#ThomasFire 2017_12_16 6:02pm PST
by Doc Searls Saturday, December 16, 2017

The #ThomasFire is now burning in spots inside the Santa Barbara city limits, most obviously in Parma Park, which is a  rural park on the north side of Stanwood Drive/Highway 192. But there are still no reports of structures lost. Clearly many more are being saved. (Scroll to the bottom of this post for updates.)

There are 973 fire engines deployed on the Thomas Fire case, with at least 500 engaged or ready to go in Santa Barbara and Montecito. Or so KEYT just said, live, here.

I've put up a set of screen shots at http://bit.ly/thmsfr . The last of these is a map (also above) showing just the last six hours of VIIRS satellite fire-spotting.  Plotted on Google Earth, they show active fire in roughly these places:

  • The end of Terra Cielo Lane
  • East of Gibraltar Road, and north of West Mountain Drive
  • Alongside West Mountain Drive at a location VIIRS calls "Latitude: 34.45667, Longitude: -119.6801"
  • At the end of a private road on the north side of Mountain Drive, west of Coyote Road
  • East Mountain Raod and Upper Hyde
  • In the viscinity of the Tea Garden (where the Tea Fire started, nine years ago)
  • A region of huge estate homes on a private unnamed drive off of East Mountain Road, which VIIRS calls "Latitude: 34.45327, Longitude: -119.65039"

Note that VIIRS is a satellite that scans the whole Earth, pole to pole and doesn't pass over any one spot more than once per (I think) 24 hours. So this is not current. But it is kinda specific, and I'm not seeing this data unpacked elsewhere. So I'm sharing it here.

6:03pm: Capt. Zaniboni wants people to go to bed feeling optimistic. There are lots of firefighters, and equipment, dealing with the fire effectively, and the wind is slowing down. It can be gusty, but he feels good about it.

8:11pm: Water-dropping helicopters piloted with the aid of night vision headgear are being deployed against the fire. KEYT is covering that, and has night vision of its own. Again, go here for live coverage.