California’s Largest Fire Cooling Down

When Santa Ana winds collided with a fire that sparked in Santa Paula — 44 miles from Santa Barbara — on December 4, they gave birth to the largest fire in California history, at least since 1932 when such stats were officially logged in. As of Saturday morning, the Thomas Fire had grown to 273,400 acres, surpassing San Diego’s Cedar Fire of 2003 which had burned across 273,246 acres. (Other fires have burned more homes or caused greater loss of life.) Thomas’s size leapt another 8,000 acres on Christmas Day when incident commanders connected a perimeter line on the fire map that brought total acreage to the current 281,620 with containment at 89 percent.

Of the tens of miles of containment line still to be achieved, all are on the Ventura County side of the fire and all located near the fire’s northern boundaries, near Cherry Creek, Lockwood, and Rose Valley just off Highway 33. Crews that once numbered more than 8,000 are now down to 688. Engines, once up to 1,000, are now down to 14. Of the 688 firefighters, about half are on the fire at any given time.

The crews that had been cutting lines around the fire all week, scraping the earth and mopping up hot spots, are now monitoring a fire that has begun to cool, said Terry Krasko, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson normally assigned to Ozark-St. Francis National Forest in Arkansas. “They’re on watch to make sure everything is staying how we want it to stay.”