To the north, on a hillside that butts up against his home, the smoking skeletons of three of his neighbor’s houses were visible through the burned limbs of oak trees. To the west, a steep slope littered with charred bushes and trees. To the south, downed power lines lie on the darkened earth (at the height of the fire’s siege in the canyon, the power lines fell on Martin’s deck). To the east, the blackened edges of the Santa Barbara Botanic Gardens are visible, as is the ridge beyond, where an occasional yellow-suited firefighter lugged a hose up a hill.
Yet, in the middle of this scene, Martin’s house stood mostly unscathed.
As the firestorm approached at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, police officers — two sets at two different times — knocked on Martin’s door, asking him to leave.
“I told them we were staying,” he said. “They were polite, they said ‘We recommend against that.’ They shook my hand and said ‘good luck.’”
Long before the officers arrived on his doorstep — 31 years to be exact — Martin, 73, knowing full well he lived in a canyon that could explode in flames at any moment, started preparing.
First he did the obvious, clearing brush around his home and trimming up trees and shrubs, creating what fire officials call “defensible space.”
Then he went the extra mile.
His home, a multilevel structure made of stucco, has wooden eaves, three large wood decks, and is surrounded by oak trees on steep slopes.
It’s the kind of home fires love to burn. So Martin took his fire protection measures to the next level.
He installed three Rain Bird sprinklers on the roof and built a concrete bunker in order to “have a shelter in a firestorm.”
The bunker is 5 feet by 7 feet. The space is just big enough for Martin, his wife Penny, two folding chairs, three filing cabinets filled with important documents and photographs, and an ample supply of food and water. The concrete walls of the bunker are about 8 inches thick; it also has a concrete ceiling. When Martin built it, he knew the day might come when his home would perish, so he put a 5-inch gap between the main home and the bunker, though it appears they are connected.
“Basically, we’re equipped,” he said.
Any proper East Coaster might scoff, writing Martin off as paranoid.
But firestorms in Santa Barbara County aren’t all that unusual, especially in the last year. And on Wednesday night, a firestorm is exactly what arrived at Martin’s doorstep.
Martin said the flames came unexpectedly from the west.
“I always expected it to come from the east,” he explained.
He said the flames charged down the hill behind his house, but he was ready: the sprinklers were on and he had water hoses around his house ready to fight spot fires.
Sometime around 5 p.m., flames had overrun everything around Martin’s home.
He said the flames were “coming from everywhere.”
Martin added: “The wind was screaming, embers were flying from everywhere.”
Every five minutes, Martin, with a bandana tied around his mouth and nose, would run around his house, putting out spot fires.
He said five minutes was about all he could take in that environment. The wind was blowing so hard, he could feel glowing embers smacking him in the chest.
“The firestorm, it insults all your senses,” he said. “If I stayed out [there] very long, I wouldn’t survive.”
The heat was nearly unbearable. On the north side of Martin’s home, the outside pane of two double-paned windows cracked from the heat. A plastic, circular thermometer mounted to the side of the house, melted, but remained in place.
“It sort of looks like a Dali thermometer,” he said, referring to the surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
Nevertheless, Martin periodically charged out from his bunker, spraying down the brush. At one point, a flaming log rolled onto the bottom step of his north deck, which if left unattended, most likely would have torched the entire house.
As fire crews and media trucks rolled up Mission Canyon Road yesterday afternoon, Martin and his wife were busy cleaning up ash and burned vegetation.
Martin surveyed the scene, recalling how his wife woke up at 4 a.m. and rushed outside to extinguish a pesky set of flames near their firewood pile.
“We probably put that thing out six times,” he said.