A wildfire sparked by the flare of a shipwrecked mariner has burned nearly a fifth of Santa Rosa Island and marks what officials called the largest blaze recorded on the island in modern history.
Firefighters ferried in personnel, equipment and pallets of supplies by boat amid gusty winds and rough seas as they raced to save sensitive wildlife, including the continent’s rarest species of pine tree. Preservationists were worried the flames could burn through pristine terrain unique to the region.
“It’s one of our gems of the California coast,” said Michael Cohen, chair of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council. “It looks like it did 100 years ago — it’s just untouched.”
The fire had burned more than 10,000 acres and was 0% contained.
Flames spread up steep slopes, chewing through island chaparral, along with some grass and brush, said Mike Theune, fire information officer assigned to the incident.
Two historic buildings were destroyed — Johnson’s Lee Equipment Shed and the Wreck Line Camp Cabin — along with a storage structure, he said. A helicopter evacuated 11 employees of the National Park Service, which manages the island as part of the Channel Islands National Park, on Sunday.
Flames were about a half-mile from the island’s stand of Torrey pines — one of just two places in the world where the species grows naturally, Theune said. Firefighters were seeking to contain the fire using preexisting features such as roads, ridges and trails rather than carving a fire line through the island’s sensitive ecosystems, he said.
Each of the Channel Islands has endemic species and subspecies, including island foxes, that are found nowhere else, said Phyllis Grifman, vice chair of the advisory council. “They’re kind of known as the Galapagos of [North] America.”
Santa Rosa is home to six endemic plants, as well as the island spotted skunk and rare birds, Cohen said. It also has a rich cultural history — North America’s oldest definitively dated human remains were found here in 1959, and there are culturally significant Chumash sites, said Cohen, who is also president of the Santa Barbara Adventure Co.
The fire was inadvertently sparked by a man who crashed his sailboat into rocks on the island’s rugged south side and then fired emergency flares to signal for help, according to the U.S. Coast Guard and eyewitness accounts.
Jace Malone, who helms the New Hustler sportfishing boat, saw smoke around 9:30 a.m. Friday and drove closer to the island so the children on his boat could take a look. Then he saw someone waving.
A man stood on a small sliver of unburned land, surrounded by scorched vegetation, Malone said. Small pieces of his vessel were scattered among the rocks. He’d somehow scratched “SOS” into the blackened earth, a photo released by the Coast Guard shows.
Malone called the Coast Guard, which sent a helicopter to hoist the man up, he said. The mariner, who was not seriously injured, had spent Thursday night stranded on the island, the agency said in a social media post.
Windy conditions initially fanned the flames and made it difficult for firefighters to reach the blaze. A gale warning was in effect from Friday night to early Monday, and forecasters had warned boats of all sizes to remain in harbor, said Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.
Winds also precluded the use of water-dropping aircraft: Firefighters attempted one drop, but the wind blew the water away before it reached the ground, Theune said.
Still, firefighters reached the island less than 12 hours after the fire was confirmed, which “was no easy feat,” he said. They traveled by boat, which he described as the most time-efficient mode of transport and also necessary to accommodate all the supplies needed to fight a wildfire. “That’s what makes fighting a fire like this different, as opposed to mainland firefight where we can drive in trucks and equipment,” he said.
A firefighting aircraft was able to fly over the fire Monday and was conferring with firefighters on the ground to decide whether it would be possible to use more aircraft, Theune said. About 70 people were assigned to the fire, and more were on the way, he said.
The last major fire on the Channel Islands was the Scorpion fire, which burned 1,368 acres on Santa Cruz Island in 2020.
The post Largest fire ever recorded burns Santa Cruz Island, endangering ‘gem of California coast’ appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
