Let Malibu Burn: A political history of the Fire Coast

Mike Davis

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(continued) During World War II — severe drought years on the West Coast — hundreds of fire watchers were sent into the Southern California mountains to guard against Axis saboteurs. A few months after they were withdrawn, 150 Malibu homes were incinerated in another November fire. Yet this new disaster failed to discourage a postwar migration of artists, printers, book dealers, architects (including Olmsted himself), poets and screenwriters — many of very modest means, and some seeking to escape the scrutiny of McCarthyism — who envisioned Malibu as Carmel South. In an engaging memoir of this period, UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell described a genial way of life devoted to Mozart and beachcombing.

He also provided a classic account of the onslaught of the terrible firestorm of Christmas week 1956, which, burning to the sea, retraced the path of the 1930 blaze.

The wind was still savage when we went to bed at ten, the sky swept clear, aglitter with stars. Anacapa flashed its warning light. The cypresses, pines and eucalyptuses were noisier than the surf. Cats' fur threw sparks when stroked. We slept in spite of the sinister atmosphere.

I woke up abruptly at four to see a fierce glow in the sky . . . God, the whole face of the mountain was burning, in a long line just below the summit, and moving toward us on the wind. Fear dried my mouth. I knew doom when I saw it.

A subsequent Forest Service study of this disaster, which killed one person and destroyed 100 homes, stressed the impossible challenge of combating such unpredictable natural forces: "Malibu fires combine most known elements of violent, erratic and extreme fire behavior: fire whirls, extreme rates of spread, sudden changes in speed and direction of fire spread, flash-overs of unburned gases complicated by intense heat and impenetrable smoke held close to the ground."

Indeed, the uncontrollable 1956 fire, which coincided with a waxing of Cold War anxieties, had unexpected political repercussions. If the government could not defeat wildfires in the Santa Monicas, critics asked, how would it deal with possible nuclear conflagrations? Accordingly, as chronicled by fire historian Stephen Pyne, the Eisenhower administration acknowledged the Malibu blaze as "the first major fire disaster of a national scope," and Congress — more concerned with the credibility of a vast civil-defense establishment than with the tragedy of local homeowners — debated how to provide "complete fire prevention and protection in Southern California."

For Pyne, the Malibu blaze also symbolized the transition from the traditional forest-fire problem to a new "fire regime" characterized by the "lethal mixture of homeowners and brush." This artificial ecotone of chaparral and suburb magnified the natural fire danger while posing new obstacles to firefighters, who now had to defend thousands of individual structures as well as battle the fire front itself. "Whereas it was often remarked that chaparral, particularly that composed largely of chamise, is a fire-climax community," Pyne wrote in Fire in America, "it is now joked that the same is true of the Southern California mountain suburb."

Finally, the 1956 fire — followed by two blazes, one month apart, in 1958-59 that severely burned eight firefighters and destroyed another 100 homes — was the beginning of the end for bohemian Malibu. A perverse law of Pyne's new fire regime was that fire stimulates development as well as upward social succession. By declaring Malibu a federal disaster area and offering blaze victims tax relief as well as preferential low-interest loans, the Eisenhower administration established the precedent for the public subsidization of firebelt suburbs. Each conflagration, moreover, was punctually followed by rebuilding on a larger and more exclusive scale as land-use regulations and sometimes even the fire code were relaxed to accommodate fire "victims." As a result, renters and modest homeowners were displaced from areas like Broad Beach, Paradise Cove and Point Dume by wealthy pyrophiles encouraged by cheap fire insurance, socialized disaster relief and an expansive public commitment to "defend Malibu."

In the absence of fire-risk zoning, the only constraint on development was a shortage of water for firefighting and domestic consumption. The completion of a trunk water line in 1962, therefore, was the signal for a new land rush. The county's Regional Planning Commission promptly endorsed developers' fantasies by authorizing a staggering 1,400 percent expansion of the Malibu population over the next generation: from 7,983 in 1960 to a projected 117,000 in 1980. Although the California Coastal Acts of 1972 and 1976, under the populist banner of "Don't Lock Up the Beach!," eventually slowed the real estate juggernaut (and squelched such preposterous nightmares as a proposed Corral Canyon nuclear-power plant and an eight-lane freeway through Malibu Canyon), the urbanization of the Malibu coast — Los Angeles' "backyard Big Sur" — was already a fait accompli.

Yet, even as they were opening the floodgates to destructive overdevelopment, county and state officials were also turning down every opportunity, between 1945 and 1969, to expand public beach frontage (a miserable 22 percent of the total). Nor did they show any interest in creating a public land trust in the mountains, which were entirely under private ownership, including even the streambeds. Consequently, most of Malibu remained as inaccessible to the general public as during the isolationist Rindge era. As Thomas Mikkelson and Donald Neuwirth, historians of the coastal-access battle, have put it, "The seven million people within an hour's drive of Malibu got Beach Boys music and surfer movies, but the 20,000 residents kept the beach."

Returning for a final look in the early 1980s, Powell bitterly decried the aristocratization of his beloved coast.

In feverish buying and selling of land, the coast has become utterly transformed and unrecognizable. Each succeeding house, bigger and grander, takes the view of its neighbors in a kind of unbridled competition . . . Once lost, paradise can never be regained . . . developers have bulldozed the Santa Monicas beyond recovery.

The Malibu nouveaux riches built higher and higher in the mountain chamise with scant regard for the fiery consequence. The next firestorm, in late September 1970, coupled perfect fire weather (drought conditions, 100-degree heat, 3 percent humidity and an 85-mile-per-hour Santa Ana wind) with a bumper crop of combustible wood-frame houses. Firefighters said the cedar-shake roofs "popped like popcorn" as a 20-mile wall of flames roared across the ridge line of the Santa Monicas toward the sea. With the asphalt on PCH ablaze and all escape routes cut off, terrified residents of the famed Malibu Colony took refuge in the nearby lagoon. Firebrands fell like hellish rain on the beach, and day turned into night under the gigantic smoke pall. Coalescing with another blaze in the Valley, this greatest of 20th-century Malibu firestorms ultimately took 10 lives and charred 403 homes, including a ranch owned by Governor Ronald Reagan.

Furious property owners — radically underestimating the real balance of power between fire suppression and nature — denounced local government for failing to save their homes and demanded new, expensive technological "fixes" for the wildfire problem. Elected officials, acutely sensitive to Malibu's national prominence in political fund-raising, were quick to oblige. In the meantime, developers — racing to stay ahead of proposed "slow growth" coastal legislation — redoubled their subdivision efforts. The new Malibu boom, in turn, only provided more fuel for the three "Halloween" fires that consumed homes in October 1978, 1982 and 1985. The first two began in Agoura and roughly followed the route of the 1956 fire through Trancas Canyon, while the third repeated the itinerary of the 1930 Decker Canyon conflagration.

The 1978 fire, which burned superstars' homes in the Broad Beach area (where Powell had lived in the more humble 1950s), also set a new speed record, crossing 13 miles of very rugged terrain in less than two hours. One eyewitness account in the Los Angeles Times described how the rampaging fire front "turned thousands of wild rabbits into balls of flaming fur that darted insanely about, only to start new fires at the spots where they fell." The surviving beasts — domestic pets and wild animals alike — "mingled in chaos with human evacuees along the beach at Point Dume while oblivious surfers rode the waves." Traumatized Malibu residents, who a were also battered by disastrous floods and landslides in 1978 and 1980, could be forgiven for imagining that Nature was getting angrier at them.

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