Largest fire ever recorded on Santa Rosa Island threatens ‘jewel of California coast’

A wildfire sparked by a shipwrecked sailor has burned about a fifth of Santa Rosa Island and marks what officials are calling the island’s largest fire in modern history.

Firefighters ferried crews, equipment and pallets of goods by boat amid high winds and rough seas as they raced to save sensitive wildlife, including the continent’s rarest species of pine. Conservationists were concerned that the flames could burn in the otherwise pristine area of ​​the site.

“It’s one of our treasures on the California coast,” said Michael Cohen, chairman of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary Advisory Council. “It looks like it happened 100 years ago – it hasn’t been touched.”

The fire has burned over 10,000 hectares and is 0% contained.

The flames spread across the slopes, chewing through island chaparral, as well as grass and brush, said Mike Theune, the 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 building, 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.

The flames were about a kilometer from the island’s Torrey pines – one of only two places in the world where the species grows naturally, Theune said. Firefighters wanted to contain the fire using existing facilities such as roads, hills and trails instead of carving fire lines in critical areas of the island, 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 are known as the Galapagos of [North] America.”

Santa Rosa is home to six endemic plants, as well as an island that sees skunks and rare birds, Cohen said. It also has a rich cultural history — North America’s oldest human remains were found here in 1959, and there are culturally important sites for the Chumash, said Cohen, who is also president of the Santa Barbara Adventure Co.

The fire was caused by a man who crashed his boat on the rocks on the south side of the island and fired emergency flares to call for help, according to the US Coast Guard and eyewitness accounts.

Jace Malone, who runs the fishing boat New Hustler, saw smoke around 9:30 a.m. Friday and drove close to the island so the children on his boat could have a look. Then he saw someone waving.

A man stood in a small, unburnt area, surrounded by charred vegetation, Malone said. Small pieces of his ship were scattered among the rocks. Somehow he scratched “SOS” on the black earth, a picture issued by the coast guard.

A Coast Guard Air Station Ventura MH-60T Jayhawk flies to the rescue of a 67-year-old sailor after his boat crashed on rocks off Santa Rosa Island.

(US Coast Guard)

Malone called the Coast Guard, which sent a helicopter to lift the man, he said. The sailor, who was not seriously injured, spent Thursday night stranded on the island, the agency said in a social media post.

Windy conditions initially spread the flames and made it difficult for firefighters to reach the fire. A hurricane warning was in effect from Friday night into early Monday, and forecasters warned boats of all sizes to stay in the harbor, said Bryan Lewis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

Winds also prevented the use of water drops: Firefighters tried one drop, but the wind blew the water away before it reached the ground, Theune said.

Nevertheless, the firefighters arrived on the island less than 12 hours after the fire was confirmed, which was not an easy thing,” he said. They traveled by boat, which he described as a means of transportation that works a lot of time and is necessary to meet all the things needed to fight a wildfire. “That’s what makes fighting a fire like this different, compared to firefighting in the country where we can’t drive trucks and machines,” he said.

A firefighting plane was able to fly over the fire on Monday and was talking to firefighters on the ground to determine if it was possible to use an additional plane, Theune said. About 70 people were included in the fire, and others are on the way, he said.

The last major fire in the Channel Islands was the Scorpion fire, which burned 1,368 hectares on Santa Cruz Island in 2020.