Devastating Fire Helped Bring Malibu Together : Recovery: Some proclaim the ’93 blaze as the fledgling city’s coming of age. ‘There is a bond. We are like a family,’ says a local businesswoman.

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 the 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 Malibuites.”

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.”

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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 firms and address such fire prevention questions as 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 most residents, the group 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.

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“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.”

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.

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. To do so, Carmany said, the city cut its spending on outside consultants and used the savings to pay for the new hires.

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

“Government around here was a hobby,” Arnold York. “It has become a necessity. The fire matured our counsel . . . (and) welded us into a very active small town.”