to the Santa Barbara area: the sundowners.

These are a local variant on the Santa Ana winds that cause the rest of Southern California so much trouble. And, indeed, most locals just refer to them as “Santa Anas” which gives a more accurate image than does “sundowner,” which suggests an allusion to soft, gentle, cooling breezes, an evening refreshment in the tropics.

These sundowners don’t do soft, gentle, or refreshing. This is the sort of wind that causes people to turn around and look to see if there is a mushroom cloud from an nuclear explosion a few miles away. I don’t think a sundowner could really scorch the bristles off a warthog, but that pig would sure be contemplating his future as a rasher of bacon afterward.

Most people don’t know that for the better part of a century, Santa Barbara held the record for having the hottest temperature ever recorded in North America – one hundred and thirty one degrees. That would be 55, in Celsius. It happened in the 1850s, when a naval ship was at anchor in the Santa Barbara harbor. Naval instruments were of better quality than what the Weather Bureau had, and so their recordings were considered “official.” On that particular day, an especially vicious sundowner sprang up, causing the temperature to soar by 70 degrees in minutes. It killed about half the donkeys and mules in town at the time, and caused nearly the entire avocado crop – then Santa Barbara’s main economy – to literally cook on the trees.

The Santa Ynez mountains, North America’s only range to run east-to-west, lie directly behind Santa Barbara and Goleta, and behind them is the Santa Ynez Valley, which has air that is already hot from lying still under the blazing summer sun. When the Santa Anas come up, they don’t hit the south coast directly, but rather create a super-inversion in the Santa Ynez valley, compressing that air and forcing it out via the only route available – through the passes in the Santa Ynez mountains. The air rips through, superheated by the compression and moving at high velocity, and when it hits the twin cities on the coast, it is often well over 100 degrees, utterly dry, and moving at up to 70 miles an hour. The passes ensure that, like a river rapids, it remains compressed and high-speed.

One spark can cause a massive disaster in minutes. I personally saw a fire start seven miles away, and in less than thirty minutes it was on us, utterly destroying the neighborhood in which I lived. We had embers the size of housecats falling out of the sky around us. The fire effortlessly crossed a one hundred yard firebreak in its irresistible march to the ocean.

As I write this on Saturday morning, a small cool front passed over the state yesterday, resulting in clean air and cool temperatures in a fair chunk of the state. But it has passed, and a high pressure system is moving in, and will take up a position over western Nevada and park there tomorrow. As part of the clockwise rotation of the system, desert air will sweep across to the coast, creating a Santa Ana.

And, in all likelihood, it will bring the sundowners from the Santa Ynez Valley. By late Monday, if the charts are to be trusted.

Maybe Goleta will get lucky, and the fires will be out before the sundowners strike. Or maybe they’ll sweep down the San Marcos pass, putting the La Cumbre district at risk but sparing the areas that are presently burning.

This is well trodden ground for Santa Barbarians. The Paint fire, the one that nearly incinerated yours truly, destroyed 660 homes and 400 other buildings, and only an unexpected cessation of the winds stopped it from roaring through the upscale Hope Ranch district all the way to the beach. In 1963, the Coyote Fire poised above the city, and newspapers continent-wide blared that Santa Barbara was about to be destroyed.

Sundowners – and their fires – are not new or unusual. The biggest sundowner of all was in the middle of the 19th century, confounding a naval meteorologist and thousands of avocado trees. The entire ecology of the region is set up to be burned over from time to time. Much of the plant life likes lots of sunlight and requires little in the way of water or nutrients. The chaparral is largely oil-based, and while that makes it drought-resistant, it also means it burns like a mad bitch when it ignites. It’s a fire-based ecology.

Before the advent of the Smoky-the-Bear era, fires funneled down the mountains, regular as clockwork. Every twenty years, on average. The manzanita and creosote would grow to a certain thickness, and lightning would strike, and the process would begin from germination in the ash and soot.

But the “no-fire,” zero-tolerance policy let the growth infest the mountains, as forests throughout the west have choked on their own growth. Humans have been busily doing much the same thing, to the point where sheer population pressure has pushed human dwellings further and further into what had been arboreal or chapparal zones.

Back 25 years ago, a pair of science fiction writers wrote of a catastrophe caused by a combination of overgrowth and development that resulted in a fire in the mountains behind Santa Monica that destroys 2,000 homes. At the time it seemed unthinkable, a fluke catastrophe like the 1961 Bel Air fire. That destroyed about 300 homes.

Now, we are at the point where if we only lose 2,000 homes, we consider ourselves lucky.

And it’s only going to get worse.

There was one note, and this will brighten the day of a friend of mine who is involved with the local Fire Safe Councils and spends nearly every spare moment in trying to get our mountain communities prepared for the next big wildfire: many homes in the Goleta area would have been lost already – a couple of hundred at least – except that the county cracked down on property rules for fire abatement – fire-proof roofs, fire-retardant landscaping, a clear zone around each house, and so firefighters and homeowners have been able to take stands and cause an otherwise irresistible fire to pass by the homes. As of Saturday night, not one home had been lost. Hundreds of people are not homeless today because they cleared the brush and substituted rock gardens for manzanita patches. And the clueless gorms at CNN had the county fire marshal from Santa Barbara on camera, saying so. At least they got that right.

After the Paint fire, Santa Barbara considered getting rid of many of the eucalyptus trees in the region which, non-native to begin with, are flat out explosive in a fire. A movement sprang up to “save the eucalyptus,” and they were largely successful, which left me shaking my head and doubting the sanity of my erstwhile neighbors. I’m glad to see that at the level of the individual homeowner, sanity still prevailed.

But I know those sundowner winds, and if they come up, all the fire prep in the world won’t help. If a hundred-yard firebreak won’t stop them, planting trees at least five yards from the house only slightly improves the odds for the homeowner.

All we can do is watch, and hope.