In Santa Barbara and Ventura counties, conditions are ideal for a wildfire to rapidly spread upon ignition, according to an expert from the UC Santa Barbara Wildfire Resilience Initiative.

“Right now the circumstances are ripe to support an extreme, out-of-control wildfire,” geography professor and UCSB Wildfire Initiative director Alan Murray said. Courtesy Mike Eliason
“Right now the circumstances are ripe to support an extreme, out-of-control wildfire,” geography professor and UCSB Wildfire Initiative director Alan Murray said. “And [if] it’s a warm day and we still have not had any measurable rain, the conditions, yes, are ripe. We have fuel. We have vegetation that wants to burn, and if it gets ignited, it will burn.”
The only program of its kind across the UC campuses, UCSB’s Wildfire Resilience Initiative — founded in 2022 — is a consortium of UCSB faculty and staff who develop and apply technology, resilience research, satellite data and meteorological information for the “understanding, prevention and mitigation” of extreme wildfire events, according to its website.
Notably, the initiative also found that it “would be difficult to evacuate quickly,” Murray said, in the case of a major evacuation because of the infrastructure of I.V. roads and since there are only three primary routes to exit from. Approximately 24,000 people live in I.V. and 5,000 people live on campus. In Pacific Palisades, many evacuees were held up on roads when leaving due to limited space.
In the ongoing Los Angeles fires, Santa Ana winds helped spread embers which led to the unprecedented scale of the Palisades fire, which has burned 23,000 acres so far according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE).
Wildfires aren’t new to Santa Barbara County either. The seventh-largest wildfire in California history occurred in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. The 2017 Thomas fire burned approximately 280,000 acres, killing two people, and was caused by a Southern California Edison (SCE) power line falling and igniting dead vegetation, according to the Ventura County Fire Department.
It has become routine since then for SCE, the region’s main power provider, to shut off power in Ventura County during wildfire season to prevent such a wildfire from occurring again. Santa Ana winds helped fan the Thomas fire flames, but Murray says those winds are usually more of a concern for parts of Ventura and San Diego.
Since Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires began two weeks ago, areas in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties have experienced power shutoffs by SCE. The energy provider distributes frequent warnings of potential power shutoffs due to the risk posed by winds causing SCE power lines to fall.
“We don’t get them because of the geography of this area. The Santa Ynez Mountains are [large] enough that we don’t get those,” Murray said.
“But when the pressure systems are aligned a little differently, we do get something here,” he continued. “We call [them] sundowner winds.”
Sundowner winds are of comparable strength to the Santa Ana winds — 30 to 70 miles per hour — and are created by the “different alignment of pressure systems,” Murray said. Because the Santa Ynez Mountains have a unique east-west orientation, wind pressure systems create a pressure difference in space that favors northerly winds, according to Wildfire Resilience Initiative research. Most mountains have a different orientation, making these winds unique to Santa Barbara.
Sundowners create the worst weather conditions for wildfires in coastal Santa Barbara, the initiative found.
They are called sundowners because they tend to intensify in the evenings after the cooling of the mountain slopes, the initiative’s primary researcher on sundowners and professor Leila Carvalho found. The biggest difference with Santa Ana winds is that sundowners are stronger at night and have unusual spatial and temporal variability which makes them difficult to predict.
Characteristic of sundowners, warm winds can increase the temperature in mountain regions increasing risk of wildfires in the Santa Ynez Mountains. Currently, an excess of dead vegetation in the region could be significant fuel for a wildfire.
“Any fire could potentially become super significant, and we have seen them in the past, right, that these fires in the Santa Ynez [Mountains] can be driven down in minutes right to very populated, well, 200,000 people in this coastal Santa Barbara area,” Murray said.
Wildfires are a natural occurrence in wildlands areas. However, the presence of excess dead vegetation due to the last 11 months of sparse rain and the extreme winds can help spread flames to create catastrophic wildfires like in Pacific Palisades.
“Fire is inevitable, and it is a part of our past, and it will be a part of our future. And so the problem, though, is under these extreme conditions — and that’s what we saw in Pacific Palisades and near Pasadena, Altadena — is that you have these high winds, you have this fire event, and now embers are being carried a half a mile, a mile, two miles,” Murray said.
In such extreme weather conditions, prevention measures for wildfires like creating defensible space — areas between homes that have been cleared of combustible materials to slow or stop the spread of fires — or hardening structures — switching out combustible material for more resilient materials — go “out the window.”
The initiative studied fire hydrant locations throughout I.V. and their proximity to residences, and found that over 99% of residences conform to a policy that hydrants should have a 150-foot unobstructed pathway to structures. But “even a fraction means almost 200 structures do not [conform],” Murray said.
“The fires are increasing exponentially, both the number and the size of these fires. So it’s true that historically, we’ve had extreme fire events. That isn’t really new,” Murray said. “But to have an extreme — the worst fire that we’ve ever seen every year or multiple times a year, that’s unprecedented.”
As for what people can do, he recommended residents build defensible space in their communities and harden their structures.
A version of this article appeared on p. 5 of the Jan. 23, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.