Never happened before! OH WAIT...From 1834...
http://www.authorama.com/two-years-before-the-mast-12.html
In the middle of this crescent, directly opposite the anchoring ground, lie the mission and town of Santa Barbara, on a low, flat plain, but little above the level of the sea,........
The town is certainly finely situated, with a bay in front, and an amphitheatre of hills behind. The only thing which diminishes its beauty is, that the hills have no large trees upon them, they having been all burnt by a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before, and they had not yet grown up again. The fire was described to me by an inhabitant, as having been a very terrible and magnificent sight. The air of the whole valley was so heated that the people were obliged to leave the town and take up their quarters for several days upon the beach.
Dana Point, CA is named after author Richard Henry Dana Jr.
Just a coincidence, but Dana Point has been in the news the past few days because of landslides and erosion, which the ecokooks naturally blame on climate change.
Santa Barbara had some bad fires in 1964, 1977 and 1990. In 2017, the Thomas fire, named for Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative college north of Santa Paula, destroyed more than 1,000 structures in Ventura County and in the Santa Barbara suburb of Montecito.
>a great fire which swept them off about a dozen years before
THAT part of CA goes through a ~12 year chapparal cycle which always ends in a burn. Otherwise the seeds never shed their waxy coating and wait for fire.
If one adds 12 years to 1834, this sequence emerges:
1834
1846
1858
1870
1882
1894
1906
1918
1930
1942
1954
1966
1978
1990
2002
See also: Sycamore Canyon fire; Painted Cave fire; Wolf fire. Like clockwork!