Brush Fire Hits Santa Cruz Island : Drought: A rescue flare is suspected as the cause of the third large blaze to strike Ventura County this year.

Firefighters continued Monday to battle a brush fire that had charred between 500 and 600 acres of Santa Cruz Island by nightfall.

The fire was reported about 12:40 a.m. Monday after a flare, launched to help rescue people stranded on an island beach, apparently landed on a steep bluff.

About six hours before the island fire was ignited, firefighters had extinguished a blaze that started Saturday and blackened 283 acres east of Fillmore.

The blazes were the second and third large brush fires this year in Ventura County, which officials predict could experience its most dangerous fire season ever because of the lingering statewide drought.

“This county faces its worst danger in recorded history,” said Fritz Cahill, a field officer for the Los Padres National Forest. “We’re talking about real dry, brittle brush.”

Cahill said that plants already are as dry as they usually are in August or September.

The blaze on 62,000-acre Santa Cruz Island--20 miles off the coast of Ventura--was expected to burn until tonight, said Carol Spears, a spokeswoman for the Channel Islands National Park.

It had not threatened any of the about 35 people on the island, nor had it approached most of the structures, officials said.

Twenty firefighters were expected to remain on the island through Tuesday to combat the fire, which engulfed land owned by the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental group. The conservancy owns about 90% of the island.

Officials of the U.S. Coast Guard, which rescued three stranded crew members of the 21-foot motorboat Frivolous, said that, if the agency is found to be responsible for the fire, it will reimburse firefighting groups battling the blaze.

Coast Guard officials said they received a report at 7:54 p.m. that the boat was beached off the northeast side of the island near China Harbor. Two cutters were on the scene by 11:35 p.m., Chief Petty Officer Mark Kennedy said.

Because it was “pitch black,” the Coast Guard launched two flares attached to parachutes during the next hour to illuminate the area. And workers from UC Santa Barbara--which staffs an experimental station on the island--launched another flare after driving to the beach to aid in the rescue, Kennedy said.

The rescued trio was in good health, Kennedy said. But one of the flares apparently set off the fire, which was well under way by the time firefighters from the National Park Service arrived by boat about 4:30 a.m., Spears said.

At first light, planes brought 60 more firefighters from the Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, Spears said.

The fire at one point came within 1.5 miles of a Navy radar site, Spears said. But none of the other structures on the island--a Park Service ranger station, a ranch and several buildings operated by the Nature Conservancy, and a guest ranch--was anywhere near the fire.

The island boasts eight plant species--including the Santa Cruz Island monkey flower and the Santa Cruz Island bush mallow--found nowhere else in the world, said Diane Elfstrom Devine, operations manager of the Nature Conservancy. But none of those species appeared to be damaged by the blaze, she said.

“It’s one of those cases where the fire is not necessarily bad as long as it’s not out of control,” Elfstrom Devine said.

While firefighters battled the blaze on the island, crews from the California Division of Forestry surveyed the area damaged by the fire that had raged near Fillmore through the weekend.

“In the mop-up, we’ll be cutting through brush, clearing some areas,” said Sandy Wells, a spokeswoman for the Ventura County Fire Department.

About 150 firefighters and other personnel had extinguished the blaze by 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Ventura County investigators believe the fire was intentionally started about 1 p.m. Saturday by two teen-agers using a lighter.

The county’s first large brush fire this year blazed for three days in the Los Padres National Forest near Piru Creek after a campfire was abandoned, officials said. The fire, which started April 13, charred 635 acres.