Visitors Came to Malibu by the Thousands to Escape the Heat

• Lifeguards Labored into the Dark to Keep Beaches Safe

BY HANS LAETZ

“They just wouldn’t go home.”

Los Angeles County lifeguards say the crowd that swelled Malibu’s population by as many as 215,000 beachgoers on Labor Day alone was unusual not only for its huge size, but also its reluctance to head home to baking inland cities as the sun went down.

“Sunday night we were doing rescues in the pitch black of night,” said Northern Section Capt. Dan Akins. “In the twilight, we could see little shadows out there, and there were hundreds of people in the water in the dark.”

And who could blame them? Woodland Hills was still above 100 degrees at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday, and highways leading out of Malibu were jammed.

A combination of near record-setting heat inland, a three-day weekend with school just going into session, and perfect beach weather drew more than 650,000 people to the public beaches over the three-day weekend. Add to this the Friday night crowds, people at the pier and the annual Chili Cook-Off, and Malibu could easily have hosted around 900,000 people during the four days.

The casualty toll was amazingly light: no serious injury accidents on the beaches or roads were reported by officials, and no reports of serious crime were noted.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies said the weekend started off badly Friday night, when a traffic accident at Pacific Coast Highway and Big Rock Drive snarled the Malibu-bound commute. Some residents reported a 90-minute ordeal to get from Santa Monica to Trancas.

Five crashes occurred on Malibu roads Friday, and four on Saturday, including a crash between two sheriff’s deputies’ motorcycles (see separate article). But only one wreck was reported Sunday, and none on Monday.

Sheriff’s officials said none of those accidents caused serious injury. “When it’s that crowded, people don’t go too fast, people don’t get hurt,” noted sheriff’s Traffic Sgt. Phillip Brooks.

City of Los Angeles Police reported one major collision on PCH near Sunset Boulevard Saturday afternoon, when a pickup truck and van collided, blocking one westbound lane and backing up traffic to the 405 freeway.

The story was at the beaches. “We had people parking where they’ve never parked before,” said lifeguard Chuck Moore. “I came down from Ventura Sunday, and every single legal place to park all the way to Zuma had a car in it.”

Zuma-bound traffic was at a standstill at midday Monday all the way back to the southern tunnels on Kanan-Dume Road.

Zuma Beach parking lots were full by 12:30, and motorists hoping to get in anyway were backed up a half mile. Cars were parked in nearly every available spot on many residential streets on Point Dume and in Malibu Park.

Back at the beach, the sand was so crowded that “you could walk from the main tower to the water on umbrellas,” Moore said.

“The guards spent the entire day out of their towers and walking on the berm, because they couldn’t see the beach,” Akins said.

Building south swells on Sunday and Monday, and a lack of wind, caused set after set of perfect curls to form, some of them six-feet-high in chest-deep water. Most of the crowds stayed close to shore, but 457 people needed rescuers’ help out of the water Sunday and Monday, as the large swells generated sporadic strong outgoing currents.

“Usually by this late in the year the waves have pushed the sand in and we get a shore break,” Akins said. “But this year the bottom is so flat that the waves are really forming, and currents carrying people way out.

“Most of our rescues this week were a good 150 yards out,” he said.

One fin-wearing boogie-board rider at Zuma Tower 1, near Point Dume, was struck by a large wave Sunday and found face down in the foam. “We performed CPR on him, and he was talking by the time he was loaded on the helicopter,” Akins said.

Another swimming accident just a few minutes earlier required lifeguards to strap the victim to a special device to keep the spine immobilized. That person also was air evacuated.

The hot, bedraggled inland dwellers kept arriving at Zuma until late in the day. “We got a whole second wave of people at 3 p.m., and we had people out there in the dark because they didn’t want to go home to the heat.

“We were out there on the P. A., announcing ‘the beach is closed, please go home,’ and they wouldn’t,” Akins said. “At 8:05, we still had lifeguards in the water bringing people out of rips, and that was something I’ve never seen.”