“That’s going to be tough for a lot of folks.”Ĭalifornia Is the Thanksgiving week storm approaching Southern California really a ‘bomb cyclone’? This time, he said, there will be “absolutely no time to do mitigation,” which, he noted, could be especially traumatic for Santa Barbara-area residents, who survived last year’s mudslides. Normally, Swain noted, there is some time between the fire season and the rainy season, when officials build berms to divert water and map out flood evacuation plans. “This may be the rare situation where rainfall puts out a coastal Southern California wildfire,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.Īlthough the precipitation - part of an unusually cold weather front sweeping across the state - will likely tamp down, and maybe even end, the fire season, Swain said the rain also brought concerns of debris flows and flash flooding. This time, it seemed, the rain gods had answered. Bulldozers and hand crews dug into the dirt, creating a containment line around the perimeter, hoping to stop the spread.Ĭalifornia Cave fire: Residents thought they were safe, then flames and smoke ‘began to blossom’Ĭave fire: Residents thought they were safe, then the flames and smoke ‘began to blossom’Īnd by Tuesday afternoon, clouds had started to roll in. counties arrived, and engines pulled into neighborhoods to defend homes in the fire’s path. Soon, backup firefighters from Ventura and L.A. He was driving on the highway at 55 mph, he said, and the fire matched his pace. The fire, which had burned more than 4,300 acres by Tuesday afternoon, seemed to be sprinting along Highway 154 on Monday night, said Santa Barbara County Fire Capt. But then, fire officials said, erratic winds twisted the flames in the opposite direction, sending them back up the steep, rocky terrain toward the firefighters.
As the wind howled through the canyons, flames chewed down the hillsides toward communities in Santa Barbara and Goleta, spurring evacuations. “It’s my kids’ inheritance.”įor thousands of residents in the hills northwest of Santa Barbara, the Cave fire, which started just before sunset Monday, brought back terrifying memories of 1990, when in two hours flames ripped through the mountains and burned all the way to the sea, destroying more than 400 homes and killing a woman who tried to seek shelter from the fire in a creek behind her house.Ĭalifornia California braces for intense rain, renewing concerns about mudslides in burn areasįlash flood watches are in effect across the state as a cold front bringing rains rolls in to areas left vulnerable by wildfire. Instead, he drove to a hill that overlooks his community and stared at his home on his phone, thanks to night-vision cameras he’d installed near his chimney.
When a wildfire again tore through these hills on Monday evening, Sichi decided not to evacuate with his wife. Through the years, he did what he could to protect the house, adding a metal roof, fire-resistant windows and a more-than-$90,000 system that, with a touch of a button on his phone, remotely causes sprinklers to douse the home with thousands of gallons of water. He loved this place - this cluster of homes in the mountains north of Santa Barbara - but the Painted Cave fire taught him a lesson. Gordon Sichi rebuilt his house in the same spot where in 1990 he lost it to flames.
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