Lightning storm rolls through SLO County, sparking brush fires

Update 8 p.m.

Three fires in San Luis Obispo County are still listed as active overnight, according to CAL Fire.



“The Whale Fire near Cayucos is holding at 120-acres and is 20% contained”, Cal Fire PIO Adan Orozco said. “A fire on Sunrise Ridge Rd. near Templeton, which started around the same time as the Whale Fire, is at 15-acres and is 15% contained.

Another fire on Rancho Rd. in Nipomo grew to 68-acres and is 80% contained.

The cause of each fire has not been determined. “It may take a day or so to determine the cause,” Orozco said.

Evacuation warnings are still in place for the Whale Fire. Old Creek Rd. road closures are still in effect.



Update 6:30 p.m.



“The Whale Fire is holding at 120-acres and is 20% contained”, according to CAL Fire PIO Adan Orozco. “Fire crews will be on scene for at least two or three days.”



“We cannot officially confirm the fire was started by lightning at this time, but there was a lot of lightning around the area at the time the fire started. Fire investigators are still working on the cause.” Orozco said.



Road Closures: Old Creek Rd at Highway 46 and Old Creek Rd at Santa Rita Rd are still closed. No estimate of when they will open.

Update 5:00 p.m.

At 4 p.m. CAL Fire advises the vegetation fire on Old Creek Rd. at Whale Rock Reservoir near Cayucos, has grown to 120-acres. The fire behavior has moderated, according to CAL Fire tweet.

A lightning storm rumbled through the Central Coast on Saturday morning, sparking fires from Santa Ynez to Cayucos.

About 11 a.m., Cal Fire SLO dispatched firefighters to a vegetation fire possibly caused by a lightning strike on Reservoir Canyon Road, just off Highway 101 in San Luis Obispo. The department put out a request for additional units shortly after.

Firefighters also responded to fire reportedly caused by a lightning strike near Whale Rock Reservoir.



At 12:05 p.m., an evacuation warning was issued for the Cottontail Creek Road area, according to Cal Fire incident command scanner traffic.

The fire near Whale Rock Reservoir is reportedly almost 40 acres.

A road closure was issued on Old Creek Road at Highway 46 in Templeton, and Old Creek Road at Santa Rita Road, according to the California Highway Patrol’s dispatch incident log.

In response to the unusual weather, Cal Fire SLO issued a “lightning coordination response plan, level one,” according to Public Information Officer Adan Orozco.

The plan changes the type of response Cal Fire usually employs when responding to a vegetation fire. Instead, they will start with a lighter response, rather than the heavy response normally issued for wildland fires. The initial units will survey the severity of the fire and request more equipment accordingly, Orozco said.

PG&E reported multiple power outages throughout SLO County.

In the South County, more than 600 customers were without power Saturday morning near the Trilogy development and east of North Thompson Road in Nipomo, as well as along Huasna Road in rural Arroyo Grande.

In the North County, outages knocked out power to about 300 customers along Santa Lucia Road in Atascadero; south of Highway 46 West in Templeton; along Peachy Canyon Road near Adelaida; and near the intersection of Creston and South El Pomar roads in Paso Robles.

PG&E meteorologist John Lindsey said the quirky weather was caused by an upper-level low-pressure system about 750 miles southwest of the Central Coast that picked up subtropical moisture and sent it northward to SLO and Santa Barbara counties.

That created a line of thunderstorms that moved northward along the Central Coast with frequent lightning and isolated periods of moderate to heavy rainfall.

Lindsey said the Saturday morning system would continue to move up the coast of California through the afternoon.

Fires, power outages in Santa Barbara County

In northern Santa Barbara County, lightning strikes earlier in the morning sparked multiple fires and knocked out power to thousands of customers.

About 8:30 a.m., personnel from the Santa Barbara County Fire Department and Los Padres National Forest responded to the Alisal Ranch area for a report of smoke following lightning strikes, county Fire Capt. Daniel Bertucelli said.

As a Santa Barbara County helicopter flew overhead to help firefighters get to the scene of the hard-to-access small fire, another incident was reported near Drum Canyon and Centennial Street in Los Alamos.

That fire had burned about 2 acres, with some resources from the Solvang incident diverted to Los Alamos with that blaze estimated as having the potential to grow to 10 acres.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., a third fire was reported near La Purisima Golf Course off Highway 246.

More than 9,000 Pacific Gas & Electric Company customers in the Santa Ynez Valley and Los Alamos area were without power after multiple outages.

Personnel from the Santa Maria, Lompoc, Santa Barbara City and Vandenberg fire departments also responded to assist with the numerous incidents.

In the Santa Maria Valley, firefighters responded to a tree on fire on the 200 block of East Foster Road, and a structure fire involving a fence in the 4500 block of Edenbury Drive with an open gas line nearby.

With resources spread thin, an off-duty Montecito batallion chief responded to the Orcutt structure fire to help and asked for Southern California Gas Co. personnel to be dispatched to the scene, according to emergency dispatch reports.

As of 11 a.m., significant resources were focused on two other incidents, one called the Surf Fire at Hollister Ranch and another at Vandenberg Air Force Base where crews estimated flames had charred a couple of acres and that the fire had the the potential to grow to 150 acres, according to emergency dispatch reports.

No rolling blackouts in SLO County

The unsettled weather came one day after a statewide heat wave forced energy managers to initiate rolling blackouts for hundreds of thousands of customers across California.

No blackouts occurred in SLO or Santa Barbara counties, and Lindsey said none were forecast at this time.

The California Independent System Operator, which runs the state’s electricity grid, told the Sacramento Bee that it believed it had enough capacity to avoid further blackouts this weekend.

“We don’t anticipate any emergency declarations,” ISO spokeswoman Anne Gonzales told The Bee, adding that “conditions remain challenging,” especially going into the beginning of the week when temperatures could top 110 degrees at various locations around the state.

In SLO County, Lindsey said forecasts show Paso Robles could hit highs of 115 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday, which would match the county’s all-time record, set in Paso on July 20, 1960, and again Sept. 2, 2017.

Records could also fall in San Luis Obispo, which could hit the high 90s, Lindsey said.

Triple-digit heat in Paso Robles likely will last all the way through next weekend, he added.

This story was originally published August 15, 2020 at 11:14 AM.