Today marked the toughest day so far in the battle against the Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara County, as the blaze flared up early this morning under heavy, steady, and predicted winds. “It was just a constant fire front all day long up there,” said U.S. Forest Service Division Chief Mark von Tillow before this afternoon’s town hall meeting at San Marcos High School. “I was up there [near the west fork of Cold Springs Canyon off Gibraltar Road], and the wind was coming pretty much straight out of the north, at about 40 miles an hour, I’d say.”
Incident commanders didn’t have a precise update on how many more acres had burned today and didn’t want to release that number without concrete information. As of Saturday evening, the Thomas Fire had burned 267,500 acres — ranking as the third largest wildfire since California started keeping count — with containment at 40 percent.
“We made a lot of preparations for this wind event [today],” said Santa Barbara County Fire Chief Eric Peterson, detailing how ground crews have been cutting and reinforcing firebreaks as helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft have dumped millions of gallons of water and retardant. Currently, he said, there are 400 trucks in the Montecito area, today’s focal point. “We had five days to prepare for this,” he said. “That’s why we’ve had no injuries and [only] minor structural damage. But we’re in a pretty severe firefight right now.”