Tag archives: wildfires
Last week, two million fellow residents of the Golden State were intentionally blacked out by their public utilities without a whimper of protest from our publicly elected officials in Sacramento, Washington, D.C., or Santa Barbara County. Fortunately, Montecito, Carpinteria, and Montecito stayed alit, while residents of Goleta woke up last weekend to smoky air, face […]
Sue Happy Supervisors The old saying, “What goes around, comes around,” should be the new County motto! That is, our County Board of Supervisors (BOS) has done virtually nothing to prevent forest fires by way of reducing fuel loads or creating adequate buffers between the urban and wildland interface. Moreover, they have not maximized the […]
The Day The Hill Came Down First, of course, there was the fire. The Thomas Fire, so named because it began on the campus of Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula before devouring nearly 300,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara County along with nearly one thousand homes and/or structures. Following California’s cycle of cataclysms, […]
The Montecito Fire Protection District is hosting two meetings next week to discuss wildfires. The first will be a review of the 2017 Thomas Fire and the Department’s Wildland Fire Program, and the second will be a discussion about climate change and its effects on wildfires. On Wednesday, October 17, MFPD will present a report […]
Everywhere you look in California, there are larger, more explosive fires. Why? As the left once again blames climate change, could there be another reason why we are seeing so many huge fires? What role have environmental activists, eco lobbyists, green NGOs, lawyers, and politicians played? What about forest management? Forests need thinning to promote […]
Just imagine “A world of ballroom dance creating a beautiful place in your mind, body and soul. ” Even after the fire, mudslide, earthquake, and multiple evacuations, five women (three from Montecito), and their dance instructor, Vasily Golovin, owner of Dance Fever Studio Montecito, found the time to attend the San Francisco Open Dancesport Competition. […]
Heal the Ocean (HTO) has received numerous (some irate) phone calls regarding the mud being deposited on Goleta and Carpinteria beaches. Television media has also called for a response from us. We told them, and everyone else, we were investigating and would let everyone know when we knew the answer. We at HTO don’t believe […]
Please, let’s keep as many boulders that have clobbered our community as possible; place them someplace in Montecito (Manning Park, Toro Canyon Park, the Cold Spring area, the lot we traded with the Y next to MUS) and build a big, big awesome (think Awahnee) community stone house recreation center. Have several big outdoor stone […]
It was a double whammy. First the fire, and then came the flood. And, in this case, it wasn’t so much a “flood” as a debris-laden runoff from the denuded hills above Montecito. The flow of boulders, mud, and timber that came crashing down, crafted a direct route from the burn area to the ocean, […]
Peter Walker Hunt‘s letter (“Put the Fires Out!” MJ #23/51) brings out the stunning reality of what our communities have just gone through. Current federal policy on wildfire management is choking us in the smoke of burned tax dollars. The devastation and death of wildlife is a by-product of the “goal line” set within a […]
(photos courtesy MFPD chief Chip Hickman) Most in Montecito have no idea how close we came to community decimation two weeks before Christmas. At 6 am Saturday, December 16, 2017, sundowner winds of 30 mph, gusting up to 60 mph, drove the Thomas wildfire, the largest in California history, past the firefighter containment lines on […]
“You’ve got a big-ass fire headed straight your way,” was the salty salutation I heard when answering the phone. The caller was William J. Myers, a lifelong family friend and veteran retired firefighter known more familiarly as Bill. I was a bit perplexed, as the only fire I had heard about at the time was […]
It was just before 6:30 pm, December 4 – which happens to be Feast Day for the beloved Saint Barbara, the Patroness of Fire and Lightning – when what turned out to be the largest wildfire in California’s recorded history started to burn. The Thomas Fire started just north of Santa Paula. That same night, […]
I have a couple ideas to help our local economy in regards to the recent tragic Thomas Fire. My suggestion is to have a Holiday Re-Do on February 25. This gives all the businesses, companies, nonprofits, clubs, and individuals an opportunity to re-do their parties and events that were canceled due to the Thomas Fire. This […]
We only had a little over an hour with Montecito Fire chief Chip Hickman, as he had to escort some of the people who’d lost their homes back to their property, but we made the most of our time. No Montecito firefighters were lost or even hurt throughout the ordeal. There was one death, that […]
What a ride this has been for us all. While we are not yet out of the woods of what will probably turn out to be the worst wildfire in California’s history, I write this letter with a cautious sense of optimism. There are still over 8,000 firefighters on this fire. On 12-hour shifts, there […]
Last edition, the cover of Montecito Journal boasted the line “Saving Montecito”, with a photo of a Montecito fire truck at Station 1 on San Ysidro Road. Little did we know that roughly 48 hours after the newspaper hit stands, Montecito firefighters – along with thousands of others from across at least seven states – […]
