Hello MET Neighbors,
I am pleased to share SB Fire Chief Mark Hartwig's reply to my question today about increasing patrols during the Red Flag emergency. BTW, thanks MET (Phil, Ina and all) for cleaning up the burnt over Eucalyptus Forest and for keeping Painted Cave Road so fire ready. Much appreciated!
Yes Mr. Sichi. Due to the elevated fire risk, will have augmented staffing for the next three days (72hours). I expect you’ll see white engines (County Fire), green engines (USFS), and maybe a red engine or two (other local government) patrolling the pass communities. Mark
Excellent! Thank you, Gordon for the update. The Forest Service is on 24 hour shifts through Monday and will reassess then. They are doing evening patrols across ECC (St 41, in our area) each night until 10pm, but will be available the rest of the night. Painted Cave community members are driving the mountain roads to make sure there are no shenanigans going on, and SMPVFD is doing patrols on OSM, Stagecoach, and WCC. The temps ar dropping and the humidity has gone up, although UCSB has predicted that there will be an intensification of temps and winds between the hours of 8pm and 10pm tonight and tomorrow. We'll see how that manifests.....