Malibu Road Fire Cause Is Still Under Investigation

• Questions Are Being Raised about Brush Clearance Practices and Their Possible Contribution

BY HANS LAETZ

As arson investigators continue to seek a cause of last week’s Malibu Road brushfire, residents along the beach have some pointed questions about supposed brush clearance on the burned parkland. But firefighters say brush clearance by a parks agency, while perhaps not up to standard, had little to do with the loss of five houses.

Unofficial damage estimates stand at $60 million, making the Malibu Bluffs fire of Jan. 8 one of the most expensive brushfires on a per-acre basis in state history, one fire official said. No people were hurt in the fire, which charged to the ocean and took 300 firefighters three hours to extinguish, and a half-day to mop up.

But the story took a more somber turn two days after the fire, when the remains of one resident’s dog were found in the debris. “Angel,” a small white dog owned by Malibu Road residents Al Ehringer and Christina Carmel, was the only unaccounted-for pet remaining until her remains were discovered Wednesday.

A handwritten sign posted at Ehringer’s and Carmel’s burned-out house thanked the dozens of volunteers who walked around the area, looking for pets scattered by the Jan. 8 firestorm, which blew from Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu Road in less than eight minutes.

Another of Ehringer’s and Carmel’s dogs, a chocolate Lab named “Teddy Bear,” rode out the fire in a beach-level hot tub as houses and decks around it burned. The dog ran off, but was recovered hiding in a nearby house’s support piers Tuesday morning.

Their two other dogs also survived. “Bo,” a black chow, dug a hole in the sand and stayed there until found by a firefighter; and “Bubba,” a mixed breed, was able to find shelter from the flames.

Arson investigators for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department had not released a cause of the fire as of Tuesday, eight days after flames roared down two small arroyos and over the hills southwest of Bluffs Park. Speculation remains centered on a possible tossed cigarette from a car on Pacific Coast Highway into overgrown brush along the highway.

Fire officials continue to review radio logs, and interview individual firefighters, as they reconstruct how the fire grew, and how houses were lost and saved. “Any way you look at it, there was some amazing firefighting performed,” said County Fire Battalion Chief Terry DeJournett.

Malibu Mayor Ken Kearsley agreed, but said he wanted to make sure the right decisions had been made when the original dispatch went out at 5:01 p.m. on that hot, windy Monday afternoon.

“It seemed to me we had a lot of fire trucks up on PCH where the fire started, and not enough down where the fire was heading, on Malibu Road. But I don’t want to Monday-morning quarterback, and I am not saying that anything was done wrong,” he emphasized.

“I do want to make sure that the right questions are being asked about the response,” Kearsley said. The veteran of a half dozen Malibu fires said he looked forward to getting the fire department’s final analysis.

DeJournett said the original deployment was “exactly as it should have been. We had three trucks go down Malibu Road, one truck go to the point of origin, to keep it from spreading laterally there, and one engine go to the helispot” to pump water for the fire helicopters in transit.

Firefighters on board those three trucks on Malibu Road had to make fast decisions about which homes to save, which to protect, and which to allow to continue to burn. DeJournett said. “When Engine 70 arrived (from the Carbon Canyon fire station), Suzanne Somers’ house was already involved,” he said.

A Malibu Surfside News photo of Engine 70’s arrival is time-stamped at 5:10, just nine minutes after the blaze broke out nearly one half mile away, and shows that unkempt roadside brush at the bottom of the bluff had not yet started burning.

“Clearly, that (Somers’) house was affected by burning embers just shooting down the bluff, up and under the house” DeJournett said. The fire battalion chief said he doubted if the small amount of brush and ornamental plants that burned on the north side of Malibu Road ignited the house.

“That brush wasn’t burning when the house started,” he said. Gesturing to the skeletons of sage and sumac plants up the hill, he added, “This was a flashover fire, and it wasn’t very hot. If it were a hot fire, that hillside would be nuked, and the charcoal we see would instead be all white ash.

Additional trucks from the strike force, pre-positioned in Agoura Hills, rolled out of Malibu Canyon and up Malibu Road, arriving at 5:24 p.m. By that time, several houses had already been consumed by fires that had started under them, and plants on both sides of the road were aflame.

DeJournett said a small arroyo with a cement channel at its bottom, leading down from the bluffs, may have funneled heat and sparks through a tunnel under the road and then under one beachfront house, dooming it. “All that heat, all those embers, would have just poured down off the bluff and into that channel,” he said.

Some Malibu Road residents have long been unhappy with brush clearance efforts by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the autonomous government agency that controls the open space near Bluffs Park through one of its affiliated agencies. Dan Hillman, a five-decade resident, said he had been on the phone with the agency three days before the fire demanding that heavy brush on the bluff slope be trimmed.

“That property was cleared to the limits of the law,” countered Santa Monica Conservancy spokesman Dash Solarz. “I don’t believe there’s anything that could have been done in a windstorm like that.”

The fire battalion chief agreed, although DeJournett said it did not appear to him that all of the brush within 100 feet of Malibu Road houses is removed as of this week. “A lot of those plants are ornamentals, and do not burn intensely. But the fire and brands just poured over the bluff,” he said.

Residents have been sparring with state agencies for decades about the amount of fire-ready brush and weeds that have accumulated on the land between Pacific Coast Highway and Malibu Road, which had been owned by the State Parks department for decades.

Last year, the City of Malibu purchased the Bluffs Park grassy area and the Michael Landon Recreation Center from state parks, and the brush-covered hillsides were transferred to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy – the same agency that wants to operate campsites in the hills above Malibu. City officials do not believe that the municipality owns any of the land that burned.

State Parks spokesman Roy Stearns said in a telephone interview that the parks department paid county jail inmates to clear the brush within 100 feet of the Malibu Road beach houses over the past several years. “We had a year left on the contract, so State Parks decided to just go ahead and have the county corrections crews continue to brush that area on behalf of the new state agency, the Conservancy.

A walk on the bluffs above Malibu Road just west of the burned-out area reveals numerous places where wild brush and human-planted shrubs, succulents and trees exist well within 100 feet of structures. But most of the brush within the clear zone had been removed in most places, and most large trees had been “lollipopped” to remove dead branches at the bottom.

Kearsley said the 100-foot limit may be insufficient in some areas where topography and local wind conditions can cause fire to jump a great distance instantaneously. “We need to be smart about this, and to reconsider the proper limits,” he said. “It may be appropriate in some places to clear back 300 feet, but it needs to be done smartly.”

City of Malibu planners and building inspectors are clearing their desks to process fire-related permits, and had already issued the first building permit for repairs just one day after the fire. “That was for a home that didn’t get any structural damage and only had some minor damage,” said Gail Sumpter, the city’s permit services manager.

Sumpter said the city is waiving fees for demolition and cleanup permits, but said insurance should cover fees for new building permits.

One major concern, she said, is fire-damaged wooden pilings and beams that have to be removed in some cases from within the surf line. “We will have people like our environmental programs analyst to make sure that when they clean things up they protect our environment,” she said.

All of the homes that are rebuilt will need to have septic systems replaced with new state-of-the-art onsite wastewater treatment systems, and will need to meet tougher new fire codes, she said. Several newer houses in the fire’s path built with more-modern methods did not ignite.

But whether that was due to smart building, or just plain luck, was unclear, said DeJournett as he marveled at the capricious nature of the fire. A compound of three homes undergoing renovations right in the middle of the fire did not burn despite numerous exposed studs, construction materials and open walls.

“The arriving fire trucks ignored that complex, and after they got things under control up the beach, one of the engines came back and found three separate points where the houses had begun burning’” the battalion chief said. “That owner is incredibly lucky.

“Conservatively speaking, at $60 million in destroyed beach houses and just 20 acres of brush burned, that makes this fire one of the most expensive fires in terms of dollar-loss-per-acre in California history,” DeJournett said.

OVERVIEW—An aerial photograph by Richard Mollica, a City of Malibu planner, taken from a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s helicopter, shows most of the 20 acres that burned on Monday, Jan. 8. The fire leaped from Pacific Coast Highway to underneath several beachfront houses and decks in fewer than eight minutes, fire officials say. The list of destroyed residences has been updated by fire officials and includes 24266, 24352, 24358, 24380 and 24402 Malibu Road. The house at 24320 Malibu Road is now being descibed as “severely damaged” by fire officials and is undergoing further review. The fire remains under investigation.

Photo credit, MSN/Hans Laetz
THEORY—County Fire Battalion Chief Terry DeJournett points to charred terrain and theorizes how heat and sparks could have traveled down a small arroyo leading from the bluffs and ignited one of the beachfront homes.