Big Sur blaze may be most expensive
Soberanes Fire tests resolve, threatens to break U.S. records
BIG SUR — Perched on a sunsoaked mountainside, Joel Berg dripped with sweat after cutting a thicket of dry brush with a chainsaw and a shovel.
The 29-year-old firefighter was midway through his 16-hour shift last week at the leading edge of the Soberanes Fire, the huge blaze south of Monterey that may become the most expensive wildfire to battle in U.S. history.
It was Berg’s 14th straight day of work in the rugged Big Sur high country — the last before he’d go home to see his wife — amid his second twoweek stint in the ongoing effort to
create a line of defensible space around the exceedingly stubborn burn.
While most of the smoke from the fire has cleared above the fabled stretch of Central California coastline, and tales of 100-foot flames ravaging dozens of homes no longer make headlines, the 2½month-old inferno has continued to wear on Monterey County — testing residents, the tourist-driven economy, the majestic redwood stands and the firefighters.
“There’s just no shade up here,” said Berg, a hotshot from Humboldt County, as temperatures in the dusty hills far from any ocean breeze pushed into the 90s. “No trees. No relief from the sun. Day after day, it kind of gets to you.”
U.S. Forest Service officials don’t expect to carve a containment line around the 206square-mile fire until the middle of the month. Parts of Big Sur, they say, could smolder through December.
The protracted firefight, which has cost an estimated $235 million so far, has required thousands of personnel as well as myriad support that goes well beyond the emerging “Thank you firefighters” signs. Tent cities have upended roadsides, ranches and sports fields with planes, catering trucks and sleeper trailers.
Base Camp Manager Eric Verdries, who holds shop in a yurt at the county’s Toro Park near Salinas, was recently making sure that the 1,100 firefighters still on the job were properly equipped.
“It’s my job to support them,” he said, noting an equipment inventory that has included some 265 portable potties, 60 shower stalls and 13 industrial-size dumpsters.
Food Unit Leader Mike Chapman, who also works at the sprawling fire camp, estimated last week that the cook staff had prepared more than 400,000 meals, not including the pot roast that was on the menu that evening.
“We can have everything from taco night to junk food night with hot dogs and hamburgers to prime rib,” Chapman said. “The joke is when fire burns, pigs die.”
No one imagined the scope of the Soberanes Fire when it began on the morning of July 22 on the northern end of the sparsely populated Big Sur coast, south of Carmel Highlands. An illegal campfire in Garrapata State Park ignited it, authorities say, but the culprits are unknown.
The raging fire obliterated 57 homes in its initial tear through an area that hadn’t burned since the 1950s before turning southward into undeveloped state and federal lands.
The blaze, which set the stage for the death of a bulldozer driver whose vehicle flipped in a steep canyon, currently ranks as California’s 18th largest in terms of acreage burned.
It’s not only the sheer size of the fire, but also the presence of remote homes, isolated lodges and mountain retreats that explains why the response has been so challenging — and expensive — according to Robert Baird, supervisor for the Los Padres National Forest.
“There are fingers of structures and communities that we’ve had to surround,” he said, pointing to a map at base camp that showed far-flung valleys and ridges where crews were defending buildings. “We’re not just blindly digging a line around the fire.”
California’s five-year drought and a general trend toward longer and fiercer fire seasons — often attributed to climate change — are factors that have intensified the burn.
While the costs of suppression are high, Baird estimates that firefighters have saved $6.8 billion worth of real estate.
The National Interagency Fire Center, which tracks firefighting costs, could not confirm the blaze as the nation’s priciest, saying inflation and other accounting snags were yet to be considered. However, the preliminary expenses are far greater than those racked up at other giants, including the $134 million Biscuit Fire on the Oregon-California border in 2002 and the $127 million Rim Fire around Yosemite in 2013.
The toll of the latest inferno extends to Big Sur’s famed wilderness.
The initial fury of the fire pierced the largely resilient groves of redwoods that rule over the coastline. Fire bore deep into the cores of the iconic trees while heat penetrated the shallow root systems, killing an untold number of the centuries-old titans.
While flames lapped against the county’s largest tree, a 150-foot-tall monster with a 60-foot circumference at Big Sur Land Trust’s Mitteldorf Preserve, the redwood survived.
But a Pacific madrone registered as the largest of its type in the United States was not as fortunate. The tree at the state’s Joshua Creek Canyon Ecological Reserve swelled with fire and is not likely to recover.
“For things to look like they did before the fire, it’s going to take many years, in the order of decades,” said Jonathan Pangburn, a Cal Fire forester who oversees Monterey County.
The conflagration has largely cooled in the thick forests along Highway 1, taking residence in the dry, chaparral-covered mountains inland. The less dense trees and shrubs at higher elevations, pruned by previous blazes like the 2008 Basin Complex Fire, have tempered the fire’s advance.
Still, many of the coast’s half dozen state parks that closed because of the Soberanes Fire remain shut down, including the popular Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park along the
Big Sur River and Andrew Molera State Park atop Pacific bluffs.
The closures, along with smoky skies, have been responsible for reducing tourism in the region’s small towns as much as 60 percent, according to business owners.
“It’s been the largest economic hit we’ve seen in Big Sur,” said Kirk Gafill, whose family runs the landmark Nepenthe restaurant at mile marker 43.9 on Highway 1, where Bohemian outcasts and literary hopefuls famously converged in the 1950s and 1960s. Author Henry Miller was known to sip Courvoisier at the bar.
Today, much of the coast’s counterculture vibe has been lost to luxury hotels and spas, and a burger at Nepenthe will set you back $17.50. Still, both businesses catering to wealthy San Franciscans and those serving the backpacker crowd endure — and are happy to see visitors begin to return.
Local restaurant worker Aldo Resendiz, 20, who lives with his parents in the town of Big Sur, said he’s most excited about seeing the roads open after many were shut down during the firefight, including Highway 1.
“If you stayed here, you were stuck here. If you went to town, you were stuck in town,” he said. “It was all pretty inconvenient.”