Before Midland School received mandatory evacuation orders for the Lake Fire, Midland Dean of Academics Ellie Moore drove back to the property several times to retrieve photos and memorabilia from fellow faculty members’ homes on campus, Moore told the Sun.
“Everything else is so rehearsed, but going on FaceTime with my coworkers and saying, ‘Take my mother’s ashes, and photos of my siblings,’” Moore said. “It’s pretty surreal to do. That was the strangest part.”
Founded in 1932, Midland is a boarding high school on Figueroa Mountain Road in Los Olivos with about 80 students living on campus full-time during the school year and several faculty members who live on campus year round, including Moore, she said. The 3,000-acre property sits on the edge of the San Rafael wilderness and adjacent to Figueroa Mountain. The school’s 20-acre farm is home to 21 horses, 16 cattle, and 60 to 80 chickens.
With the campus evacuated as of July 7, teams have been using Midland School’s dormitories and cafeteria as shelter and its soccer fields as a staging area to assist with fire suppression.
While Midland’s faced wildfires throughout the years and the school holds regular fire drills, “it’s an anomaly to go through this in the summer,” Moore said.
“It’s more challenging to deal with evacuating … in worst-case scenarios because we have fewer hands on deck,” she said.
The Lake Fire ignited near Zaca Lake on July 5 and has burned more than 38,000 acres, damaged four structures, and caused six injuries. The blaze was 38 percent contained as of July 15, and it’s one of more than 3,800 wildfires burning across the state.
“The fire behavior is active with some long-range spotting, and parts of the fire are moving into areas with no recorded fire history,” according to Cal Fire.
Santa Barbara County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato proclaimed a local emergency to ensure that all county resources are available for Lake Fire control efforts due to its threats to Santa Ynez, Los Olivos, and surrounding farms, ranches, homes, campgrounds, and state routes 154 and 176, according to a July 12 statement from Santa Barbara County.
“The July 2024 Lake Fire is still burning and continuing to create dangerous conditions to the safety and well-being of persons and property within Santa Barbara County. In addition, the longer this emergency goes on, the greater impact it will have on the economy of our county,” Miyasato said in the statement.
While the 2007 Zaca Lake burn scar sits nearby, 17 years of recovery, two years of heavy rainfall, and two minimal wildfire seasons have created historic levels of grass and chaparral, leaving room for the fire to spread rapidly without running into old burn scars and dying out, according to previous Sun reporting.
More than 3,207 fire personnel were split into a North Zone and a South Zone to ensure that strategic, logistical, and operational functions are met as the fire grows in complexity, according to Cal Fire.
The North Zone is focused on holding the fire at the Sisquoc River and along Zaca Ridge to the east, according to Inciweb, a database that tracks wildfires. The South Zone has created buffer zones in the fire areas to control lines and prevent the fire from traveling farther south into residential areas.
The fire has continued southeast through the Davey Brown, Ranger Peak, and Goat Rock areas. Approximately 2,166 people within the evacuation warning and order areas have been impacted by the Lake Fire.
Moore left her home on Midland School property at 12:30 a.m. on July 7 after the fire crested the ridgeline and burned into the school’s backyard, she said.
“We hadn’t been given a mandatory evacuation, but I was worried about what that looks like in the middle of the night with the fire being close to our Wi-Fi towers,” she said. “We decided to ring the bell and evacuate at that point.”
Midland faculty living on campus arrived at the Dunn School, a Los Olivos-based boarding school, at 1:30 a.m., she said.
“I’m currently in the dorms at Dunn with other displaced faculty at Midland, and the rest of us are scattered throughout the valley,” Moore said on July 8.
JD Scroggin, Dunn School director of marketing and communication, told the Sun that “it’s heartwarming for us to be able to offer help to these friends and services during a tough time.”
While Dunn School is not in an evacuation area as of July 16, the school paused its summer programming on July 10 due to air quality concerns, but they resumed on July 11 as conditions improved, Scroggin said.
“We are closely monitoring the progress of fighting the fire, closely monitoring things like air quality, evacuation zones, and evacuation warning zones,” Scroggin said. “We’ve communicated with all of our members and have updates on our website and via email each day to let them know that programming is moving forward as planned.”
Midland School Horse Program and Rangeland Conservation Director Regina Butala told the Sun that she was at the school’s barn when she saw the plume of smoke from the fire’s early days.
“We’ve had previous fires so we are well-acquainted with the risk and have plenty of evacuation plans,” Butala said. “I had to get all of my volunteers on standby for our horses; we needed to do it early because of that many animals.”
They transported horses to four different farms in the Santa Ynez area, and cattle were put in pastures with low vegetation and plenty of water, she said. The school had a prescribed burn on campus last fall to help with vegetation management, which burned about 280 acres, according to the county Air Pollution Control District.
“Since it happened so recently, we were really happy because it reduced our fuel load right on campus,” Butala said. “For this fire, I believe that presumptive management really helped probably reduce the risk for the spread of fire onto campus.”
Butala and two other faculty have an agricultural pass that allows them to travel back to the school site to irrigate crops and tend to animals remaining on campus, she said.
“We’ve done all that we can at this point—we’ve evacuated campus, horses are in safety, we’ve turned off important propane lines,” Butala said. “It’s just a sit and wait now, and we just have our trust in the fire department to protect the structures as they can.”
Hannah Nelson was in Indiana when Butala called her about the fire on July 5—five days after her first day on the job as head of Midland, Nelson told the Sun.
“I think one of my strengths is being able to act really calm in an emergency situation, being able to step back, see the big picture, being able to delegate and talk to people about what roles they need to do, asking questions,” Nelson said. “Now, the emergency itself is terrifying, right? Like we’re talking about losing land, potentially losing homes, all of these things that [are] so hard.”
Hailing from Longmont, Colorado, and having worked as a site incident manager, Nelson said that her background in emergency management and wildfire knowledge gave her a strong base knowledge immediately stepping into managing Midland’s emergency.
Nelson arrived in Los Olivos on July 11 to help with risk management, and she has been consistently communicating with parents and giving updates, she said.
“I don’t know what the first planned communication to the community would have been if the fire hadn’t happened,” Nelson said. “But then, those communications, it’s been an opportunity for me to connect to ... different big things that I’m seeing in general with the community, thanking them, appreciating them for this outpouring of support. … But then thinking about and connecting to the foundation of the school.”
Staff Writer Taylor O’Connor can be reached at toconnor@santamariasun.com.