Life Is Over, and Life Goes On

Scenes from the fire zone:

Charter skipper Bertram McCann said he had never seen anything like it before.

A mile at sea off Carbon Beach at dusk on Tuesday, the Santa Ana winds, supercharged by the fires that raged from sea level to hilltops, were pushing sizable waves away from the shore.

In the half-minute it took McCann to make a cellular phone call, the waves spun the Sea Reyk, his 11-meter Trojan Express Cruiser, in a full circle. Even a mile from shore, the smoke was hot and thick, and the boat pitched and yawed in the whitecaps.

“It’s unbelievable,” McCann told Malibu homeowner Derek Sherman, who had chartered the boat to get to his beachfront home. “Getting in close enough to swim, it’s going to be unbreathable.”

An hour later the wind shifted, and the seas started to calm.

McCann throttled back the twin 350-horsepower motors and came within 100 yards of the dark beach houses, outlined against a glowing hillside.

Disregarding a Coast Guard warning not to land on the beach--it was directed to another boat, after all--Sherman and his friend Mark Stevens, owner of The Gym in Brentwood, stripped down to bathing suits, put on life jackets and jumped in.

“It was very cold, so we tried to swim more quickly but we couldn’t breathe,” Sherman said. “Every time we tried to breathe, we were sucking in ashes. Thank God it was a very short swim.”

McCann waited until he saw them yell and wave from the shore, then sped back to Marina del Ray, reporting to the boat’s owner, country singer Dwight Yoakam, that all was well.

As the skipper dug into a cheeseburger and fries at Edie’s Diner later, the cellular phone tinkled. It was Sherman, calling from shore, to report that he and Stevens were busy hosing down his house and a neighbor’s residence.

*

Chalk one up for red tape.

It took Greg Coghlan five years to get all his permits to build on the very top of Saddle Peak, a spot that gives him a 360-degree view of downtown Los Angeles, the Valley, the ocean and rugged canyon country.

But Tuesday, those delays were looking like a blessing. As spreading fires clawed up the hill, Coghlan was breathing easier than neighbors. A concrete foundation was all he’d managed to finish. A wooden utility pole was all that could possibly burn there.

“I picked the right time to build,” said Coghlan, who lives in Dallas.

But he remained in his van on the lot--at 2,665 feet, the highest private lot in the Santa Monica Mountains, he said--until firefighters warned him to leave.

Thirty minutes later, the pole had burned.

*

Rheta Resnick arrived at the Cross Creek Shopping Center a little after 3 p.m.--precisely the wrong time. Fire had eaten its way down the hillside and had just leaped across Pacific Coast Highway to the Malibu Lagoon and Surfrider State Beach.

As she emerged from the tunnel of heat and choking cloud of smoke, Resnick said she only wanted to get back to her home, just up the hill on Serra Road. She had ditched her car two hours earlier near Topanga Canyon Boulevard and walked the six miles along PCH.

Now she was just a few blocks from home--but firefighters were not permitting anyone up Serra Road. Her husband, whom she thought was defending the house with the garden hose, was not answering the phone.

Around her, firefighters were developing a strategy for trying to save Serra Center, an enclave with about 50 structures including a Catholic retreat and a clutch of houses.

Over the course of an hour, the crews gradually succeeded in their efforts to turn the blaze away from the buildings and down toward Malibu Creek. At the Texaco station in the shopping center, Resnick stood with a few others, breathing the clean air of the station’s office for almost 90 minutes.

“The most frustrating thing is that you can’t do anything,” she said.

*

As he waited for the flames to work their way toward him on Pacific Coast Highway near Big Rock Drive late Tuesday, Kern County Fire Capt. Gary Yaeck reflected on what often seems like the futility of his job: “After a while, it’s like you’re in the middle of a 60-0 football game--at the half. You don’t like it, but you gotta finish the game.”

*

Early Wednesday afternoon, Malibu Mayor Carolyn Van Horn offered the following damage assessment:

* Big Rock: About 25% of homes gone; assessment efforts hampered by limited access.

* La Costa: Homes on Rambla Vista and other interior streets suffered major damage. Only two or three homes remain on Rambla Vista. Homes fronting Pacific Coast Highway are OK.

* Las Flores Canyon: Homes on either side of Sea Lion Restaurant destroyed. Residences up to and including the Malibu Times newspaper undamaged; major damage farther up the canyon.

* Las Flores Mesa: 90% of homes destroyed.

* Rambla Pacifico: 80% of homes destroyed.

* Sweetwater Mesa: Two structures on canyon side destroyed.

* Carbon Canyon/Carbon Mesa Road: Up to six homes at end of Carbon Mesa Road destroyed.

Areas that had escaped major damage as of Wednesday midday were: the Civic Center area, which is being used as a firefighter staging area; Fire Station 70 in Carbon Canyon; Serra Retreat and Serra Road, Malibu Knolls; and businesses on Pacific Coast Highway and in the Cross Creek area. The city’s offices, housed in a building on Stuart Ranch Road, were moved to the Michael Landon Community Center at Malibu Bluff Park on Pacific Coast Highway on Tuesday when the fire began moving dangerously close.

*

Michael Klein was one of the lucky--and prepared--ones as the fire roared down Villa Costera in the Carbon Canyon area, engulfing structures all around his two-story, million-dollar home. Klein, 38, an aerospace engineer, raced home to defend his property, but was forced to leave by fire officials when the water pressure failed.

From below, he watched as flames leaped from house to house, wondering if his was among them. He had taken precautions: The brush was cleared around the house, and its roof was not combustible. But the intense fire seemed to be consuming everything.

When he finally was allowed to return, he found Los Angeles City Engine Co. 109 sitting in his driveway. With its 400-gallon water supply, it had saved his house.

Klein emptied his refrigerator, giving all the food he could find to weary firefighters.

Afterward, as homes close by still burned, he reflected on life in the Malibu hills: “It definitely challenges your strength when (stuff) like this happens. . . . You wonder if it is worth it. Tomorrow is going to be tough. It is going to look like a moonscape around here. It’s not going to look like Malibu.”

*

It was already chaotic enough in the Topanga Canyon community of Fernwood early Tuesday afternoon. Frantic residents were packing up belongings and pets--especially horses.

As a crowd of refugees stopped at the Country Natural Food store, cars sped down the hill to safety. Firetrucks sped up the hill to danger.

One firetruck slowed suddenly to turn. A firetruck just behind it braked hard but skidded, sliding into the opposite lane and smashing into a pickup pulling a horse trailer.

The drivers--and horses--appeared OK but clearly rattled. So were bystanders, who came within a few feet of being hit.

*

One of the stranger scenes Tuesday night was on the Santa Monica Pier, where several hundred people, some of them eating ice cream cones, watched the fires blaze across the water.

Inside one of the pier arcades, Chris Knight tangled with Andrew French, his co-worker at a Malibu pet store, in a heated game of air hockey.

“It kind of takes our minds off it,” said Knight, 19, of Culver City.

Stacie Lopez, 24, of Santa Monica, Rollerblades on her feet, was watching a friend play a video boxing game. Her brother, a firefighter, was on the fire line just up the coast.

“I’d rather be out having a good time than be sitting home stressing, like I did last week,” she said.

Restaurant owners said business was better than usual for a Tuesday, as people flocked to the pier after dark.

“This is a good place to watch,” said Tom Watters, the manager of Crown and Anchor restaurant.

John McCabe, 32, came to take pictures.

‘It’s funny how life goes on,” he said. ‘People were talking about meeting someone later. Things are burning down, and they’re making plans to go have a drink.”

On the sand just south of the pier, Marlon Johnson was playing volleyball.

“We can’t put the fire out ourselves,” Johnson said. “We’re not going to let fire interrupt our volleyball.”

*

Santa Monica’s Palisades Park, on the bluffs overlooking the sea, is not usually a hospitable place late at night. Toward midnight Tuesday, however, spectators lined the railing of the 1 1/2-mile-long park, some of them toting cameras and binoculars. Parking spots on Ocean Avenue were as scarce as on a good beach day.

The air was eerily still. People spoke in hushed tones more associated with church than being outdoors at a park.

The sights were to write home about: The perfectly outlined Santa Monica Mountains were back-lit by fires on the other side. What appeared to be the Los Flores Canyon area was engulfed in bright orange and yellow flames.

In the sky above the fires, helicopters blinked like giant lightning bugs.

Ignoring the panoramic view, a homeless person swaddled in a sleeping bag slept atop a picnic table a few feet away.

Contributing to this report were staff writers Mathis Chazanov, Ken Ellingwood, Scott Shibuya Brown, Nancy Hill-Holtzman and Jesse Katz, and correspondents G. Jeanette Avent, Barry Baum and Patrick McCartney.