Fire Station Becomes ‘War Room’ for Storm

With the rain still pelting down, a county food truck pulls to the curb about 6 p.m. up the street from the Los Angeles County fire station on Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas.

Several dozen young workers from the California Conservation Corps clamber out of trucks, lining up to receive plates of spaghetti, sausage, salad and white bread. Already-soggy paper plates in hand, they search for a dry place to eat their first meal after a long day of positioning sandbags on hillsides above houses in Westlake Village.

“We got the call at 9 a.m.,” said Perry Kirby, project coordinator for the Camarillo-based team. “We were working sandbags by 11.”

As the reports of flooding, washouts, mudslides and traffic accidents mounted through the day, so did the intensity of activity at the fire station. The station was to become the site of the “war room” for what the Fire Department would dub the “Malibu Incident,” a daylong parade of weather-related woe.

With the communications capability augmented by a specially dispatched mobile command center, supervisors at the Las Virgenes fire station were engaged in deploying and equipping 19 crews consisting of more than 400 workers responding to emergencies all the way from the San Fernando Valley to Malibu.

“I’ve told the communication guys, ‘This is a good run-through before the brush-fire season starts,’ ” said James Shepard, a division chief who was “incident commander” for the operation. At a 7 p.m. planning session attended by two dozen of his top lieutenants, Shepard sought to remind them of the mission. “The overall goal is to protect life and property,” he said.

Reports from the assembled field supervisors gave a hint of the crises of the moment:

Two power poles knocked down by a car near the top of Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the wires still hot, blocking the road and potentially isolating that area; several mudslides in canyon areas leading to Malibu, closing off access for clusters of houses; a small private bridge washed out, and a weather report predicting potentially dangerous high tides along Malibu Colony.

In a flood, a fire department becomes available for whatever emergency service mission comes up.

Capt. Larry Huerta stepped down off his truck after seven hours of “running everywhere on floodings, backed-up sewer lines, from Agoura to Calabasas, just a lot of water.” Only now did he have a moment to worry about his own home in Northridge.

“I’ve got a real low back yard,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going on in my house.”

Times staff writer Richard Lee Colvin contributed to this story.