Malibu Gets a Grim Sequel to Fires of ’93

Scene after scene repeated itself, following an unnerving script written three years ago.

From the pickup trucks heaped with household treasures, to the frantic searches for household pets that refused to come, to the towering flames racing over the chaparral ridges of Malibu to the sea, Monday was October 1993 all over again.

There was one blessed variation in this reprise. In 1993, 268 homes burned in the Malibu fires. But by late Monday evening, all but two houses in the rugged area had dodged the flames--even as separate blazes destroyed dozens of homes in San Diego and Orange counties.

But so much else was the same.

The fear that comes when smoke wafts up nostrils on a gusty fall day.

The guessing games. Will the flames go this way or that? Will the wind die or rise ?

The split-second decisions: Should families stand sentinel with the pitifully skinny garden hose or flee, leaving behind all that defines them materially? For some longtime residents of these scrubby hills, the script of natural disaster is so familiar that they react almost without thinking.

“When you see the smoke from the Monte Avido area, you start packing,” said Carol Katz, 57, who has lived in that part of Calabasas since 1978 and has been evacuated before.

Still, nature resists planning.

Katz had a prepared a list of things to take. But she had to leave so quickly Monday that she did not have time to grab much of it.

Karen Dumas, 52, started loading her car hours before the flames moved toward her Malibu Bowl-area home. But when it was time to drive it away, the fire had cut off her escape.

Her husband was less practical--and resigned to it.

“We discovered we were woefully unprepared,” said Larry Dumas, 65. “My gloves are for the birds,” he said as he wiggled his fingers through holes in his gloves. “My ladder is no good. But you know, if we have to go through this again sometime, I probably won’t do any better.”

Kit Miller, a resident of Monte Nido, at the top of Malibu Canyon, lived through the fires of 1993 and the 1970s. On Monday, she realized it was once again time to worry.

“I looked up and I saw a very hazy sun and I just had a feeling. Whenever the winds come up, I get very paranoid. My blood runs cold.”

She was standing on a cliff on Cold Canyon Road, near Mulholland Highway, watching flames burning up a canyon area and waiting for the smoke to clear enough for her to get back home and help her husband hose down the roof. Her car was filled with boxes, picture frames and other belongings.

“After all these years, you get a routine, we have boxes and tape everywhere in the house,” she said.

Looking out at the fire, she added: “It’s exciting to look at from a distance. But it’s something you never ever get used to, not entirely.”

As evacuees headed down the canyons above Malibu, they drove by tree stumps still black from the 1993 brush fire, past still-empty house lots.

“They’re just so resilient,” David Clarke, a Los Angeles County lifeguard at Zuma Beach, said of Malibu residents, who regularly suffer through not only wildfires, but also mudslides and flooding.

“They just keep coming back for more. If there’s a fire, they pick up a hose. If there’s mud, they pick up a shovel. I don’t know if anyone ever leaves.”

Santos Flaniken is thinking of it.

“I lost my first house in 1978,” he said as he stood on a rooftop at the Malibu Beach RV Park with a garden hose putting out spot fires in palm trees. He has lived through four major blazes.

“The reason I’m in an RV now is because I lost a house in the fire of 1983.”

“I like the RV so much I kept it.”

He also likes Malibu.

Still, he conceded:, “I think this is about it for me. I think I’m going to move to Hawaii.”

The 1993 fires taught Malibu officials some lessons, one of them being the importance of brush clearance.

Information officer Sarah Maurice said the city initiated a stepped-up enforcement program in 1995 under which forest workers could forcibly go onto private property, clear it and charge it to the homeowner’s tax bill.

As a condition of rebuilding permits after the 1993 blaze, the city required owners to use fire-resistant construction materials.

The city also had several evacuation sites mapped out, including one for animals at Zuma Beach.

But Jean Goodman, chairwoman of the Malibu’s emergency preparedness study group, complained Monday that the city was not as ready as it should have been.

As the fire neared, the power went out, taking the television and phone lines with it. City Hall employees did not have a way to communicate with staff at Michael Landon Park, where evacuees were being directed.

“I had to find a pickup truck and drive over there myself,” Goodman said. “If the City Council had approved a budget for an emergency operations center we wouldn’t be in the mess we are now.”

While some found fault with the city’s emergency planning, others fell back on their own devices.

Actor James Keach, who lives on Pacific Coast Highway, sprayed his property with a fire hose supplied by a generator that sucked water out of his pond and swimming pool.

“We’re planning to stay here and fight this,” Keach said. “I’m not going to leave. When you live here in Malibu, you got to plan for this.”