A searingly familiar scene

Dawn was still two hours away. Soon, the sun would splash onto the terraces of the Malibu hillsides, one by one, until one of the nation’s most exclusive and reclusive towns would come into relief like the details of a plein-air painting: A shock of bougainvillea. A horse corral. A wraparound deck with a commanding view of the sea.

But when Jim Palmer woke with a start Sunday, it didn’t feel like Xanadu. And it didn’t look like night.

The sky was bright red. Malibu was ablaze. Within hours, the smoke around the 61-year-old’s home was so thick that he was wearing a snorkel mask to protect his eyes and had wrapped a wet towel around his face. With a bucket of water, Palmer fought back embers creeping under his garage door. Flames were gnawing at the front porch of the neighbor’s home. He spotted firefighters nearby and screamed for them: “I need water over here!”

It would be a striking scene -- if only it didn’t happen time and again.

In the three decades leading up to the blaze that charred more than 2,200 acres in the Malibu hills on Sunday, wildfires have claimed hundreds of homes and tens of thousands of acres in the area, costing homeowners, business owners and taxpayers millions of dollars.

Each time, the fire seems to bring a new tableau.

This time, it was a Jaguar sedan fully engulfed in flames on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu Canyon Road.

It was fire billowing from the historic hilltop Castle Kashan.

It was a man trying to stamp out the embers searing his lawn on Malibu Crest Drive -- until his sneaker caught fire.

Along Saddle Peak Mountain Road, residents huddled together and stared down into the fire, mesmerized by a massive column of smoke that gathered in the geographic bowl containing many of the populated parts of Malibu and then spilled out over the ocean 3,000 feet below.

Art dealer Jeff Poe, 46, watched as flames hopscotched across the hills near his secluded home, nestled in a small bowl off Carbon Canyon. Helicopters kept returning to the canyon, one after another, dropping water on the flames. At some points, they seemed to gain the upper hand. Then the flames would pop up again on the ridge above Poe’s home.

Poe spoke with firefighters; they offered no assurance that his house would survive the fire.

“They always said it would come,” Poe said.

Sharon Gee, 74, a 47-year resident of Malibu, was sitting on a plastic chair in front of her rented beachfront home. Gee has lived through five Malibu fires and knows the routine; on Sunday, she moved into action in the predawn hours, moving her horses, wetting down the house, turning on the sprinklers and then evacuating until the fire moved on to a new spot.

Her house survived.

“We’re like old sailors,” she said. “We stand watch.”

The sign outside the gutted Malibu Presbyterian Church advertised this week’s sermon. It was to be about Revelation, which describes the end of the world.

“We only lost a building,” said Pastor Greg Hughes. “We believe God will make something beautiful out of ashes.”

That is a sentiment lost on author Mike Davis, who has written extensively and incisively about what he calls Southern California’s “market-driven urbanization.”

Probably the most controversial thing he’s ever written, he said Sunday, came 10 years ago: “The case for letting Malibu burn.” He remains unrepentant; his research, he says, has suggested that there are some spots in Malibu that have burned to the point of “theoretical possibility.”

“These are places that burn as frequently as they can,” he said. “There is simply nowhere else on Earth where fire is inevitable.”

Most in Malibu decline to participate in that kind of debate.

“The challenges of Mother Nature -- fire, flood, rocks -- these are all things that we confront,” said Jim Ludwig, the clerk of the board of elders at Malibu Presbyterian and a member of the congregation for 28 years. “We’re blessed with a beautiful setting. And with the sweet comes some bitterness. But that’s the way it is -- wherever you live.”

No one disputes that Malibu is a virtual laboratory for wildfires. Its hillsides are coated with dry chaparral, interrupted by homes of the well-heeled. Its canyons run north to south, operating as a natural bellows for the Santa Ana winds that force hot, compressed air through the mountains and toward the Pacific each fall and winter.

In 1978, a series of devastating blazes in Malibu, Agoura and Mandeville Canyon blew through 230 homes and 26,000 acres. Seven years later, six houses were lost. November 1993 brought what some observers have labeled a “superfire” -- a vicious firestorm that raged for three days and sent a column of smoke six miles into the sky. Three people were killed and 268 homes were lost, almost all of which have been rebuilt.

The list keeps growing. October 1996: 10 houses lost in Malibu, Calabasas Canyon, Corral Canyon. January 2007: four more homes gone, this time on the oceanfront.

Maps that fire officials were using at a command center Sunday to plot their defense showed that much of the 1,000-plus acres that had burned so far had also burned in the 1993 or 1996 fires -- or both.

By now, fire in Malibu carries a distinctive sense of inevitability.

About midnight Saturday, howling winds woke Michael Watkins in his Malibu Crest home. A television producer and director, Watkins has lived in Malibu for 20 years; fire, he knows, often comes on the heels of that sort of wind. He got his wife and dogs packed into a car in the morning but stayed behind to look after their home.

“All of a sudden,” he said, “it came. Embers were lighting up the yard all around me and blowing up against the house.” Overwhelmed, he called for help from nearby firefighters, who kept the flames at bay.

“Those guys saved my bacon,” he said. “It was wicked.”

Just because they happen with some regularity does not mean that wildfires have lost their ability to shock.

Joe LeMonnier, 50, of Agoura arrived at the business he owns, Malibu Glass and Mirror, at 6 a.m. Sunday to find it engulfed in flames.

When he saw that firefighters had been forced to concentrate on protecting an adjacent school, he grabbed a fire extinguisher and saved a trailer office. Two other trailer offices were lost, as well as about $500,000 in inventory.

“It was so hot. You can’t get near it,” he said. “You think of a campfire. . . but it’s not like that. It’s so much more intense.”

Michael Kerbage, too, found himself fighting the blaze; Sunday morning he climbed onto the roof of Colony House Liquors, in the 22500 block of Pacific Coast Highway, with a garden hose. The blaze came close enough to set fire to a nearby palm tree before moving on.

“Lucky,” he said. “Just lucky.”

joel.rubin@latimes.com

andrew.blankstein@latimes.com

scott.gold@latimes.com