Montecito and Santa Barbara CA Tea Fire Update November 15th 2008
categories: Santa Barbara
Update: Saturday November 15th
Here is a quick update on what I know as of now regarding the fire that erupted over the last 2-3 days.
The fire started at about 5:45 p.m. on Thursday November 13th, 2008 with horrible dry winds up to 70 m.p.h. The location seems to have been just above East Mountain Drive behind Westmont College. We drove to the top of Via Alicia to view this and were simply amazed at how quickly it started to spread. The high winds made it completely uncontrollable for the first 20 hours.
At first the fire spread toward the city, down through Sycamore Cyn (the same place as another major fire in 1977) and up the back side of the Riviera. Luckily the winds subsided and the fire never made it to the downtown area. As the winds shifted the fire spread up the backside of the Riviera near Las Alturas where several homes were lost. Then the fire quickly went through the back foothills across Parma Park, up over to Gibraltar Road where it skipped across the canyon and then down into Rattlesnake Canyon. As of now, the western edge of the fire seems to have stopped around parts of El Cielito, Las Canoas and Gibraltar Road. It still is burning in random spots and no one is certain about the exact boundaries, especially over closer to the Montecito area.
Up to now there are reports of about 2000 acres burned and about 100-200 homes. Luckily the winds here locally have subsided to almost nothing over the last 24 hours and the weather is supposed to cool down with little to no wind over the coming 3 days. So hopefully this will be the case.
Unfortuantely many people have lost there homes and although the main news outlets love to simply talk about the celebrities, there are many other people that have been displaced.
I will try to give another update here in the coming days as hopefully everything starts to settle down. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Here are some links to view video and images: Video
For information on Santa Barbara Real Estate, Montecito Real Estate and/or our surrounding areas, as well as any other aspects of life in our area, please don’t hesitate to contact Kevin Schmidtchen at Sotheby’s Int’l Realty.
Thank you for reading. I hope you find Santa Barbara Real Estate Voice informative. Please feel free to contact me or comment below with any thoughts.
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