Let Malibu Burn: A political history of the Fire Coast

Mike Davis

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“This is hell, dude!”

If Southern Californians seemed unprepared for the inferno of 1993, they had no one to blame but themselves. Unlike the earthquakes that followed a few months later, the flames came down grimly familiar paths. There was no shortage of omens.

The rains of the previous winter had produced exorbitant new brush growth, now dried and ready for burning. As in other recent fire years, the Santa Anas began howling just before Halloween. On the morning of Tuesday, October 26, Southern California woke up to perfect fire weather. Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald Manning accurately assessed "a potential day for disaster" and dispatched 10 city engine companies to the rim of the San Fernando Valley, where chaparral meets suburb. Shortly after lunch, a blaze was ignited in the crucible of so many Malibu fires: just across the Ventura County line in the grassland corridor between Agoura and Thousand Oaks. A regional fire war room was quickly established in the Los Angeles County Fire Department's new headquarters in the Montebello Hills.

Early Wednesday morning, as a 50-mile-per-hour Santa Ana whipsawed power lines and ripped the fronds from palm trees, suspicious fires erupted one after another in Chatsworth (northwest San Fernando Valley) and Santa Paula (eastern Ventura County). Meanwhile, a transient, camping in Eaton Canyon along the flank of Mount Wilson, tried to keep warm by kindling a small fire, which immediately spread to century-old unburned chaparral. Within 24 hours, it would destroy 118 homes in Altadena and Sierra Madre. As dawn broke on the 27th, the Thousand Oaks/Malibu, Chatsworth and Altadena fires were out of control (five firefighters had already been critically injured), and new fires were being reported throughout five Southern California counties. As local forces were overwhelmed, statewide mutual-aid agreements kicked in, and 100 engine companies were sent southward on Interstate 5 — sirens screaming — from Bay Area and San Joaquin Valley fire departments.

They arrived too late to save the two dozen homes destroyed by the first Malibu fire. But events in the Santa Monicas, and even Eaton Canyon, were overshadowed by the holocaust, beginning Thursday just after lunch, that with incredible speed consumed Laguna Beach "as if it had been soaked in gasoline," according to the Times. Twenty-seven thousand residents were evacuated from the path of a conflagration that had been long predicted and equally long disregarded. From the Times: "The narrow streets of wood homes with shake roofs finally succumbed to the devastation that for decades officials had warned was the region's destiny. After the Oakland fire two years ago, Orange County Fire Captain Dan Young said communities such as Laguna Beach were 'designed for disaster.'"

The Laguna Beach blaze (the biggest Orange County fire since 1948), which injured 65 firefighters, destroyed 366 homes (most of them valued at over $1 million) and caused $435 million in damage, seemed to be the dramatic denouement to a catastrophic fire week. In fact, it was only the first act.

The second began on the morning of November 2, near a pair of water tanks on Mount Calabasas. Within a few minutes, angry Santa Anas transformed a careless or deliberate spark into the seed of a great firestorm. Two off-duty volunteer firefighters, driving up Old Topanga Canyon Road, spotted the initial plume of smoke and managed to hook up a hose to a hydrant, but they were quickly overwhelmed by the fire's explosive growth. "I immediately thought it was arson," one said later. "I don't exactly know why."

While county crews were still racing to the scene, the implacably advancing fire ambushed its first victims at a ranch a few hundred yards downhill from the water tanks. Miscalculating the fire's velocity, residents Ron Mass and Duncan Gibbins foolishly attempted to defend their homes with a garden hose. They recognized their mistake almost immediately, but it was too late. Mass jumped into his Jeep, but the fire caught him before he could get out of the driveway. Hideously burned, he managed to stagger to the edge of Old Topanga, where firefighters saw him, his blistered arms "outstretched like a scarecrow." British screenwriter Gibbins, meanwhile, had dashed back to rescue his cat. He ran right into the fire's deadly thermal pulse. It charred 95 percent of his body. Paramedics later discovered him, barely conscious, in the ranch's swimming pool. "'I don't want to die,' he said over and over," recounted the Times. "Smoke poured from his mouth, and he talked in the terrible high-pitched squeal of a man with lungs scorched beyond repair." (Gibbins died later in the hospital, but Mass survived his third-degree burns.)

By the early afternoon, the summit of the Santa Monicas was a funeral pyre. In the face of the Santa Anas, the ridge-line network of fuel breaks failed to slow the conflagration. Veteran county crews, aided by air tankers and helicopters, gamely defended their fire line on Old Topanga Road, but it was impossible to stop a 30-foot wall of flames, driven by 70-mile-per-hour winds, from cascading down the steep ravines and gorges that lead to the Malibu coast. Multimillion-dollar estates in Carbon and Las Flores canyons — some built on the ashes of humbler houses destroyed in 1956 and 1970 — became so much fuel. The situation was now out of control. From LAX or West L.A., the dark nimbus billowing above the Santa Monicas looked like a volcanic eruption. At 1:30 p.m., a Sheriff's helicopter ordered Malibu Colonyites to begin evacuating their beach houses.

Meanwhile, in the hills above the ocean, overwhelmed firefighters and terrified residents fought for their lives. Some had to drive through barricades of fire, while others saved themselves in empty swimming pools. Sean Penn and Ali MacGraw, among scores of others, saw their homes burn to the foundations. Time and again, firefighters were betrayed by the feeble water pressure in hydrants or trapped in the labyrinth of narrow mountain streets. In the upper Los Flores Canyon, an Alhambra fire crew miraculously survived a fireball that incinerated their truck.

Don and Amy Yarrow were not so lucky. The elderly couple, who lived in a modest trailer at the top of Carbon Canyon, had been Malibu residents since the 1940s. They tried to outrun the firestorm in their Toyota pickup, but the fire was faster. They got a mere 100 yards down the road before being engulfed in flames. It took several days to identify their charred remains.

Malibu at dusk was a surreal borderland between carnival and catastrophe. Nonchalant crowds played video games on the pier while television news helicopters hovered overhead like noisy vultures and the Coast Guard cutter Conifer stood offshore, ready to evacuate residents. Beneath the flaming hills, the Pacific Coast Highway was paralyzed by a hopeless tangle of arriving fire trucks and fleeing Bentleys, Porsches and Jeep Cherokees. Hundreds more locals trekked out on horseback, by bike or on foot. A few escaped on skates. Three hundred Sheriff's deputies were brought in to guard against looting. The chaotic exodus was oddly equalizing: panicky movie stars mingled with frantic commoners. Confronted once again with its a destiny as a fire coast, Malibu replied in the vernacular. "This is hell, dude," one resident told the Times. "I'm expecting to see Satan come out any time now."

The crisis also tested Malibu's strange, bespoke morality. When the firestorm temporarily cut off PCH as an escape route, for example, entrapped residents had to make some tough choices. The Malibu Times celebrated the case of two intrepid housewives from the Big Rock area who loaded their jewels and dogs into kayaks and took to the sea, where they were eventually rescued by blond hunks from the Baywatch Redondo. Only the fine print revealed that they had left their maids, who were "afraid to go out on the water," behind.

Firefighters, meanwhile, were beginning to have the eerie sense that they were struggling against supernatural cunning. After feinting at Malibu Colony and Pepperdine University, the fire suddenly pivoted eastward toward Tuna Canyon. As fire crews battled walls of flame in the lower canyon, the swirling red center of the firestorm easily outflanked them on the north, heading straight for Topanga, the Getty Museum and, ultimately, the fat neighborhoods of the Palisades (where 70 city fire engines were already waiting).

By early Wednesday morning (November 4), Deputy County Fire Chief Donald Anthony had deployed 7,500 firefighters — some from as far away as Oregon and Oklahoma — for a last-ditch stand along Topanga Canyon Road. No one had ever seen such a gigantic mobilization of personnel and equipment. The urban ladder rigs, forestry pumper trucks and bulldozers stretched almost bumper-to-bumper for 11 miles. Courageous helicopter pilots threw away their safety manuals to fly dangerous night water drops. At dawn, they were relieved by C-130s capable of bombing the chaparral with 3,000 gallons of fire retardant at a time. Still the inferno parried each human tactic, repeatedly leaping over the fire lines to ignite brush on the east side of the road. The battle raged savagely until late Wednesday afternoon, when the firestorm literally ran out of fuel and wind at the edge of the ocean. It had lasted 36 hours.

As in previous years, the prime-time drama of a Malibu fire produced an extravagant outpouring of sympathy from government agencies and common citizens. Federal Emergency Management Agency director James Lee Witt assured fire victims that the Clinton administration, having declared Malibu a federal disaster area, would provide "all the aid they need to rebuild homes and lives." Meanwhile, scores of restaurants, bistros and boutiques supplied the upscale equivalent of the Red Cross (which was also on the scene). Insurance adjusters set up camp in Winnebagos next to the Malibu pier. The county promised tax a relief. A group of German architects offered to work for free. Fire victims formed a support network. Tony Hopkins offered an apartment to Dick Van Dyke, and Zsa Zsa Gabor gave shelter to some homeless horses.

Eleven days later, while the tabloids were still shedding crocodile tears for burned-out movie stars, another fire — invisible to most of the media — killed three residents (the same as the Malibu holocaust) and injured 19 others in a dingy downtown residential hotel. The double standard of fire disaster was rubbed in the faces of the poor — in this case, Mexican and Guatemalan garment workers. The owners of the Grand Avenue tenement had a notorious record of fire — , health — and safety-code violations. They had ignored longstanding tenant complaints about locked fire escapes, inoperable smoke detectors, vermin infestations and crack addicts who monopolized the common bathrooms. When an evicted tenant threatened to burn the building down, however, the landlords immediately called the police. "They never came down," one told the Los Angeles Times. "They said that if anything happens, call 911." A police spokesperson later explained, unconvincingly, that it had been "an awful busy day."

Sloping Suburbia

In one of his last articles, the well-known Los Angeles writer and environmentalist Richard Lillard challenged Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis that the American frontier — and with it, the frontiersman — had ended in 1890. As a matter of fact, Lillard asserted, the frontier was alive and well in the Edenic canyons above Malibu and Hollywood. The unique challenge of the wild mountains in the big city brought out the true grit in their self-selected population. "The whole hillside and canyon ambiance, almost always fresh and wild-smelling, both attracts and holds the kind of individual that Frederick Turner and many a traveler, Tocqueville included, knew in the backwoods districts." The neighborly and self-reliant hill folk, moreover, were tempered to heroic proportions by the constancy of the fire danger, "keeping an outlook for arsonists or children playing with matches, as their forefathers once kept alert for hostile aborigines."

Yet Lillard warned harshly against the creeping threat of mountain society's antipode: Sloping Suburbia. "It's not habitation amid wilderness," he wrote. "Mankind has conquered nature instead of adjusting to it. Often the new instant enclaves have a supermarket, a cleaning and dyeing establishment, and a laundromat. The immigrating mini-city populace consists of country club types rather than hillsiders."

Although Lillard was writing in 1981, his mountain frontier is virtually extinct. "Country club types" have everywhere conquered, and now monopolize almost all the picturesque seacoasts and foothills. Despite brave but belated attempts at open-space conservation like the Santa Monica Mountain Conservancy, Southern California's remnant natural landscape continues to be destroyed or privatized. The great impetus of this movement to the hills is no longer communion with nature or frontier rusticity, but, as critic Reyner Banham recognized in the 1960s, the search for "thickets of privacy" outside the fabric of common citizenship and urban life.

Hillside home building, moreover, has despoiled the natural heritage of the majority for the sake of an affluent minority. Instead of protecting "significant ecological areas" as required by law, county planning commissions have historically been the malleable tools of hillside developers. Much of the beautiful coastal — sage and canyon — riparian ecosystems of the Santa Monica Mountains have been supplanted by castles and "guard-gate prestige." Elsewhere in Southern California — in the Verdugo, Puente, San Jose, San Joaquin and San Rafael hills, as well as the Santa Susana, Santa Ana and San Gabriel mountains — tens of thousands of acres of oak and walnut woodland have been destroyed by bulldozers to make room for similar posh developments.

At the same time, suburban firestorms are becoming more apocalyptic. Two-thirds of all the homes and dwellings, for example, destroyed by wildfire since statewide record keeping began in 1923 have been burned since 1980. And as Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit complained while visiting the Malibu fire scene, "fire-fighting is getting more expensive, more hazardous." The new density of hillside housing has transformed the battle against wildfire from a war of maneuver into the equivalent of street-fighting. But larger firefighting armies by themselves are no solution. One national forest official observed: "These fires in Malibu prove that you could throw in every fighter in the world and still can't stop it."

To resume Stephen Pyne's argument that the 1956 Malibu fire was the inauguration of a new fire regime, it may be that the 1991 Oakland fire ($1.7 billion insured damage) and the 1993 Southern California fire complex ($1 billion) marked a qualitative escalation in fire danger, if not the actual emergence of a new, post-suburban fire regime.