Colorado Fire at 45% containment, crews say

Humidity levels help, but residents staying on alert

Containment of the Colorado Fire, which sparked near the Big Sur coast on Friday amid strong, offshore winds, reached 45% on Tuesday morning as hundreds remain evacuated from their homes, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Ongoing onshore winds, higher humidity levels and fog in Monterey County could bode well for the firefighters continuing to battle the blaze.

The fire had burned 700 acres, and 500 people remained under evacuation orders, according to Cal Fire spokesperson Cecile Juliette. Highway 1 was still closed from Garrapata Creek to Point Sur; flames damaged one yurt and threatened hundreds of structures on Sunday. On Tuesday, 53 fire engines and 476 personnel were at the scene to help fight the fire.

Humidity levels rose to 60 to 70 percent on Monday, according to Juliette. Onshore winds moving across the ocean towards the land also brought cooler air, increased the humidity and moisture levels and decreased heat in the region. Similar conditions were expected through Tuesday afternoon.

“That’s good,” Juliette said. “It was very foggy (Tuesday) morning. It’s still windy out there. We can get gusts up to 20 to 30 miles per hour.”

The National Weather Service said humidity levels could reach higher than 80 percent and that the majority of the winds remained “very light,” under 10 miles per hour.

“Between the light winds, cool temperatures and high humidity, basically the weather’s completely in their favor at this point,” said NWS forecaster Ryan Walbrun.

The blaze started Friday shortly after 5 p.m. near Palo Colorado Road and canyon in Big Sur during strong winds that also knocked out power for tens of thousands of people in the East Bay. The fire inched along Long Ridge toward the iconic Bixby Bridge, but left the iconic arches untouched.

Around 1,110 customers lost power from Friday night through around midday Sunday, impacting people in Big Sur, Monterey and Carmel, according to PG&E.

Juliette said officials still haven’t nailed down a date or time to lift the evacuation orders and that people could still be injured by falling debris or hit by cars near the fire area.

“I was out on the fire line yesterday and there was so much emergency traffic,” she said. “It’s still very dangerous out there. There’s still falling rock. We have fire trucks, big equipment and a helicopter landing right next to the highway. It’s just not safe to have a lot of cars on that road.”

The fire no longer had an “active, huge flame front” on Tuesday but the blaze is still emitting “lots of smoke,” Juliette said.

The Colorado Fire comes off the heels of a relatively wet water year, which began on Oct. 1 and a series of storms in December that helped soothe drought conditions for Northern California and replenish the state’s snowpack. December was the 21st wettest on record for San Francisco, which has climate records dating back to1849. As of Tuesday, the Monterey airport received 8.97 inches of rain since Oct. 1, compared to 2.14 inches it received last year in that same time period.

“This area in January, especially in Monterey County, gets the most rain out of the entire county and here we are at the end of January, in the time that’s supposed to be the rainy season,” Juliette said. “It just speaks to the dryness of the region and the fact that everybody in California needs to be ready to evacuate, not just in the summer months but all year round.”

Nearly three weeks of dry conditions in January allowed the chaparral on the mountainsides of Big Sur to dry out and become more prone to catching fire. Coupled with climate change and years of ongoing long-term drought, the dry spell has made the concept of an around-theyear wildfire season more common.

“After a month of fairly dry weather, where the fire burned, there was no real recent fire history,” Walbrun said. “What that means is that it’s a lot of unburned fuels, literally decades, if not longer, of built-up material and then … so at the ground level, that was pretty dry and the fire was able to carry through and keep the brush and fuels lit. Common sense says we shouldn’t be having fires in January after a very wet fall but when you have the right fire conditions, which we had on Friday night with the low humidity and winds, that proved not to be the case.”