When Sheriff Bill Brown took to the microphone Tuesday
morning at the Earl Warren Showgrounds, he was surrounded by a sweeping phalanx
of elected officials firefighters, and, of course, news reporters and TV
cameras. Such press briefings have become an integral part of the kabuki
theater that’s evolved out of Santa Barbara’s collective response to wildfires
and other natural disasters. They’re a vehicle by which vital information is
shared in a carefully calibrated format and some semblance of reassurance can
be conveyed: Help is on the way. Someone is in control. All is not lost.
Brown, sheriff now for 13 years, is an old hand. As he
approached the mic, he turned to sign language interpreter Katie Voice and
joked, “Looks like we’re getting the band back together.” If so, Brown has
emerged as the lead singer. Given the frayed relations between Brown and the
local firefighting establishment — over turf, terrain, tax dollars, and
temperament — that might seem an unlikely development. But Brown gets stagecraft; it’s in his bones. His
mother was an accomplished stage actress. His father was the advance man for
pioneering televangelist Billy Graham back when Graham was still packing circus
tents with his revival show.
More than that, though, are the sheer numbers of fires Brown
and his department have had to respond to. In 13 years, there have been 16. Of
those, 14 were major fires. Seven were serious enough to require evacuations.
Evacuations are Brown’s call; his department is charged with warning occupants
in evacuation zones so that they can get out in time. “My two predecessors,
Sheriff Jim Thomas and Jim Anderson, had one major fire between the two of them,”
Brown noted. He mentioned these numbers to a close advisor right before his
recent re-election. He was told, “’I wouldn’t use that as a campaign slogan, if
I was you.”
With so many fires and so many evacuations, it’s inevitable
that Brown has come in for some criticism over the years. But this year, with
this fire, Santa Barbara managed to dodge a bullet; the rain fell, the sun came
out, and people who evacuated were allowed to go back home in time for
Thanksgiving. The Cave Fire, it turns out, was the first big Santa Barbara fire
for the county’s new fire chief, Mark Hartwig, the city of Santa Barbara’s new chief,
Erik Nickel, and the county’s new Office of Emergency Management czar Kelly
Hubbard. It was their first time around the dance floor together. It’s a dance
floor Brown knows well. As usual, there’ve been some questions about the timing
of certain emergency alerts. But for now, people are relieved. No one got hurt.
These days, Brown conspicuously doesn’t say such things as,
“It’s the new normal.” It happens to be true, but it’s also old news. The
last time Brown uttered such words, the governor of California was Arnold
Schwarzenegger, with whom Brown shared the microphone at — where else? —Earl
Warren Showgrounds. And yes, the Gubinator was there in response to one of
Santa Barbara’s many wildland infernos.
“This is the price we pay to live here,” said Brown in a
recent interview. In the Midwest, people shelter in tornado cellars when the
twisters inevitably strike. In New Orleans, deadly hurricanes are part of that
city’s lethal charm. Of fires, Brown said, “This is our natural disaster price.”
It was late Monday afternoon when Brown first got wind of
what would become dubbed the Cave Fire. He was notified of the fire just as he
went into his last scheduled appointment of the day. “Oh, it’s been knocked
down,” he was told. It was a whole different reality, Brown said, when he got
out of the appointment 45 minutes later. “The whole mountainside was ablaze.”
It was terrain that hadn’t burned in 29 years, not since the Painted Cave Fire
wiped out 500 homes in an hour, sprinted down pretty much the same hillside,
and jumped all six lanes of Highway 101 in a single bound.
Chaparral stood six feet high; wild grasses nearly three
feet. With winds gusting at 40 miles an hour, one senior county fire fighter clocked
the Cave Fire’s descent down the mountainside at 55 miles an hour. At the
Bridge to Nowhere — located just a few miles upslope of Cathedral Oaks on
Highway 154 — the fire veered off simultaneously to the east and to the west.
In short order, a fire that started at 15 acres exploded
into 100 acres, then 500, and eventually topped out at about 5,000. In the
first minute, 9-1-1 got 21 calls. From 4 p.m. to 11 p.m., 9-1-1 would receive
268 calls. In the same time span a week before, there were just 54. Eventually —
thanks to California’s vast mutual aid network — nearly 900 firefighters would
be dispatched to do what they could to knock it down. Ten aircraft were
available. No other fires, it turned out, were running rampant throughout
California. And of course, they all got a massive assist from the dousing
provided by Mother Nature.
But before all that happened — and the fire was 20 percent
contained — there was considerable fear and suspense. This one, higher-ups at
the county warned in hushed but freaked-out tones, might get out of hand. Large
boxes were drawn on the map; people in one had to evacuate. People in the other
needed to be on standby. The boxes would change over time. Alerts were sent via
text message to cell phone subscribers. Eighty deputies and search and rescue
workers were dispatched to knock on 2,284 doors. Of those, the occupants of 517
were in the process of evacuating. The occupants of 324 announced they were
staying. Some, Brown said, indicated they intended to stay and fight the fire
to save their property. Such thinking, Brown said, was ill advised. “If trained
firefighters with all their resources can’t knock this thing down, somehow I
don’t think someone with a garden hose is going to have that much success.”
In the end, only one structure was destroyed. Santa Barbara got
off easy. We got only a light dusting of
the “Santa Barbara snow” — big flakes of burnt ash. And if Sheriff Bill Brown
is lucky, he might make it to the end of this term without having to make another
natural disaster performance with the microphone.
