Fire on Santa Rosa Island

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:02]Hey everyone, welcome back to the lookout.

[00:00:04]Today is somewhere around the 16th or something of May, Sunday. I don't know what day it is, but today's the day we're going to talk about a fire on Santa Rosa Island.

[00:00:17]We got a 10,000 acre fire burning in the Channel Islands. Also got red flag warnings across um the Sacramento Valley. U wind blew strong all today. Um but it's evening now and there were no big fires. We'll talk a little bit about the winds after we talk about Santa Rosa Island, but we're going to start off here by looking at this fire that um sounds like it was started by a shipwreck sailor.

[00:00:40]Um and if you wanted attention, you sure got it cuz um island's 50,000 acres and so far the fire's burned 10,000. So, we're going to look at this. Uh we're going to ask if this fire could burn the whole island. Um, spoilers, I don't think it will, but let's thank our sponsors and we'll get on with it.

[00:01:38]All right, so straight to the map.

[00:01:41]Forgot to turn on my magic cursor. Let's see if it'll work here.

[00:01:45]Cursor Pro.

[00:01:48]Got it.

[00:01:50]All right. So, Santa Rosa Island, one of the bigger of the Channel Islands here off the coast of Santa Barbara in Southern California. We got Point Conception out here.

[00:02:04]We got Los Angeles over here. We got Santa Barbara over here. So, we have Channel Islands and uh Santa Rosa Island here. It's all owned by the National Park Service. We got Santa Cruz Island out here that's owned by the Nature Conservancy, I think. Um so, we got a few structures on this island, but it's it's very undeveloped ranch buildings. And so, um the fire originally started down here in the south end of the island. And um we've had really strong winds just like most of California here. We were in the middle of kind of a big offshore wind event. So the fire started here on kind of the leeward side of the island from the as far as winds go. And it's been basically kind of running with the slope but against the wind which kind of creates for interesting fire effects.

[00:02:52]So, we'll talk we'll show you a couple videos of the fire effects or the fire itself that have been posted by um the park service and then um we'll look a little at the geography of this island overall.

[00:03:07]And it take me a minute to pull up the window here.

[00:03:18]All right. So, here's a video that's posted on Inseb. In web is the um forest service and park service and fed a ay's um fire reporting kind of website. So you can see the wind's blowing kind of from our backs here and the fire is kind of having to fight the wind to come up the slope.

[00:03:42]Here's another one here. You can see really in these just how how windy it is.

[00:03:48]but basically that the fire is having to kind of fight the slope to burn uphill.

[00:03:54]Looking at the vegetation here, the vegetation in this part of the world is really similar to a lot of the vegetation we have inland here on the Los Padres National Forest. And just kind of for reference, the Los Padres has like enormous fire history. Like every year the Los Padres is kind of decades of fire history and we've had massive fires on the LP. So, similar vegetation offshore, just some like kind of different management history.

[00:04:22]So, what we're seeing um in those images there is the fire kind of burning uphill through California. Kind of coastal sage scrub and grass.

[00:04:32]We got some like bonafide sage brush here. We got sage scrub. We've got grass.

[00:04:37]The thing that's interesting about um backing fire, like if the fire had started at the bottom here with strong south winds, you'd have what we call head fire. But it's possible to have kind of backing fire going uphill, if that makes sense. Where if you got a strong wind, the fire is kind of the winds pushing the fire back into itself as it burns. And so what you get out of that is um the fire burns for a longer period of time. You know, it doesn't just flash up the hill. kind of has to like churn its way up the hill. So, it it persists longer on the landscape and um that results in kind of more severe fire effects, more more consumption of the vegetation.

[00:05:21]You can see out here that the everything's all kind of black. So, in this um in this kind of vegetation type, in this kind of chaperel vegetation type, fire is really not the enemy, right? Um these all these plants are adapted to fire and southern California has had fire for a long time and so we don't you know in a forest when it burns with low severity you burns the understory and the trees survive we're like yeah good low severity fire is a good natural fire good fire talking Santa Rosa Island not Santa Rosa California is there's a island off the southern California coast um so it's not a bad thing if chapel burns kind all the way down to ground and all you have left is a bunch of black sticks cuz that's kind of the fire what we'd call the fire regime of this landscape.

[00:06:08]So I said I don't know if this fire is going to burn the whole island. It's burned 10,000 acres so far. I was looking here at the um infrared through today. And so this is the 24 hours of fire spread on the infrared maps starting early this morning running through the day and kind of kind of fiddling out here around the end of the day.

[00:06:36]You can see kind of a light stream of smoke coming off there. Not a not a huge plume. Kind of localized heat on the eastern end of the island. And then the infrared here is, you know, some heat there on that kind of eastern cape of the island. But it sounds like this side of the island uh the fires kind of fairly petered out. It looks like down here it kind of got out to this little ridge road. There's a lot of roads on this island and with um this map's several hours old, but with the strong northwest winds we've been having, it would be favorable for firefighters to to light backfires, do firing operations off of these ridge roads if they um if they wanted to. So, I think it's not unlikely that the fire will stay south of this kind of ridgetop road system up through here. Um, I was talking to a buddy who um worked a lot on Santa Cruz Island nearby here and he said that um because you're in the middle of the ocean, you just have this um kind of it's really moist there at night. He said that they did a lot of prescribed burning on Santa Cruz Island, you know, 30 years ago. It was really difficult to get anything to burn overnight and keep going. You know, when we look at um the maximum humidity recovery overnight, it's 99%. So that's basically like the atmosphere is completely saturated. And so our overnight recoveries forecast straight through the next week are all over the 80 and many of them approaching 100%.

[00:08:03]Um the minimum RH for the rest of the day is 95%. That's just soaking wet. Um the winds are strong, but the temperatures are light. the temperatures are fairly low, like 50s and high 40s. And so when you look at the kind of fuel type we've got out here, this light, like what we call 1hour fuels, when the fog comes in and these um moistures come up quickly within an hour really in these grasses, the fire just goes out. So looking at the um the vegetation out here, there's a lot of grass mixed in with kind of these um sage scrub slopes and so it seems like potentially the the overnight humidity is going to help contain this fire.

[00:08:53]This side of the island um topography is a little more gentle and this is where it's active right now is it's burning out kind of on this east cape of the island. So interesting to see they don't have a lot of firefighters out there right now um in large part because there's gale warnings and they're taking firefighters out there on boats. So, they didn't they haven't been able to bring very many firefighters out here. Um, the kind of funny thing about a fire like this is that it's 100% contained by the Pacific Ocean as soon as it starts. It's just u we don't um no one really wants a 50,000 acre fire.

[00:09:28]Um there are some ranch buildings out here. There's not a lot of them. You can see um you can see them here.

[00:09:38]I was talking to the same guy who was telling me about burning on Santa Cruz Island said that this this island here has more grass than Santa Cruz Island in large part because it was grazed longer is grazed heavily um to to more recent times than Santa Cruz Island. Santa Cruz Island has um pine forests and um other kind of interesting more complex vegetation.

[00:10:11]You can see the San Cruz Island also has a lot of grass.

[00:10:17]Anyway, that's the uh the outlook is basically um incredibly wet overnight humidity recovery. Um the winds are forecast to stay um fairly strong. You know, um max gusts in the teens tomorrow. Um max gust of 16, sustained winds of um you know around 10 miles an hour.

[00:10:43]So, the winds are conducive, but the wind direction staying out of the northwest is kind of conducive to keep pushing the fire back on itself.

[00:10:50]Uh, someone pointed out that if um the fire had started up here with this strong wind, it potentially could have burned the whole island. Someone asks if they know how it started and it sounds like um someone was boating and crashed their boat or something and I saw a picture of someone had like in the ash of the signal fire they started they' stomped SOS.

[00:11:13]So um your ship direct at sea in a windstorm uh if you light a fire you'll probably be found but you might want to wait um so they don't burn the whole island down.

[00:11:30]Anyway, there's not a lot of fire history that shows up here in our official fire history maps out on the islands. There's there's a few kind of smaller island smaller fires.

[00:11:41]I think one of these fires out here that was started was um actually an escape burn, escaped pile burn, but don't quote me on that. Here's a burn out here. Scorpion fire burn in 2020. 1300 acres.

[00:11:56]So, I don't really know much about these islands. I've never been out there, but um big fire on islands novelty like we see say often, you know, Southern California, you're not going to hurt much with a fire out here. There are endemic species. There are some in Santa Cruz Island, there's some endemic Santa Cruz Island kick foxes, but you know, those foxes, they live in holes and u most critters survive fires. You know, I think that's um our biggest fires sometimes trap deer and the like, but most critters that live in places that are hot and dry in the summer have holes that they can go hide out in. And um I usually don't worry too much about critters when we have fires.

[00:12:36]Stricken boater launched a flare to signal for help and it started a fire.

[00:12:40]Sell sailboat ran ground signal fire ever. Okay. Can you give us an update on the five cabins fire near Capitol, New Mexico?

[00:12:55]It says there's very special forest and plants.

[00:12:58]Cool. Well, most California I'm not too worried about the special forest and plants because I think that um most California um vegetation being that we have dry summers and people have been running around lighting fires and etc. I'm not super worried about um I usually worry more about the damage to rare plants uh from fire exclusion than uh from there being fires happening.

[00:13:24]Often times after fires we see that our rare plants really uh go gang busters.

[00:13:35]All right, someone wants me to check on a fire out around Capitan, New Mexico. Let me check it out.

[00:13:44]Okay, any other questions about this fire? Put them in thread. I don't know a lot about it. I'm just showing you a map of what I've got. Um, don't have a lot of intel so far. But they mentioned there's, like I said, there's quite a few roads out here, which you can see on this uh this overlay here.

[00:14:00]You can see them on the air photo, but you can also see uh every ridgetop out there pretty much has a road on it. It doesn't take a lot of resources if you have favorable wind sometimes to light a firing to engage in a firing operation. And so, uh, the only problem with trying to do a firing operation when, you know, when the humidities are up and everything else is that, uh, often times you can't get it to go.

[00:14:23]If the grass is damp, it doesn't matter if you're pouring a bunch of diesel fuel on it, um, or wet it in the middle of the night if it's damp, it's not going to burn.

[00:14:31]So, you know, that said, there's not that many people out there. It's 12 miles across. Um, it's a lot of walking, but we'll just have to see what happens.

[00:14:41]But my prediction right now is that they'll hold it here in this kind of southern third of the island.

[00:14:49]Let's check out Capan, New Mexico. See what's happening out there.

[00:14:58]So right now, if I get outside of California, it can be hard sometimes to find good data. Okay, so here's the fire we're talking about. This is the seven cabins fire about 9,000 acres.

[00:15:17]Let's turn on our heat satellites. Okay.

[00:15:21]So, so what we see in these heat satellites is yellow areas are areas that are kind of cooling down. Orange areas are active in the last 24 hours and red areas are active in the last 6 to 12 hours. So, it looks like this fire is kind of cooling down on the west and the northwest a little bit. And when you see these um real even patterns on the heat dots, it usually means that there's a big column. And so, this fire made a big run yesterday, it sounds it looks like, and now it's kind of moving downhill to the east.

[00:15:58]You can see other fire history out in here. See if we got any here.

[00:16:07]All right. So, it's burning into the Pine Lodge fire on this side, which uh 7 years old.

[00:16:16]In some places, we look at fire history and we can like kind of generalize that fires like will go out when they hit an area that's recently burned. But those rules don't apply as much in areas that um hang on a second. I got to pull up my current layer. In desert areas, you know, like when you have grass, cheap grass and weeds and stuff that grow back quickly, fires can still run kind of readily in burn scars in heavy timber.

[00:16:45]Sometimes if you have a big fire, it'll act kind of as a fuel break for, you know, 5 to 10 years. Not as much in um in the desert. So you see this fire here is a real similar similar um size and shape to this one here. This um is burned. This burned in March of 2020. And this is burning here in May. Uh here you can see they did a firing operation on this old fire off these road systems to kind of button up the bottom. This fire we don't really see um as much in the way of road systems at the bottom where they could like potentially engage it.

[00:17:26]One thing we think about at night is that air flows downhill at night. So we get some of our bigger runs um when you have mountain when you have fires backing down a mountain often times you have bigger runs at night when the air is sinking off the mountains. These are about 9,000 ft mountains and the valley is about 6,000 ft. So, you got some decent topography for that fire to fall off of.

[00:17:47]All right. Well, that's the seven cabins fire. Yeah, we're always open to like if you do have a question about something like that and we're on a broadcast if we can, we'll jump to it. Once we get out of California, our intel is not quite as u fresh necessarily, but it's getting better everywhere you go. So, Capatan, where's this?

[00:18:07]This is Southern New Mexico, isn't it?

[00:18:17]Being a person from California, it's it was striking to go out to New Mexico and see that like the um pine forests, you know, start at 6 7,000 ft and go up to 9 or 10,000 ft.

[00:18:31]Um, you know, it's kind of different from what we got here.

[00:18:37]Okay. So, yeah, here we are. We're kind of southern New Mexico, pretty close to, you know, the center of the state.

[00:18:49]All right. Well, that's uh that's our broadcast for tonight. Make sure you check out our website, the lookout.

[00:18:57]We kind of um this is our archive. It goes back to 2021. We got a lot of stories on here.

[00:19:03]If you're interested in fires, fire history, fire behavior, there's probably going to be something on here that resonates with you. Uh check out our sponsors. You can check out our Patreon.

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[00:19:48]Nate Holly says, "Calpire did a great job today on fires that popped."

[00:19:53]We could pull up Watch Duty here.

[00:19:59]Watch Duty is pretty awesome. Oh, never mind. While we're in here, I just want to turn on one thing otherwise and show the right now we got pretty strong winds still on this fire on Santa Rosa Island.

[00:20:10]But like right now they're um running around 30 miles an hour, 25 to 30 m hour, but u overnight they're supposed to drop down kind more like 10.

[00:20:22]Um 24 hours from now, we'll see what color they are. also gentle 24 hours from now, tomorrow morning. So, winds look like they're slacking a bit.

[00:20:38]Yeah, there were a few fires that took off today in California, Central Valley.

[00:20:42]None of them real huge. We had like a 45 acre fire in Fresno County. Had a couple small fires up in Northern California.

[00:20:49]There's a fire in Altoont Pass. There's always fires on Elim Pass. Every year you've got a good wind driven fire on Elim Pass. 70 acres is really pretty small for that country. So, um yeah, windy. As we talked about um today, we had a short little video I made um where we just looked at the local um hazards of this particular red flag warning that's happening. Um what we pointed out is that the grass is still pretty um pretty green most places and we're not super worried about huge fire starting with this red flag warning. It's a good time to be aware and that you've got kind of there's some places with dry grass where it has cured where potentially you could have a you know couple hundred acre grass fire that could burn some homes. Any grass fire is dangerous if you haven't weeded around your house. So get out there, weed eat, cut your brush. Fire season is coming.

[00:21:46]It could be a doozy. We never know.

[00:21:49]Anyway, thanks for supporting. Lookout and like and subscribe. Telly rens.