WESTSIDE / COVER STORY : Rising From the Ashes : The Blaze That Devastated Malibu Last Year Also Helped Bring the Community Together

Disaster tests any community. But for fledgling Malibu, incorporated in 1991, last year’s firestorm ranks as perhaps the city’s defining event.

More than a year has passed since flames destroyed 270 houses, stripped the rugged hillsides of vegetation and changed the face of this seaside community of 11,730 residents, many of whom came to Malibu for privacy and scenic beauty. The city government, which was still in the process of getting its municipal legs when the disaster hit, also was altered by the fire.

Some proclaim the fire as the city’s coming of age.

“There was a chemical change in this community,” said Karen York, who along with her husband, Arnold, owns the weekly newspaper Malibu Times and founded Operation Recovery, a support group for fire victims. “There was outreach and support from the whole community. There is a bond. We are like a family.”

Within weeks of the disaster, Operation Recovery was formed, holding weekly meetings that became a lifeline for some residents, who called themselves “burn-outs.” Out of mutual sorrow, many fire survivors who had known each other only superficially became close friends. Political foes set aside differences to work toward common interests. And the community, often a dichotomy of heavily developed east Malibu versus largely rural west Malibu, worked seamlessly to aid survivors of the fire.

“The city grew up,” said California Coastal Commissioner Madelyn Glickfeld, whose house burned to the ground.

Representing about 500 east Malibu residents who had lost their homes, Operation Recovery quickly became a political force. Its members persuaded city leaders to alter building regulations and begin replacing the La Costa neighborhood’s water system, which was inadequate for fighting fires. (La Costa is a hillside neighborhood in east Malibu, just off Pacific Coast Highway between Rambla Pacifico and Carbon Canyon.)

At City Hall, where some residents had accused the City Council of micro-managing the staff, city employees were given broader latitude to handle the crisis. Among other changes, seven additional employees were hired, time was set aside on the council’s weekly agenda for fire survivors to speak, and building permit fees and planning review requirements were waived.

Many fire victims have complained that city’s inevitable red tape slowed rebuilding efforts, but they and others say that, despite the delays, the ordeal of the fire helped local government mature.

“The City Council has had to evolve from a being a homeowners association to being a professional body,” said Ron Goldman, a local architect.

City Manager David N. Carmany agreed.

“I think most big cities develop their personalities in the first decade (after incorporation), and this has helped the city of Malibu,” Carmany said. “Before the fire, it felt like ‘Mayberry RFD’; now we have voice mail. . . . There is definitely a resiliency, a can-do spirit here. People are going to find solutions to their problems.”

Like Jean Craig, a 10-year resident of Malibu whose home in La Costa burned, the majority of fire survivors say they knew their neighbors by face but not by name. After their homes were destroyed, shell-shocked residents gathered at Operation Recovery meetings to confront what seemed an endless parade of insurmountable problems--inadequate insurance, burned foundations not covered in policies or tough, expensive geological conundrums. The group grew close along the way.

“Before the fire, I used to see this kindly man I would say hello to as I was walking my dog by his house,” said Craig, who is writing a first-person account of the fire and its aftermath for a book she plans to self-publish. “We worked together to rebuild our homes. . . . If I had a crisis, I could go two doors down and knock on the door and Zane (Meckler) would be there. There are six people I could do that with now whom I could not do that with before.”

Meckler, a 21-year resident of Malibu and a former president of the Malibu Democratic Club, says that in the six months after the fire, Operation Recovery meetings were like religious gatherings. He says the sessions were both painful and therapeutic.

Neighbors would see each other at the Operation Recovery meetings and “the more harried they would become, the more (they) would huddle together and say, ‘Whaddya think,’ ” Meckler said. “Our friends are now people all over the hill. . . . These are live human beings now, not just names on a list. . . . We check on each other. . . . A lot of things in common were unearthed by the fire. Jean’s now not only a neighbor but a friend.”

Although largely untouched by the fire, west Malibu residents held a fund-raiser for Operation Recovery. Churches, a synagogue and other groups helped residents get basics such as clothing and shoes, among other things.

“The fire did create a sensitivity in the people of west Malibu who thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ ” said Jody Stump, who lost her La Costa home. “Before, there was this strange schism. It still exists, but there is a sensitivity and tolerance that we’re all Malibu-ites.”

Support from Malibu’s business community also forged new bonds. Dry cleaners offered free cleaning of smoke-damaged clothes, restaurants served meals gratis, and nurseries gave away plants. And residents responded in kind.

“My wife and I threw a bar mitzvah for our son and normally we would buy at a discount store,” said Michael Rubin, who lost his home in the fire. “But I said, ‘Let’s give the business to Pete,’ (the owner of Country Liquor). We had about a $500 bill. All these people lost the bulk of their business last year. We wanted to give it to them.”

Nowhere was residents’ newfound cooperation demonstrated more tangibly than through Operation Recovery. The idea for the group came when a bereft Arnold York, whose La Costa home burned to the ground, called an Oakland survivors group created after the 1991 fire there, looking for advice.

“They told us, ‘If you are going to rebuild, you’re going to have to get organized, because it was a crisis a week,’ ” said York. Craig says York in many ways became a visible symbol of recovery efforts, much as actor Edward James Olmos did by sweeping up broken glass in the days immediately after the Los Angeles riots.

With a brain trust of talent--including lawyers, architects, writers, artists and entrepreneurs--the fire survivors had the makings of a small but potent lobbying force. Subgroups were created to haggle with insurance companies and address such fire prevention questions as the creation of a volunteer fire department and a new water system.

“In the beginning, it was almost a 12-step program, I’m not kidding,” Arnold York said as he sat in his Malibu Times office at the bottom of Las Flores Canyon Road. “It was solace, but we also had an agenda to rebuild. We told our insurance companies that if they didn’t behave themselves we would issue them a report card. We focused political energy on them and told them we were going to make what they said public so they could be held accountable. We wanted to hold their feet to the fire.”

Pressure also was applied to both the city and the Fire Department. Malibu Times reporters doggedly covered all rebuild issues, supplemented by editorials on the subject, mostly written by York.

“The Malibu Times became a mouthpiece for all of us in the sense that it had anything you needed to know in it, from information about the Red Cross (to) recovery groups or how to reach the state Insurance Department,” Meckler said.

York, a lawyer who bought the newspaper in 1987, had been seen as a vitriolic critic of the city government. But he and other critics set aside most of their differences with the city to work toward fire relief, according to members of Operation Recovery.

“The fire brought together strange bedfellows,” said Art London, a retired attorney whose Carbon Mesa home burned and who has mostly disagreed with York about local politics. “People who are hostile to the city and people who are supportive of it worked together for a common cause. Differences were not relevant. It made some of these people sound like apologists.”

Counted among the accomplishments of Operation Recovery is a set of new “custom development criteria” for the La Costa neighborhood. Established in the late 1920s, the area was one of the first developments in Malibu. About 110 of La Costa’s 250 houses burned.

Led by fire survivors in the neighborhood, La Costa residents organized into a homeowners association. After getting signatures from a majority of residents, the association successfully lobbied the city to increase the neighborhood’s allowable house size from 1,885 square feet to 3,400 square feet for the area’s typical 50-by-100-foot lot. The new standard was more generous than the 10% house-size increase that the city initially granted to fire victims because house sizes in La Costa had remained largely unchanged since the community was first developed.

“To get 60% of Malibu residents to agree to anything is nothing short of extraordinary,” York said. “We had to move houses, change views. It wasn’t easy. People had to set aside their own private desires to do what was best for the community.”

Malibu’s political complexion also changed, according to some residents.

Before the fire, the City Council was loathe to relax its strict building restrictions, responding largely to pressure from west Malibu residents concerned about protecting open space. But after the blaze, the council was forced to moderate its restrictive stance somewhat to meet the reconstruction needs of east Malibu.

Contributing to the change was the pressure from La Costa residents’ to increase house sizes--and the election to the council last April of Jeffrey Jennings, described as a moderate on home-building restrictions compared with some other council members.

“A political bloc formed in east Malibu,” said Sara Wan, whose husband, Larry Wan, is a former mayor of Malibu. “East Malibu impacted the election and Jennings got elected because of that.”

But perhaps most important, Operation Recovery negotiated with the Metropolitan Water District and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to replace La Costa’s water system, the only one in the city being upgraded in the fire’s aftermath.

“We were told by the Fire Department that we couldn’t have put out a grease fire in the kitchen,” Karen York said. “We are getting a new water system. The city didn’t get in our way, but (it) they didn’t lead either.”

Nonetheless, the tragedy clearly affected city government. There was doubt that the young city, with just 12 full-time employees, could handle the demands of cleanup and rebuilding. To “staff up,” Carmany hired seven more full-time employees, mostly in the building, planning and public works departments. To do so, Carmany said, the city cut its spending on outside consultants and used the savings to pay for the new hires.

Although no fire survivors are pleased with the prolonged process of rebuilding, no one interviewed for this article seemed to regret casting their vote for cityhood years back.

“The fire demonstrated to people the real advantage of having a local government because the city was able to respond to the fire victims the way the county never could,” said Mayor Jeffrey W. Kramer. “We were able to waive fees, rewrite the building codes so they could build bigger and . . . extend the time to apply for rebuild permits. We provided a local sounding board where people could let off steam.”

And, inside City Hall, the disaster changed the way city staff members did their jobs.

“The City Council wasn’t confident in their own staff,” said Bob Benard, Malibu’s former planning director who recently left to take a job with the city of Long Beach. “The council had to be in charge of everything. . . . After the fire, we couldn’t wait for the council to review everything. Between us, we had hundreds of years of municipal experience. We made code and policy changes without sacrificing their principles.”

The fire also gave Malibu the opportunity to correct a decades-old problem in lower Las Flores Canyon, which is now slated to undergo a $21-million landslide and flood-control project. The ambitious project was negotiated by Carmany and other city staff, who successfully brokered a deal under which the federal and state governments will, respectively, absorb 75% and 25% of the project’s cost.

More generally, residents’ real-life struggles with rebuilding may be prompting the city to take a less restrictive approach to land-use planning.

“Perhaps the city moved into the role of advocacy for residents’ development interests,” Carmany said. “There has been a healthy skepticism regarding development in Malibu. (With the fire) we had a large percentage of residents wanting to rebuild their homes who had to sit on the other side of the (building department) counter.”

So far, only two of the residents who lost their homes have rebuilt. Arnold York speculates that it will be another year before there are many houses back on the hillsides ravaged by fire. York says he is looking forward to retiring from his post as impresario of Operation Recovery, but the group won’t dissolve until the majority of burn-outs have rebuilt.

But as painful as it has been, he said, the consensus is that the community and city came together.

“Government around here was a hobby,” York said. “It has become a necessity.”

Voices of Malibu

‘The fire did create a sensitivity in the people of west Malibu who thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” ’-- Jody Stump

Who lost her home in the fire

*

‘Before the fire, it felt like “Mayberry RFD”; now we have voice mail.’-- David N. Carmany, City manager

*

‘There was a chemical change in this community. . . . We are like a family.’-- Karen York, Co-founder of Operation Recovery