The Fire This Time

As we’ve all heard by now, it was the third blaze in Malibu this year, and the worst Malibu fire in a decade and a half —with 53 houses burning so quickly they may as well have made of cellophane, and another score badly damaged. We also know that due to the fact that an appropriately jittery Schwarzenegger ordered firefighters to Southern California early last week in advance of the Santa Anas, massive amounts of resources—both in terms of ground crews and equipment—arrived on the scene with remarkable speed.

Although there were all those homes the firefighters couldn’t save, once they were on site in full strength, they worked with well-coordinated precision, and got the upper hand on the flames before the day’s light began to bleach from the sky. As early as 3 pm on Saturday, the dark, roiling smoke that had characterized the fire’s earlier hours, had changed to hazy gray plumes. By Sunday evening, the fire was at 70 percent containment.


This latest local inferno was called the Corral fire, presumably because it started on a dirt road in Corral canyon, just north of Malibu. It must be challenging for those tasked with naming these fires to keep coming up with different monikers—as opposed to calling Saturday’s blaze….say….Malibu XXII.

I became aware of the fire at 6:30 a.m Saturday morning after I was startled out of a very pleasant sleep by a phone call from my neighbor, Rebecca, who told me that the nearby hills were once again burning. Whenever Malibu burns, we in Topanga Canyon get jumpy. We know from experience that if the wind starts blowing the wrong direction, we could easily be next. In 1993, for example, the fire started in Old Topanga Canyon, raced to Malibu faster than a man could run, then blew right back to us in a big and scary way.

But when, by 10:30 a.m. the flames appeared to be in no immediate danger of moving anywhere near to Topanga, I poured myself one more cup of coffee, packed my dog in the car, and drove to Malibu to chat up some firefighters.

The people who had come from all over California and beyond to battle our latest conflagration were, in their downtime, a friendly and talkative bunch. Here are a few of my notes—along with some photos I snapped while chatting. I’ve not quoted anyone by name, although only one person asked me not to. I figured there was no sense in taking a chance on…well….burning the people who were kind and courageous enough to do a very risky job in our behalf.

Here’s what they said:

NOTE: PHOTOS AND QUOTES ARE NOT RELATED:

A veteran LA County firefighter: “After 2003, the Blue Ribbon committee made very good recommendations about what was needed. Yet the money wasn’t allocated.” He laughed wryly. “They won’t make that mistake again. Look,” he said. “Nobody does more cost effective work than West Coast firefighters. We’ve fought a lot of fires. And we’ve gotten it down. I think we do the best job of anybody in the U.S. So, if we say we need something—we need it.”

A strike team captain: “This morning, we were ready to roll within three minutes. We want to be proactive. If there aren’t enough resources, or if resources are slow in coming, it’s never a willingness issue on our part. It’s a political issue.”

An LA County Fire guy, fairly high up the food chain: “If it’s Malibu, they throw everything they can at it. I’m not saying that’s wrong exactly. Every fire deserves to get every bit of effort we’ve got, especially when it threatens structures.” But, with Malibu, he said, it’s not just the fact that houses are threatened. “It’s whose houses are threatened.”

An air fleet honcho: “During the last fires, I knew we’d have fires that day. Anybody with any experience knew. We were ready that Sunday morning that the fires broke out, beginning in Malibu. So anybody [at a state level] who says they were caught unawares….. Well, I just don’t understand it.”
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As I did this on a whim, I had neither the proper clothes nor the proper clearance , to go up on the fire lines. So I confined my time to the two staging areas—one for ground crews, the other for the various helicopters and their crews. I noted as I talked to the ground guys during their downtime that they were nearly as intrigued as I was by the massive DC-10 that made periodic passes overhead, occasionally circling while it waited for the small spotter plane to lead it in to make another one of its drops.

As to which planes were the most efficient, the air fleet guys said that while the big fixed-wing planes like the DC 10 and the Super Scoopers are extremely useful (and spectacular to watch), they have their limits. The DC 10 can mostly drop water or retardant along ridge tops, but has trouble getting down into the hills. The Super Scooper does well when it’s close to a large body of water, but is less handy further inland. Plus it’s dangerous to fly in high winds.

Everybody loves the nimble Sikorsky Firehawk—basically a Blackhawk retooled for firefighting. That’s the creature you see below slurping up its load of water from a tea cup-sized pond located on the Pepperdine campus.

By the way, in addition to watching the wickedly skillful Firehawk pilots buzzing in to take on more water, some of the air fleet guys and I took to watching the local ducks that, despite the ‘copter-generated gale force winds that repeatedly swept them into the reeds at the pond’s edge like so many tiny toy boats, steadfastly refused to leave their pond. As a group, they simply faced into the rotor-made wind and stoically persevered the best they could.

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Although firefighters weren’t exactly critical of residents living in high fire areas, person after after person mentioned the fire prone sections of San Diego County where they said tract houses were often built far too close together, thus were difficult and dangerous to defend once a blaze gets started. “The flames just jump from house to house and they’re nearly impossible to stop,” they said.

In terms of Malibu, the main criticism I heard was leveled at a certain type of landowner who does “a half-assed job clearing bush,” and/or who blithely plants flammable “ornamental vegetation” near their houses. “Those people don’t think a fire is ever going to come to them,” said one captain. “I saw several of those big houses go up this morning, and there was not a damned thing we could do.” Most people whose houses burned that day, he added quickly, were just unlucky.

While the goal is to save all structures, the firefighters admitted that they sometimes have to do triage. All things being equal, they said, the homeowner who’s made his or her house easier to protect is more likely to get the firefighters’ best attention. “But sometimes both the home owners and us have done everything we can, and mother nature does what she wants anyway,” said a tired firefighter.

In addition to the professional firefighters, there were also five buses full of CDCF guys—firefighters from the California Department of Corrections, specifically from Camp ISHI, in northern California. They were a story unto themselves, so I’ll have more about them in tomorrow’s post.

PS: Veronique de Tourenne, who blogs regularly for LA Observed, had to evacuate her Paradise Cove digs but still managed to write a good running commentary on the fire since it started on Saturday in the early morning darkness.