On June 27, 1990 the Painted Cave claimed two lives and burned 5,000 acres in Santa Barbara County.
On this Wednesday evening at 6:02 pm, Santa Barbara County firefighters responded to a call for a brush fire at Highway 154 and Painted Cave Road.
It was an abnormally hot day with temperatures reaching a record 109 degrees and sundowner winds kicking up to 40 mph. Within 20 minutes of arriving on the scene, the two-acre fire reached 70-feet in the air and traveled over 2 miles. It jumped Highway 101 about an hour and forty minutes later moving into Santa Barbara neighborhoods.
The Painted Cave Fire raged for five days, destroyed 430 structures, and killed two people. Andrea Lang Gurka, age 37, died while fleeing the flames along San Marcos Pass Road and an unnamed state prisoner died while working as a firefighter.
Investigators quickly determined the fire started due to arson but it was another five years until Leonard Ross was sued for allegedly igniting the fire in an attempt to “burn out his neighbor” when the fire “got out of hand.”
The Santa Barbara County Fire Department reminds residents that wildfire can happen fast—day or night. Now is the time to prepare defensible space, harden your home, and know your evacuation
plan.
Robert Bernstein put together photos from that day and created a post for the fire’s 30th anniversary. See all of his photos and read his memories from that day here.
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I owned property near to Ross’ targeted neighbor and lost everything in the fire. For many years prior to Ross setting this fire, the neighbor bullied all the people who shared adjacent property lines. He sued anyone who got in his way and after the fire he finally lost his last court case in a landmark decision where his character was brutally taken down by the presiding judge. What Leonard Ross did was wrong, but his actions were triggered by a selfless individual,
Surfbum, your post gave me a visceral shock. I lived up there too, but had moved into town well before the fire. Linthicum is the bully. This is what the land he managed to take over looks like now:
(I hope this works. It’s a tragedy, a travesty.)
https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B028'40.9%22N+119%C2%B047'33.7%22W/@34.47804,-119.792695,670m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m4!3m3!8m2!3d34.47804!4d-119.792695?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDYyMy4yIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Before the fire there were 3 small houses there; the land was treated well.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/ca-court-of-appeal/1111976.html
I was having dinner with my old mountain neighbors at Harry’s while their home, their everything, burned that night. At least they were in town. They wouldn’t have gotten out alive.
Thank you. I was about to post the Linthicum v. Butterfield link but you did it for me. I errored in the use of the term “selfless.” It should have been “selfish” which is a far to mild attribute to the repulsive Dickensian character of Mike Linthicum. People like him unfortunately create the Luigi Mangiones in our society.
You probably meant selfish. He was certainly not selfless!
I assumed you meant the arsonist, but maybe you meant his intended victim, in which case I retract that remark.
He obviously meant that the bullying neighbor was selfish.
That was a crazy evening. I remember it well. The “Dump fire” happened at the same time. It was so freaking hot and windy that day. The guy who started it – what an absolute psycho.
Hso 40 acres were auctioned off to pay for the expense of the fires. Per the I dependent, he used to make solar powered butterfly sculptures and sold them at the Arts and Crafts Faire. It also states Ross had a.motorcycle parts shop he allegedly set on fire in 78 to pay for the 40 acre land downpayment at Painted Cave. He later confessed to a girlfriend about setting the fires…so sad how one man changed the lives of so many over greed and the inability to.work things out with his neighbor.
As I’ve mentioned before, this fire moved at 60mph making it hard to outrun on open roads, let alone in traffic. I wonder how many (few) people have built adequate shelter in place fire shelters since this hard lesson. Humans are slow learners, natural selection is a slow process and shelters are costly until compared with loss of life.
Yes open roads completely congested with traffic making it impossible for people to evacuate. Now the senate moved to reduce CEQA protections for the public to push dangerous High Density Housing. This will further trap people during evacuations. With fire maps expanded evacuations all along Hollister will be impossible.
SB607
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260SB607
Build, baby, build!
I I remember this so clearly! All of my dogs were out in the backyard playing in the started barking. My dogs knew that barking was not allowed unless there was a real genuine reason I couldn’t imagine a real genuine reason in the middle of a crushingly hot afternoon. I went out there to see what was going on and I saw all of them were looking up at the hills. I looked up there to and there was the smoke.
At the time, I was working at my friend Colleen’s grooming shop on State Street, and I lived in Goleta. I recall our shop and that next door filling up with evacuated pets, several of whom had varying fire related injuries.
I was living in Goleta, my parents and brother lived in Santa Barbara in Mission Canyon, and I had no way to find out if they were all alive or dead. It was absolutely terrifying. Fortunately for us, we were all okay, even though I had to deal with worrying about evacuations all of my dogs, we had a travel trailer that I hooked up to my van and got all prepped to get them all evacuated out of the area because there was no way we would be able to get to a shelter with any pets at all let alone as many dogs as I had at that time.
I absolutely hate fire. My brother and I survived a house fire as children and it really leaves a mark on you in ways that can’t be seen with the eye.
Surfbum thank you for your honest and important observations on how this all happened. The system is badly broken when horrible people are able to get away with terrorizing others. Bad enough when it led to such a devastating catastrophe as the Painted Cave fire. You have my deepest sympathy for your terrible loss.
But now we have this behavior on a national scale. Indeed this is what creates the “Luigi recourse”. The Supreme Court pretty much stated this when they said that Trump has immunity for any illegal action. And that Federal judges can’t even stop unconstitutional actions. Of course the better solution would be to fix the system so that horrible people cannot harm others.
Thanks to a fellow hiker telling me about this article that I otherwise would not have seen. I am honored that my photos have been shared. They had sat unseen for 30 years.
Surfbum, again, thank you for your courageous honesty.