Let Malibu Burn: A political history of the Fire Coast

Mike Davis

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Fire in Malibu has a relentless, staccato rhythm. The rugged coastline is scourged by a large fire, on average, every two and a half years, and at least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable march across the mountains to the sea. In one week last month, 10 homes and 14,000 acres of brush went up in smoke.

Malibu Fire, November 2, 1993 (photo: Flickr user Joe_B)

And it will only get worse. Such periodic disasters are inevitable as long as private residential development is tolerated in the fire ecology of the Santa Monicas.

Make your home in Malibu, in other words, and you eventually will face the flames.

Shangri-la

From the very beginning, fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. Sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1835, Richard Henry Dana described (in Two Years Before the Mast) a vast blaze along the coast of Jose Tapia's Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Gabrielino Indians' practice of annual burning, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced the Malibu area throughout the 19th century. During the boom of the late 1880s, the entire ex-Tapia latifundium was sold at $10 per acre to the Boston Brahmin millionaire Frederick Rindge. In his memoirs, Rindge described his unceasing battles against squatters, rustlers and, above all, recurrent wildfire. The great fire of 1903, which raced from Calabasas to the sea in a few hours, incinerated Rindge's dream ranch in Malibu Canyon and forced him to move to Los Angeles, where he died in 1905.

From the time of the Tapias, the owners of Rancho Malibu recognized that the region's extraordinary fire hazard was shaped, in large part, by the uncanny alignment of its coastal canyons with the annual fire winds from the north: the notorious Santa Anas, which blow primarily between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, just before the first rains. Born from high-pressure areas over the Great Basin, Santa Anas become hot and dry as they descend avalanchelike into Southern California. The San Fernando Valley acts as a giant bellows, sometimes fanning the winds to hurricane velocity as they roar seaward through the narrow canyons and rugged defiles of the Santa Monicas. Add a spark to the thick vegetation (frequently above 40 tons per acre in the Malibu area) on such an occasion, and an uncontrollable wildfire will result.

Malibu Bluffs Fire, Jan 8, 2007. (photo: Flickr user jessmdad)

Less well understood in the old days, of course, was the essential dependence of the Santa Monicas' chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub and live oak woodland upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriels) have given late 20th-century science vivid insights into the complex role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination. Conversely, science has established that it is accumulated growth that determines fire destructiveness. As fire ecologist Richard Minnich has said, "You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he'll never be arrested."

Another revelation was the relationship between the age of vegetation and the intensity of a fire. Botanists and fire geographers have calculated that half-century-old chaparral, heavily laden with dead mass, burns with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of 75 barrels of crude oil. A great Malibu firestorm, therefore, may generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.

And such extreme fires can destroy the structure of the soil itself. A water-repellant layer is created that dramatically accelerates subsequent flooding and erosion. All of which means that "total fire suppression" — the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919 — is a futile, indeed disastrous, strategy that makes doomsdaylike firestorms and subsequent floods virtually inevitable by preventing the recycling of dead chaparral by more frequent small fires.

For a generation after Rindge's death, his widow, May, struggled to keep the family Shangri-la isolated and intact. Like one of the iron-fisted heroines played by a Barbara Stanwyck, the so-called "Queen of the Malibu" closed the ranch roads in 1917, strung barbed wire along the perimeter and posted armed fence riders with orders to "shoot to kill." In one famous episode, Rindge gunmen provoked a tense confrontation with deputy sheriffs after driving off a road-survey crew. Hysterical newspaper headlines warned of "Civil War in Peaceful Southern California!" Following one of the most protracted legal battles in California history, however, the courts granted the state a highway right of way across Rindge land. Opened to traffic in 1928, the Pacific Coast Highway gave Angelenos their first view of the magnificent Malibu coast and introduced a potent new fuse — the automobile — into the flammable landscape.

The indefatigable Mrs. Rindge continued to fight the road builders and developers in the courts, but the costs of litigation forced her to lease choice parts of Malibu Beach to a movie colony that included Jack Warner, Clara Bow, Dolores Del Rio and Barbara Stanwyck herself. The Colony's unexpected housewarming was a lightning-swift wildfire that destroyed 13 new homes in late October 1929. Exactly a year later, walnut pickers in the Thousand Oaks area accidentally ignited another blaze that quickly grew into one of the greatest conflagrations in modern Malibu history.

The 1930 Decker Canyon fire was a worst-case scenario involving 50-year-old chaparral and a fierce Santa Ana. Faced with a five-mile front of towering flames, 1,100 firefighters could do little except flee for their lives. As the firestorm unexpectedly wheeled toward the Palisades, there was official panic. County Supervisor Henry Wright, his nerves shaken by a visit to the collapsing fire lines, posted 100 patrolmen at the city limits to alert residents for evacuation. Should the "fire raging in the Malibu District get closer," he gasped, "our whole city might go." Fortunately, this apocalypse (which may have provided the idea for the burning of Los Angeles in Nathanael West's Day of the Locust) was avoided when the fickle Santa Ana abruptly subsided.

In hindsight, the 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Indeed, a few months before the conflagration, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. — the nation's foremost landscape architect and designer of the California State Park system — had advocated public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain landscape between Topanga and Point Dume. Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936 and 1938, which destroyed almost 400 homes in Malibu and Topanga Canyon, public officials stubbornly disregarded the conservationist common sense of Olmsted's proposal. The county of Los Angeles, for example, squandered an extraordinary opportunity in 1938 to acquire 17,000 acres of the bankrupt Rindge latifundium in exchange for $1,100,000 in delinquent taxes. (At a mere $64 per acre, this might have been the deal of the century.)

Instead, in December 1940, an impecunious May Rindge was forced to put her entire empire on the auction block. Potential buyers were advised "to make an early selection . . . [of] ocean-front lots, sites for villas, hotels, golf clubs, estates, beach and yacht clubs, income and business lots, small summer home places, ranchitos, 100-640-acre ranchos, and acreage for further subdivision." The disconsolate Queen of the Malibu died two months later.

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