SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS — Lurching for a third day through the bone-dry chaparral of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Loma Fire by Wednesday had grown in size by 10 percent, a sizzling 2,250-acre blaze with 300 homes in its path and more than 1,000 firefighters trying to rein it in.
The human force fighting the Loma Fire had doubled since Tuesday afternoon, reaching 1,092 by sunup, with fresh crews stepping in at 9 a.m. to relieve firefighters from around the region who had worked through the night. Yet despite harnessing an arsenal of aircraft, bulldozers and other heavy equipment to throw at the flames, the fire proved to be stubborn and unpredictable, and only 10 percent of it was contained by midday.
There was a bit of good news, too: No deaths or serious injuries have been reported, and the record-high temperatures that had bedeviled firefighters early in the week were beginning to cool a bit, with highs on Wednesday afternoon just south of 90 degrees and temperatures dropping steadily into the weekend.
The evacuation order was lifted Wednesday afternoon in Santa Cruz County, according to the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office.
While fire officials confirmed that the blaze began with a structure fire Monday afternoon near Loma Prieta and Loma Chiquita roads, they were still unable to provide more details about the building’s owner or what may have caused the fire to start just as a Cal Fire helicopter crew happened to be passing overhead en route to an unrelated call.
As the morning shift began, and fatigued firefighters came down out from the sparsely-populated 3,800-feet-high Loma Prieta ridgeline where the fire is clustered, Cal Fire released new figures on the Loma Fire’s impact: one home destroyed, six outbuildings gone, a second home damaged, and hundreds of residents forced to flee their mountainside homes.
Residents, however, say that at least three homes have been destroyed.
Some of the homeowners had been gone since the blaze broke out mid-afternoon Monday, sending a mushroom cloud into the sky that by Wednesday morning resembled a massive volcanic plume that could be seen across the Bay Area.
“In the first 24 to 48, even in the first 72 hours, you’re going to see a huge influx of resources come in and then we can really start with boots on the ground,” said Cal Fire spokesman Bud Englund. “That’s how we put out that fire, really, with those boots on the ground.”
The Loma fire hasn’t acted like previous fires: It took a hard run southeast, then another hard run northeast. It’s rushing down canyons — not only up them, as usual. Expanding like rings in a lake, not directed by the wind, “this is fuel-driven fire — it doesn’t need wind behind it,” said Mike Martin, Cal Fire’s command battalion chief.
So combustible is the landscape of drought-dried chaparral and pine that the Loma fire’s “spot fires” are igniting more than a quarter mile away from the main blaze, Martin said. Some flames are unusually high, up to 60 to 70 feet tall. Other flames have burned horizontally across a wide asphalt road, sometimes for over a minute.
About 300 homes are at risk — all along upper Summit Road, Loma Chiquita Road, Casa Loma Road, Croy Road, the rural area called Twin Falls and the cabins at the Sveadal resort at the end of a narrow wooded canyon west of Morgan Hill. A set of radio towers that repeat signals across the mountains is also in the danger zone.
The Loma fire ignited at the end of a long, dry summer and amid five years of drought. Across the nation, daily high-temperature records were set this summer, following a winter and spring that were the warmest ever recorded.
“This year started out dry and got drier,” Martin said.
Added Cal Fire Battalion Chief Mike Mathiesen: “It’s the new normal, with climate change and drought.”
Dave, a volunteer firefighter with the Casa Loma Volunteer Fire Association who didn’t want his last name published, lives about a mile from where it started and said a large swath of the area now looks like a moonscape.
“It moved through so fast and so hot, everything’s gone,” he said.
He worked alongside Cal Fire crews through the night and said things got “really intense” when winds picked up in the early morning hours.
“That really caused it to explode; I was witnessing little fire twisters,” he said, adding that Cal Fire’s emphasis on defending structures likely saved many from losing everything.
“Obviously our focus is life and property, so structures, homes, are a high priority for us, and we’re going to do structure defense and take precaution in those areas,” Englund said. “Those will be the areas we work on the most.”
Evidence of the fire’s fury were everywhere Wednesday morning along Loma
Chiquita and Loma Prieta roads where charred hillsides dominated the
landscape. On Loma Chiquita, a metal gate leading to a downhill driveway was
charred. A tiny statue of a lion was burned but still standing. The smoke-filled canyon made it difficult to see as crews made their way deeper into the mountain to fight the blaze.
A crew from Santa Clara County fire arrived mid Wednesday morning and began putting out hot spots along a steep hillside on Summit Road. The firefighters carefully made their way down the embankment.
Fire officials confirmed that a structure was involved in the erupting initial fire, near Loma Prieta and Loma Chiquita roads. It’s on the southern edge of Santa Clara County almost exactly between Highway 17 and Highway 101.
Spokeswoman Pam Temmermand said a Cal Fire helicopter had been en route to an unrelated incident in Santa Cruz shortly before 3 p.m. Monday when the pilot saw smoke and flames coming “from a fully involved structure fire. That’s where it started.’’
She said the crew called in the fire and that the pilot dropped off several firefighters. The pilot told her that by the time the chopper was taking off “the fire was already an acre in size. And when he looked back after a bit, it was 25 acres. That’s how fast it was spreading.’’
But the actual cause wasn’t clear.
“They haven’t determined whether it was a grass or vegetation fire that spread to the structure or if it was a structure fire that spread to the grass,” said Capt. Brian Oliver of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, another incident spokesman.
So far, California has had a relatively modest fire year, with 621,897 acres burned in 2016 through Monday on all public and privately owned lands. That ranks this year fourth out of the past 10 in acres burned through Sept. 26 and is slightly above the 10-year average of 586,237 acres statewide.
However, nearly a quarter of all the acres burned in California so far this year have been from one fire, the Soberanes Fire, which has charred 128,380 acres in Big Sur, burning mostly on remote sections of the Los Padres National Forest over the past two months. That fire, started by a campfire at Garrapata State Park, is 81 percent contained, with 100 percent containment expected by this weekend.
Mandatory evacuations are still in place along the Loma Prieta ridge line, and Englund urged residents to stay out of the area. The number of evacuees was not available.
Staff writers Mark Gomez and Paul Rogers, and Santa Cruz Sentinel staff writer Ryan Masters contributed to this report.