On the afternoon of July 1, Goleta residents Elaine and Jerry Smith were about to leave for a concert and picnic on the beach. They had just listened to a small blurb on the news about a fire burning in the hills above town, but didn’t give it much thought.
“We knew that the fire was up on the ridge, but we left for the concert anyway with absolutely no fear for the safety of our home,” Elaine later told the Sun.
The couple got into their truck and drove down to the beach for a relaxing evening filled with music, food, and fun. A few hours later, they returned home to find police, fire, and fear.
Shrouded in a hazy cloud of smoke and ash, with 15 mph winds whipping around them, the Smiths drove up their street to find a homeowner’s worst nightmare: Local law enforcement agents had blocked off the neighborhood and were forbidding access to any of the homes.
“I can’t remember the last time I’d been so panicked,” Elaine recalled. “I just knew that our house was gone.”
Refusing to stand by while his home and belongings might be burning to the ground, Jerry left Elaine with the car and walked the mile back to the house.
Once there, Jim convinced several reluctant police officers to allow him and Elaine to pack up their truck with personal belongings. For a couple of hours, the two frantically piled photo albums, clothes, pillows, and other items into their truck bed.
With their vehicle loaded down with possessions, the Smiths then had another big decision to make: Where to go?
“We’d heard things about the Red Cross being open so we thought, ‘Why not go just go there?’” Elaine said.
Despite some initial hesitations about the facility, Elaine said that the several days she and Jerry spent at the Red Cross emergency shelter at San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara ended up being “a wonderful experience.”
When they first got to the shelter, a volunteer nurse immediately bandaged up Jerry’s arm, which he hadn’t noticed had been cut while he was loading things into the truck.
“Then they gave us packets of supplies—soap, shampoo, things that felt so good to have because we were so dirty and smoky,” Elaine said.
The two found a pair of cots and settled in for an undoubtedly sleepless night.
“Jerry actually ended up sleeping in the truck because we had all our stuff in it,” she said. “But neither of us really slept that night.”
After that first frightening evening, the Smiths spent several days in the shelter with the approximately 190 other people who came to the Red Cross after being told to evacuate.
“If we had to be somewhere, I’d rather have been there [at the shelter] than at a friend’s house, because we were all in the same boat. We could laugh and cry together. We didn’t have to put on airs about how we were feeling,” Elaine said.
Eventually, the Smiths were permitted to go back to their home, which, thanks to what Elaine called expert firefighting, was untouched by the raging flames of the Gap Fire.
“That first night was absolutely horrible, but the thing that allowed us to overcome the sadness was coming to the shelter,” she said.
The costs
According to official reports from the Santa Barbara County Fire Department and the U.S. Forest Service, no residential homes burned in the Gap Fire (although about 85 residences and 60 other buildings were seriously threatened by the blaze).
The fire, which burned close to 10,000 acres in about two and a half weeks, was more than 97 percent contained as of July 22, with only a dozen reported injuries. The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation, but fire officials say it was “human caused.”
And while most all human habitats escaped the fire, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t any damage.
Authorities have estimated total fire suppression costs to near the
$20 million mark. The numbers pale in comparison to last year’s Zaca Fire, which cost almost twice that much and burned at least twice as long. Still, that doesn’t mean that county, state, and federal officials are taking the Gap Fire any less seriously.
On July 17, Lt. Governor John Garamendi, who’s also a California State Lands Commissioner, asked President George W. Bush for more federal money to fight the fire season and prevent future flooding in burn areas.
“What we need here in this mountainous area of the U.S. Forest Service Land is for the U.S. Department of Forestry to step in to reseed and replant. We must prepare for the potential for flooding now,” Garamendi said during a press conference in Goleta.
He also asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide money to deal with potential flooding.
Locally, two Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) teams have already started planning ways to deal with erosion and possible flooding once the winter’s rainy season starts up.
The teams are assigned to evaluate the burn intensities of the fire—low, medium, or high priority—and determine potential runoff areas, then come up with a management plan that will minimize potential effects from the fire.
U.S. Forest Service representatives Kathy Good and Jim Webber both said that fires overall are good for an overgrown, brush-filled chaparral ecosystem like the one growing in the hills near Goleta.
Periodically, fire clears out areas encumbered by dead and dying foliage, enabling newer and healthier plants to grow.
According to records from the U.S. Forest Service, the last time a fire cleaned out this area was in the 1950s. So nature was apparently long overdue for flames.
And nature, for the most part, was prepared when the flames finally came, Webber said.
“Most of the larger wildlife probably got out in time because the bigger animals can outrun the fire,” he said. “The animals that succumbed to the fire were most likely smaller animals, and even then the death toll probably won’t be that large.”
While forestland is expected to rebound from the fire, cultivated land in the county hasn’t fared nearly as well.
Commissioner Bill Gillette said, in a press release from the Santa Barbara County Agricultural Commission, that local farmland, especially avocado crops, has sustained significant damage from the fire.
On July 9, Gillette informed the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services that the immediate loss is estimated at more than $1 million, impacting about 233 acres of avocado orchards (200 of which were completely destroyed).
Total losses, which include replacement costs for new trees, new farming equipment, and irrigation lines, plus long-term losses due to lack of production before new trees can bear fruit, are estimated to be about $9.5 million over the next five to seven years, Gillette said in the release.
The total amount of losses won’t be known until the Gap Fire is completely contained.
And land isn’t the only aspect of the county being impacted economically by the fire.
Other county departments, plus several local nonprofit and for-profit businesses, are also feeling the heat.
Peter Wright, executive director of the Santa Barbara County Chapter of the Red Cross, said that emergency response costs are estimated at about $10,000.
The total doesn’t seem like a lot compared to the $70,000 used to respond to the Zaca Fire last year, but Wright said that the chapter is still fundraising to cover costs from both fires.
“With the Gap Fire, we were able to respond using our own chapter resources and funds,” he said.
The Zaca Fire, he said, was harder to deal with because the county put the Red Cross on standby, with the possibility of responding to 20,000-plus people.
“During the Gap Fire, our emergency shelter was open from July 1 to July 6, and then it went on standby,” Wright said. “It’s a well-oiled machine.”
Since the Zaca Fire, the Red Cross has raised approximately $40,000 to cover a $70,000 price tag, and plans to add the $10,000 from the Gap Fire soon, he said.
On July 11, Goleta Valley Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Kristen Amyx sent an electronic survey to the chamber’s 550 members inquiring about what kind of impact the fire had on local businesses.
Some of the losses reported include interruption of business due to employees being evacuated and power outages over six peak days of the fire, which forced businesses to send employees home and temporarily shut down.
“The power outages were the biggest cause of loss of productivity,” Amyx said.
She said that even high-tech businesses, which usually aren’t affected because they have backup generators, experienced problems because the power outages happened for several hours each day.
The price tag for such disruptions is realistically hard to pin down, but there’s no question that the blaze was costly for Santa Barbara County residents.
Contact Staff Writer Amy Asman at aasman@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 24-31, 2008.