Weather Helps to Bring Wildfire in Gaviota Area Under Control

Authorities reopened a 30-mile stretch of U.S. 101 on Sunday evening and encouraged some 500 people to return home just hours after a wildfire had threatened havoc but subsided under mild temperatures, light winds and a bit of drizzle.

A railroad line in western Santa Barbara County remained closed after the Gaviota fire damaged two trestles, but traffic that had backed up for miles on other area highways freed up again. One home and three outbuildings were destroyed.

“Mother Nature was on our side today,” said Santa Barbara Country Fire Department spokesman Capt. Charlie Johnson. “The temperature was down, humidity was up and we didn’t get the strong erratic winds we had yesterday. There was a world of difference between yesterday and today.”

Officials spent much of Sunday worrying about evening winds that, when they came, were mild. State transportation officials scrambled to deal with a more than 30-mile traffic backup on California 154 after closing the popular 101 earlier in the day.

The blaze began midday Saturday near a highway rest stop, authorities suspect, and sped swiftly up the rugged ravines of the Santa Ynez Mountains, sweeping across 7,550 acres of chaparral, grass and scrub oak before it began to subside.

Seventy-two engines from as far away as Fresno and San Diego rushed to the scene. Officials brought in four bulldozers, four retardant-dropping planes and five helicopters. Faced with sheer coastal cliffs, many of the more than 1,000 firefighters were forced at times to battle the blaze from the highway.

The blaze subsided so rapidly that by Sunday evening, fire commanders had grounded the airplanes, saying the helicopters were enough, and inmate firefighters from the California Department of Corrections were eating dinner on El Capitan State Beach.

Craig Warriner, 48, and his friend Robert Gregory, 49, were headed home Sunday, a day after they had looked up from their surfboards and seen a billowing cloud of smoke -- in the direction of Warriner’s weekend house in Hollister Ranch.

The two had rushed to the house to find it safe, evacuated as authorities advised, returned later, gotten a good night’s sleep and another day of surfing in -- all in the time it took a fire to go from a potential disaster to yesterday’s news.

Warriner did not give all the credit to the weather, however.

“The good news about this fire was [the firefighters’] professionalism and expertise in combating it,” said Warriner, “and really making sure that the minimum amount of damage was suffered.”

The blaze burned through two petroleum storage facilities, but appeared to have caused relatively little damage. Most homes and businesses in the sparsely populated area lost electricity, but utility workers had restored power to most areas by evening.

“So far today the weather conditions have been more in our favor than not,” Johnson said. “That’s very good news.”

Times staff writers Christiana Sciaudone and Eric Slater contributed to this report.