Brush fire burning in rural Arroyo Grande

Grover Beach eradicated (rightfully so) a whole bunch of filthy homeless camps that were severely polluting the creeks and other areas along Highway 1 a couple-a-few years ago. Ever since that time, us neighbors to this hillside had experienced an enormous amount of homeless activity in this spot where the fire was started and our neighborhoods became frequented by those looking for anything of value left outside the home, or in cars, or any opportune spot to thieve. I’ve been saying for these past years, “It’s just a matter of time before that hillside blows up in a devastating fire due to encampments and the fires they ALWAYS seem to start”. After about a year of this, some of the flatland vegetation was bulldozed along the eastern edge of Valley Road from just south of the PG&E substation down to Hwy 1. This got rid of the obviously massive encampment that had been built, all out of insanely flammable materials mind you, but the problem worked its way up the hill into the forest of 120’+ Blue Gum Eucalyptus tree that are all surrounded with thick native chaparral that hasn’t burned for over 100 years (info that I have garnered from old families local to this spot that have never seen it burn).

Here we are today. The only saving grace in this scenario, IMO, was the fire started and ran a relatively treeless stretch of real estate straight up the hill along a powerline easement. Had those tree got started in a bigger way, this would have been absolutely catastrophic. Hats off to CalFire and all the mutual aid agencies for making the fast assessment and getting Air Attack on this immediately. If not for that method of containment, this would have been sheer disaster for the homes up top. The winds were not good for this spot, as usual. Fortunately humidity levels were high today and ground crew kicked ass.

Now, SLO COUNTY….what are you going to do about eradicating the transient camping issue? Time to sweep that whole hillside and get it removed before we have a repeat event. Imagine this happening a couple days ago with the winds and low humidity levels!