Vehicle Crash Off Highway 1 Sparks Brush Fire, Driver Nowhere to be Found

In the early hours of Saturday, a vehicle crash led to a fire that temporarily disrupted traffic on Highway 1, approximately one mile west of Highway 101.

At approximately 2:31 am, local fire crews responded to an alert of a vehicle that careened off the road into steep terrain.

The sedan went over the side of the westbound grade on Highway 1, igniting a fire upon impact that quickly spread to the surrounding thick vegetation, reports the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.

Santa Barbara County firefighting teams arrived on the scene to discover the sedan unoccupied and the vegetation fire threatening to expand. Their immediate and effective response knocked down the vehicle fire and halted the forward progress of the vegetation fire at a quarter of an acre by 3:15 am.

Amid concerns of potential victims, fire personnel deployed a drone equipped with a UAV thermal imagery camera to search the dense foliage. The terrain’s difficulty, compounded by the darkness, made the search for survivors or individuals associated with the vehicle challenging.

With no one found in the area, the Santa Barbara County Fire Department hand-crew, which had been requested to help with perimeter control and mop-up operations, was canceled.

However, to ensure complete safety, firefighters were set to remain on the scene, attending to and extinguishing any remaining hot spots for at least one to two hours.

While the westbound lane of Highway 1 remained open with restricted traffic flow to a single lane, the circumstances that led to the vehicle leaving the roadway are still under investigation.

The California Highway Patrol is additionally investigating the ownership of the vehicle involved in the incident.

Updates will follow as more information becomes available.