Nearly
The Day Fire lasted a month. It started on Labor Day and burned for the rest of September. According to the Forest Service, it should be fully contained (if not out) by this afternoon. Its final size will exceed 162,000 acres, or about 250 square miles — an area that exceeds the dimensions of Chicago. At its peak last week, the Day Fire was being fought by nearly five thousand people, armed with 226 engines, 45 'dozers, 41 water tenders, 28 helicopters, 9 helitankers and more than 10 air tankers. The cost of the fire exceeded $70 million as of yesterday morning. And that's not counting damage to one helitanker in a non-fatal accident.
Big as it was, this fire wasn't even the largest to burn the same area. In September 1933, the Matilija fire burned more than 220,000 acres of the Ventura and Santa Barbara County's immense back country. This was after the nearby Indian Canyon fire burned 30,800 acres in the previous month.
The Day Fire didn't attract much news, mostly because it burned across the Sespe Wilderness and the southern districts of the Los Padres National Forest, which together comprise one of the largest roadless areas in the continental U.S. — even though it's under the northwest approach path to Los Angeles International Airport.
Fighting fires is hard in any case, and in places like this, it often verges on the impossible. The country here is wild and mountainous, with the same elevation range as the Grand Canyon and a topography nearly as forbidding. Even the "easy" parts of the wilderness are covered with thick dry evergreens, chapparal and parched grass on inclines steep as double-black-diamond ski runs. Once it gets out of control, the game is one of containment. It's a game firefighters lost several times as the Day Fire progressed.
The fire season runs from the last rains in April to the first rains in November. Day temperatures often rise into the nineties; and in late summer and fall gale-force Santa Ana winds can blow across landscapes across the thickest rain-starved vegetation on Earth.
The Day Fire was close to home for us. Two weeks ago, when the Santa Anas were blowing westward from the Mojave Desert, the fire gave Santa Barbara the worst air quality figures in the city's history. Overhead was an ominous river of smoke. Ash fell like snow. About an inch of it piled on the uphill side of my windshield wipers.
The whole city tensed up. In 1990 the Painted Cave Fire burned 500 homes. In 1964 the Coyote Fire destroyed dozens of homes before burning the entire Santa Ynez mountain range behind Santa Barbara. The Refugio Fire (1955), the Wellman Fire (1966), the Romero Fire (1971), the Sycamore Canyon Fire (1977), the Eagle Canyon (1979) and the Wheeler Fire (1985) were all large and destructive. In territory the Sycamore Canyon Fire was the smallest, yet it still took out more than 300 homes. This map of fire footprints, from the Montecito Fire Protection District, tells the story. There isn't much around here that hasn't been burned over. Recently.
So naturally, many of us turned various media for news. There wasn't much.
The only regional news station, KNX/1070 in Los Angeles, covers the fire to some extent; is busy with lots of other stuff. Our only full-time news station in Santa Barbara is little more than an audio edition of the local newspaper, and has no website at all. The paper is currently at war with its editors (23 so far have resigned) and lacks a useful website (even the paper's current "content" is locked up behind a paywall). Its Day Fire coverage consists of Associated Press stories. As it stands today, only Ventura's KVTA/1520 has any measure of Day Fire coverage, and it's minimal.
The Ventura County Star is covering the story aggressively, and features a confusing multimedia page of links, scrolling text and animations. But if there's an RSS feed, I can't find it.
The most "official" of the fire sites is InciWeb.org, which aggregates and publishes "incident" news from a raft of agencies, including the Los Padres National Forest. InciWeb's url for the Day Fire is http://www.inciweb.org/incident/475/ . It was down from Monday, September 25 until late Thursday, and is still experiencing problems. No new RSS feeds have gone out since Monday, for instance. This is THE clearinghouse for fire information, and it went dark though the wildest week of the Day Fire.
Other official sites include the Los Padres National Forest, the Ventura County Sheriff's Department and the Ventura County Fire Department. None of those have RSS feeds.
I could waste more time looking at other local and regional media websites (including the many TV stations in Los Angeles), but it's not worth the bother. The problem with all of them is that they run static web operations, and what's happening right now requires Live Web coverage. They need RSS feeds, and they need to point to, or aggregate, the independent work of citizen journalists.
