The Malibu Question

Should we order the evacuation of Malibu before it’s too late?

I mean, just check the weather map. Across the Pacific, storms are lining up like 747s coming into LAX. We don’t know exactly when they will hit, but one thing we know for sure: When they do, Malibu will get hit the hardest.

How do we know? Because Malibu always gets hit the hardest. It doesn’t matter what kind of disaster. Fires, floods, mudslides, big waves. Disasters flock to Malibu like turkey vultures to a carcass.

“The city of Malibu is a skinny strip of land between the mountains and the ocean,” says John Clement, director of public works for the city. “The mountains catch on fire in the summer and then they slide down on us in the winter. The ocean tries to wipe us out from the other side. It’s like living on the edge of creation.”

Thus far in our El Nino winter of 1998, the tally of Malibu victims remains small. Two houses tumbled into the surf at Broad Beach during the last storm and mudslides closed PCH. For Malibu, that’s chump change. It’s no worse than San Francisco, where a couple of houses have slipped their moorings.

But Clement doesn’t believe the good luck will last. “We’re gonna see some real damage over the next two months,” he predicts. “The rainy season doesn’t end here until April. We could easily get the big mudflows like we got in ’94 and ’95.”

That would be the mudflows that directly followed the big fire of 1993. The ones that poured mud through houses like lava, forcing Clement to rescue people from their second-story windows with front-end loaders.

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So common have disasters become in Malibu that people here often use them as points of reference. Ask a Malibu citizen when he arrived and he is likely to say something like, “after the storms in ‘83” or “just before the ’93 fire.”

But no one in Malibu seems to like the idea of evacuation. Jeff Jennings claims he’s not about to move out. Jennings is the mayor of Malibu, and he says he’s tired of outsiders suggesting his city should be closed down and returned to the bears and rattlesnakes.

“I saw this headline in a paper once that said, ‘Let Malibu Burn.’ The idea seemed to be that no one had a right to live here. People on the outside seem to believe we come to Malibu just to get FEMA money.”

Of course, it’s true that FEMA money now constitutes an important part of Malibu’s municipal budget. The city, which is only 7 years old, has spent $16 million on disasters over the last six years and barely staved off a financial crisis this summer, when some timely reimbursements arrived from FEMA.

It’s also true that the city has grown sensitive about the reimbursement issue. It hastily backed out of a plan to take over the Malibu Pier from the state last fall, when it appeared that El Nino storms might smash the structure into toothpicks and leave the city with still more bills to submit to FEMA.

Still, Jennings argues there’s no justice in Malibu’s reputation as the welfare mom of natural disasters. What about Tornado Alley? What about the Sea Islands of Georgia?

These locales don’t engender the bad vibes of Malibu, he says, because they don’t have the celebrities. “People see Malibu as the playground of the rich and famous,” he says. “When the disasters hit here, it’s a case of schadenfreude.”

I had to look that one up. Schadenfreude is defined as “the malicious enjoyment of the discomfiture of others.” The dictionary doesn’t mention movie stars, but you get the idea. Jennings is arguing that we enjoy watching celebrities suffer because we resent their fame and fortune, not to mention their beach houses.

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To check out the theory I called Ali McGraw, but she’s moved out of Malibu. Then I called Kris Kristofferson, Larry Hagman and Barbra Streisand. They’ve moved out, too.

Maybe they got tired of all the schadenfreude getting beamed at them.

Meanwhile, life goes on among the non-celebrities, who constitute most of Malibu’s population. Like Mayor Jennings, they seem to support the idea of staying with their ship even if it’s going to sink.

Retired Judge John Merrick, for example, has lived in Malibu since 1947. For those of you interested in our cultural history, Merrick happens to be the judge who conducted the marriage ceremony of Sean Penn and Madonna on a Malibu estate. Out here, almost everyone has this sort of brush with fame.

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In any case, Merrick has seen disasters come and disasters go. Once, when he lived at Latigo Beach, he found himself on the roof of his house throwing huge, burning embers into the sea. That was 1956, he thinks.

Another time he watched huge waves knock a neighbor’s house off its foundations and into the surf. That was 1980.

He never considered leaving. “After the storms go, the sun comes out. The air is clean. You can’t find another place like this,” he says.

And that’s that.

Or take Marge Bernstein, who first moved to the Malibu beach with her husband in 1957. Their first house was destroyed by storms in the winter of 1983. They rebuilt on the same spot.

Her husband has died, and now Bernstein waits out this winter by herself. Outside her house the beach has been eaten away, leaving waves crashing directly against the sea wall. It’s unsettling.

“Big trees and telephone poles come rolling in with the waves. They batter the sea wall, and all you can do is hold your breath,” she says. “If the sea wall breaks, the water starts to fill up behind it, and you get this domino effect.”

But is she getting out? Nah.

“This week my neighbors and I were asking each other, why does each person come back after their house is destroyed by fire or waves, especially when we know it could happen again?”

“I guess the answer is that the ocean just gets to you. The beach becomes your home. You can’t leave.”

So it looks like the evacuation plan ain’t gonna fly. Malibu people won’t leave, no matter what. Public Works Director Clement believes, in fact, that the disasters can actually reinforce peoples’ attachment to Malibu.

“Geologically, Malibu is unique,” he says. “It’s unstable and will always be unstable. It’s more unstable than any other stretch of the coast. There’s more than 200 mapped landslides within the city boundaries alone.”

“Somehow,” he says, “people in Malibu have come to terms with this fact. They accept it. For some, it even has the plus of putting them in touch with the elemental part of nature.”

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In 1994, Clement plucked an old lady from a house that had been filled to the gills with mud. She climbed into the bucket of his front-end loader and rode it to safety. When she got out, Clement asked her what she was going to do.

“I’m going to clean it up,” the old lady said.

And so it goes. We can expect the worst from Malibu this winter, and most likely we will get it. The rains will come, the mud will flow, and FEMA will pay with our tax dollars.

But it’s not a total loss. In return, we will get our schadenfreude.