In what sounds more like a movie than real life, firefighters in California are racing to save a grove of endangered trees after a shipwrecked sailor inadvertently started a wildfire on a remote island off the coast.
As of Monday morning, the fire on Santa Rosa Island, part of Channel Islands National Park in Southern California, had spread to more than 10,000 acres, fueled by heavy winds that were battering much of the state over the weekend.
The fire began on Friday, after a 67-year-old man crashed his sailboat on the rocky coast of the island. He fired emergency flares to signal for help, which inadvertently sparked a wildfire, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.
Two good Samaritans who were in their own boats reported to the National Park Service that they saw a vessel aground in pieces, said Kenneth Wiese, a Coast Guard spokesman. On Saturday, the Coast Guard was able to rescue the 67-year-old man, who was not injured, Mr. Wise said.
However, the fire continued to grow.
Three dozen firefighters were battling the blaze on Monday, with more staff on the way, said Mike Theune, a fire information officer assigned to the Santa Rosa Island fire. Firefighters were boarding boats with their gear to head to the island, about 45 miles from the Ventura, Calif., harbor.
As of Monday, the fire had destroyed three buildings and forced 11 Park Service staff members to be evacuated by helicopter from their employee housing.
The fire is burning half a mile from a stand of Torrey pines, a rare species of pine tree found in only two places in the world: San Diego and Santa Rosa Island. The Channel Islands are well known for their unique wildlife, with about 145 kinds of plants and animals found only on the archipelago.
Torrey pines, in particular, are considered critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, meaning they face an extremely high chance of extinction in the wild. The trees, which are broad and often have twisted branches, unlike more traditional pines, have been part of the island’s ecosystem for thousands of years, said Mr. Theune.
Scientists have many theories about how the trees arrived on the island. Some think they were brought by birds that carried seeds from the mainland, or by pine cones that floated across the ocean. Others believe that members of the Chumash tribe, who used boats to navigate the islands, brought them from the mainland. There were more than 10,000 Torrey pines on Santa Rosa Island as of 2015, growing on two sandstone bluffs on the northeast corner of the island, according to the National Park Service.
“We are absolutely concerned,” Mr. Theune said. “It’s extremely rare, considered possibly the rarest pine in the world, and it only grows naturally in these two places.”
He said that the heaviest winds were expected to subside by Monday afternoon, so firefighters hoped to be able to start dropping water from helicopters onto the trees. Thus far, the winds have been too heavy for the drops to be effective, with one firefighter on the island recording a wind gust of 50 miles per hour, he said.
This is the first large-scale wildfire on Santa Rosa Island since the National Park Service took over management of the island in the 1980s, he said.
Soumya Karlamangla is a Times reporter who covers California. She is based in the Bay Area.
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