Malibu’s Worst Fear: Wildfire Repeats and Takes Devastating Toll

BY HANS LAETZ

A full moon...a notorious mountaintop cave overlooking the Valley...and partying teens and young adults. Good times, until they suddenly went bad.

When a car went screaming down Corral Canyon Road at 2:30 a.m. or so Saturday morning, its horn honking, residents in the cluster of houses at Malibu Bowl a mile away may have thought it was just another load of idiot partiers. But it may have been a warning.

The worst fire in Malibu in 15 years swept down Corral Canyon Saturday morning, destroying 53 houses and damaging another 35 in just four hours. Some 4900 acres of Malibu were burned in the third brushfire to strike the city in 2007.

It may be weeks before a damages estimate can be tallied up, but given the nature of the 53 houses that burned to the ground and 34 that suffered serious damage, the final tab can safely be expected to exceed $100 million.

In 90 minutes, the fire had reached the houses southeast of the caves. At least 32 homes burned in the Malibu Bowl area, by 6:30 a.m. TV helicopters showed row after row of houses all fully engulfed.

A third of the 100 or so houses in the vicinity were all on fire at the same time, some of them having spontaneously burst into flame as superheated air swirled on 40 mile-per-hour winds.

Canyon residents describe an awful scene in the predawn darkness Saturday. Flashing lights and wailing sirens from sheriff’s vehicles, and pounding fists of deputies and neighbors, awakened several hundred people on streets off Corral Canyon Road, a dead-end ridgetop road, three miles inland from and several hundred feet above the ocean.

Their homes clustered in two hillside tracts had slim chances: only a few fire trucks could make it up Corral Canyon in the 45 minutes it took the flames to arrive. At least 32 houses in Malibu Bowl were destroyed before 7 a.m.; streets such as Lookout Road, Lockwood Road, Ingleside Way and Corral Canyon Road were hit hard.

Newell Road, where six Glendale firefighters were burned 11 years ago, was singed but spared.

As fire moved south down Corral Canyon Road into the houses at El Nido, a neighborhood builder with a pair of decommissioned fire trucks saved several structures. About a half dozen homes were lost there, as the fire’s eastern flank moved south towards Latigo Beach.

The southwestern tongue of fire, meanwhile, skirted the largest cluster of homes on Latigo Canyon Road, where it was stopped on a house-by-house basis. Of the 15 houses facing the fire front, not one was lost.

But on the ridge further downhill, five or six homes were burned as the fire crested the hill and burned all around Latigo Canyon Road’s switchbacks. This wall of flames then plunged several hundred feet straight down into Sycamore Canyon, and was finally stopped in the canyon bottom along Via Escondido, as Cal Fire trucks arriving from a state command post in Camarillo rolled in.

Burning embers rushed out a half-mile ahead of the fire front, claiming at least three houses within a block or two of Geoffrey’s Restaurant. As the day went on, it would turn out those were the last houses to be lost to flames.

At Solstice Canyon, a bridge repair project that left just one lane for all traffic on Corral Canyon Road was blamed by angry residents for causing downhill refugee traffic to back up while uphill fire trucks rolled through. Not so, said the county fire chief in charge of Malibu, Reginald Lee.

“I saw a lot of the residents of the area that was evacuated pull over and watch the fire, they were jamming the side of the road,” he told the city council Monday night. “If they would have moved on down we would have had plenty of room.

“Once we got down to the bottom, they stayed at the service station, which is our staging area, and started crowding us out,” he added.

Just west on PCH at Latigo Shores, the fire jumped the highway and singed the landscaping between the road and condominiums, but spared the structures. The heavily protected BeauRivage Restaurant and Union 76 station were surrounded by burning hills at 7.

Up and down at the coast, the brushfire again caught the city sleeping on a weekend morning.

Many people along the 27-mile coastline had no idea of the peril until they turned on the television—if their cable worked—or stepped outside to retrieve the morning paper, only to see the sky filled with a golden-orange glow as the rising sun caught the plume of acrid smoke.

Residents repeated the all-too familiar drill of looking at helicopter footage, trying to triangulate how far away the danger was from escape routes, and making plans to help themselves or their friends escape from fire.

Charter Communications, the city’s primary cable TV company, lost 12,000 feet of fiber cable early, again blacking out much of the city’s TV service and any Internet and phone connections to the outside world via the hapless system operator.

Although 53 houses were lost, hundreds were saved, and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s decision to move thousands of firefighters, hundreds of trucks and dozens of aircraft into Southern California was credited with saving Malibu. Trucks from Lake Tahoe and the Bay Area were among the first-in units last weekend, on the scene within two hours instead of two days.

On Sunday, Schwarzenegger stepped over crunched roofing tiles and through burned doorways, and comforted several families that lost everything. “We lost 53 homes—that’s the latest update that I’ve gotten—which is very sad,” the governor said. “We want to get those people back on their feet as soon as possible.”

“We had the trucks we needed, here at our disposal,” L.A. County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman said. He estimated that as many as 250 would have burned if reinforcements were not nearby.

“We lost dozens of homes, but it could have been up in the hundreds had we not had pre-positioned resources, at the ready,” affirmed Cal Fire chief Tom Barry.

At the height of the fire, as many as 14,000 residents had been ordered to evacuate, including some neighborhoods far from harm’s way.

Confusion reigned is some neighborhoods like Malibu Park, where sheriff’s deputies were broadcasting mandatory evacuation orders late Saturday at the same time that Point Dume and Paradise Cove residents were told to go home. Most point and cove residents had never pulled out in the first place.

By Sunday evening, residents of Corral, Latigo and Escondido canyons were allowed to drive into their fire-ravaged neighborhoods. Checkpoints ensured that only residents—and not looters or looky-loos—drove up the twisting canyon roads.

On Monday, two SuperScooper planes made drops on isolated pockets of fire, and camp crews were working on burning clusters of trees as late as Tuesday morning. One flare-up Tuesday brought trucks from as far away as the Civic Center groaning up the Latigo Canyon switchbacks, past smoldering ruins of mansions and modest houses.

The Thanksgiving weekend fire showed how well careful fire planning could work—and also demonstrated that one ignored factor could unravel everything.

Corral Canyon residents say their pleas for increased ranger patrols on State Parks land at the north end of Corral Canyon Road have been rebuffed for months. Corral Canyon resident Scott Palamar, who lost his house in the fire, had been exchanging letters and phone calls with chief park administrator Ron Schaefer about the parties and the fire danger.

Park rangers acknowledge that they could not patrol the ridge-top rave location sufficiently to break up repeated instances of lawless partying up there, and neighbors had been complaining for months.

The chief ranger Monday agreed that his staff was stretched thin due to budget cuts and hiring problems, and said his 15-member ranger patrol was down to six rangers and two supervisors.

“It’s hard to hire people down here due to salary and cost-of-housing issues,” he said.

Residents said they had been told only one state ranger is on duty at night to patrol the broad swath of mountain parkland from upper Corral Canyon west to campgrounds near Point Mugu, a drive that can take an hour. Schaefer said more rangers than that were on duty Friday night, but patrols go home for the night at 1 a.m., and raves can last until dawn.

Corral residents peppered officials with questions about why their pleas for increased fire patrols at isolated canyon party locations had gone unheeded; one angry person had posed that question at a Saturday news conference.

The commander of the Malibu-Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, Capt. Tom Martin, said “that particular area is state parks property, we do get calls from time to time and we do respond but that is primarily their responsibility.”

Schaefer said Palamar’s request for a fire gate at the north end of Corral Canyon Road was rejected, because “people would have just parked outside the gate and hiked in, and fire trucks would not have been able to get through all the parked cars.”

As officials totaled up fire damages and injuries—eight firefighters hurt, one of them with moderate injuries—others noted the fire season is just half over.

“We’ve got half of Malibu left to burn,” said City Councilmember Ken Kearsley Monday.

Combustive City Council Meeting Dominated by Fire Concerns

• Residents in Wildfire Areas Voice Complaints about Access, Response, Safety and Aid for Victims

BY BILL KOENEKER

Tempers flared and emotions exploded when fire victims came to the Malibu City Council meeting this week to address concerns in the aftermath of the Corral Fire that consumed 53 homes and destroyed dozens of other structures.

Complaints about the lack of alternative access on Corral Canyon Road, fire department response and questions about post-fire assistance reverberated—occassionally loudly—through the council chambers.

Malibu Battalion Chief Reginald Lee recapped the Canyon and Corral fires for the council and credited air support in both blazes as critical to keeping losses at a minimum.

He said the Corral Fire was different than the Canyon fire because it started closer to homes.

Explaining the losses, Lee said the strategy in fighting Santa Ana wildfires is strictly defensive. “We are relying on your home and brush clearance as protection. In a wind-driven fire, we would need a single engine for every house. We cannot do that,” he said.

Council members asked Lee about how out-of-town companies get their information about local streets and homes and other topographical information and were told that firefighters use Thomas Brothers guides.

Councilmember Ken Kearsley suggested the city would be willing to figure out a way to provide GIS or GPS information systems as he said is done in Honolulu. He noted, “The guys in our neighborhood did not know anything.”

A Ramirez Canyon resident told the council how maps and an evacuation plan were put together by the residents in his canyon and then handed out to fire department personnel after the accuracy of the maps was confirmed by a fire captain.

Lee said because the last three fires in Malibu started close to the coast, fire officials are rethinking the deployment of assets. “The staging has been to have equipment on both sides of the hill. We try to overwhelm the fire before it gets to valuable assets. We are rethinking where we want to put our equipment,” he said, given that these fires started in Malibu and not in Agoura or Calabasas.

Councilmember Pamela Conley Ulich ticked off a list of what she said were problems she had heard about, including that there were more firefighting personnel than beds and that an engine was leaking water. “Can we help you get better equipment? How can we expedite new engines?” asked Conley Ulich, who said she was told that paramedics at Zuma headquarters have no washer or dryer.

Some of the harshest criticism was heaped on the city for what several residents said was a lack of alternative access on Corral Canyon Road because of the potential for bottleneck on the one-lane bridge over Solstice Creek.

“We are very upset,” said Beverly Taki, a Corral Canyon resident whose home was spared. “We had to beg the city to meet with us. Nobody came to us. We wrote our own evacuation plan.”

Taki said the city had made promises about an alternative route, but never followed through.

Other canyon residents agreed. “There was no alternative access. We could not get through the RV Park or BeauRivage,” one said.

Initially, council members disagreed, then questioned city and fire officials about what actually happened and learned that the fire department was not aware of any agreement with the RV park, but thought that was up to the city.

It was also revealed that the gate to BeauRivage, an alternative route, was not opened until 8 a.m.—hours after most residents were forced to evacuate.

However, Lee noted that evacuees’ vehicles were pulled along the side of the road and impeded firefighter access to the area. As for the bridge, he said, “There were no problems,” but reiterated that bystanders impacted the staging area.

Taki also took aim at the mayor and Councilmember Ken Kearsley for what she said were misstatements made to the media.

Mayor Jeff Jennings admitted that he initially made a disconnect between the steelhead trout restoration and bridge replacement along Corral Canyon Road, denying construction was underway.

“I made a mistake. During the next several interviews, I tried to correct that,” he said.

Barovsky defended Kearsley and said there was fire near him. Kearsley said he ignored the mandatory evacuation orders and stayed with his home “while fire was at my doorstep.”

Taki said she had driven past Kearsley’s home in Sycamore Park and saw no evidence of fire.

Barovsky stood by her comment and said, “There is a lot of emotion, but the personal attacks do no good. How does this get us anywhere? Mistakes were made. We do need a better plan for access.”

Kearsley said he thought it might be advisable to study whether there was another route out of Corral Canyon.

SMMC Board Approves Acquisition of Property for Alternate Ramirez Route

• Action Is Contingent on Coastal Commission’s OK

BY BILL KOENEKER

The board of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy voted this week to acquire a Ramirez Canyon property that is critical to building an access road to Ramirez Canyon Park where the SMMC is headquartered if the staff of the California Coastal Commission gives a green light to the project without extensive environmental mitigation.

SMMC executive director Joe Edmiston, whose organization currently has pending before the City of Malibu a parks and trails plan that involves expanded activities at the Ramirez Canyon Park, explained that the board agreed that the project to acquire three legal lots for $7.5 million and another $1.5 million to build the road from Kanan Dume Road to the canyon park is only viable if the Coastal Commission staff recommends the Conservancy can resell the previously graded pads rather than mitigate and restore them for the access road that would be built through an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area.

The matter of the park and trails plan in the form of a Local Coastal Program amendment is scheduled to go before the Malibu City Council on Wednesday, Dec. 5.

The SMMC board, which includes the head of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the superintendent for State Parks and Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan, agreed to go forward with submitting the LCPA to the city.

The access road has become a key element in the park and trails plan, which includes overnight camping in several mid-Malibu canyons and in western Malibu at Charmlee Wilderness Park.

The plan includes expanded activities for SMMC fundraising at Ramirez Canyon Park that neighbors find objectionable and have previously litigated.

While the emphasis and adrenaline has been focused primarily on overnight camping, the crux of the negotiations between the city and the Conservancy appear to be on what municipal officials will allow in Ramirez.

The matter was previously discussed by the council, when members expressed an interest in finding an “incentive” for the SMMC to build the road by allowing more activities if the road gets built.

Edmiston said he has not talked to the council during the interim. He indicated he did talk to the city attorney. “She told me things are not as bleak as I might think they are,” he added.

In various public pronouncements in the press in the last week, city council members have seemingly kept up a resolve to allow the overnight camping despite the recent fire in Corral Canyon, where most of the campsites are planned and an ever-growing emotional clamor for no camping.

The SMMC director noted the talks between the staffs of the Conservancy and the coastal agency have moved to a senior level, and negotiations between the property owner and the SMMC were continuing.

Asked if there might be some inclination to put off the matter pending before the city, Edmiston said, “There was a motion to pull back the proposal. Nobody wanted to do that. The board wanted to go forward with the proposal,” he added.

Without saying he regretted it, Edmiston said his candor at a workshop about the ongoing negotiations between the land owner and the conservancy about the alternate access road was used against him in the negotiations between city officials over the LCPA.

The executive director acknowledged the Conservancy had compromised on overnight camping issues by limiting the number of campsites and scaling back other activities.

He also called the idea of limiting campers to no kind of camping equipment such as propane stoves a “punitive measure” and would hold the line at least for propane stoves. Edmiston had already told the council he would agree to no campfires, no smoking and no white gas stoves.

Many nervous residents and fire victims have called for not only limiting camping activities, but no camping whatsoever, saying it should stay out of the mountains.

However, Mayor Jeff Jennings on Monday night said that was not possible because of the policies of the LCP.

“People are confused about it. Camping is now permitted in every park project in the City of Malibu. That is a fact. Not an opinion. Because camping is a permitted use, the city is powerless to prohibit government agencies. We cannot deny them. If you accept those two items, and you have another solution call me,” added Jennings, who put the onus on Edmiston.

“There is a person who can stop camping in the Santa Monica Mountains. He is the guy. He started the idea. Joe is the guy. Go see Joe.”

• The Publisher’s Notebook •

No Holiday from Wildfire

BY ANNE SOBLE

When the first predawn telephone calls started, I huddled against the early-hour chill and rethought the last-minute jottings in my Notebook column from the previous week’s issue. I had headlined it a “Red Flag Holiday,” and I drew some assurance from the local marshaling of firefighting personnel and equipment in response to the all-too-accurately forecast Santa Ana winds. Malibu had gone through the Canyon Fire a month earlier and has already endured more episodes of these powerful winds in several months than was usually the case in several years. As a community, we were lucky that the losses, however intense for those who experienced them, were low. But on Saturday, that luck ran out. Even though last weekend’s winds paled beside the hurricane-force blasts of Oct. 21, they still were, as I ruefully noted last week, the ingredients of fire weather. Lesser winds with low humidity and parched vegetation in the wrong terrain are as lethal as winds of double the force under less strained conditions. Those of us who have lived in Malibu long enough have instinctive responses to these conditions. Newcomers may think we obsess about nature and the weather, but we have learned the futility of thinking that either’s attributes can be harnessed by personal power.

Those who play by these natural rules know that they have to acknowledge this force in the same way a farmer acknowledges the role of nature in bringing crops to harvest. I think locals who raise horses, llamas and other livestock that haven’t had all of their instincts bred out of them connect to this natural force in a special way. During the Santa Anas, I go out to the corrals and watch how the animals react to the sound and the motion of the wind. Animals know when there is even the slightest scent of fire in the air; they become more acutely aware of their surroundings. Humans need that connection and awareness.

We reiterate County Fire Chief Michael Freeman’s request that we all “pray for rain,” however one interprets the concept of prayer. If we don’t receive at least three-to-four inches of deep, saturating rainfall, there’s no way of telling where the next Malibu firestorm may strike. While we watch and wait, we can take time out for this Sunday’s community gathering at Bluffs Park from noon to 2. The park is the site of the assistance center for fire victims, but everyone is invited to come together in a show of local support and solidarity. It’s a reminder that even if you moved here for privacy, you need to forge bonds for times of crisis.

Historic Buildings in Solstice Canyon Are Burned: Park Is Closed

• Matthew Keller House and TRW Aerospace Research Buildings Destroyed by Corral Fire

BY ANNE SOBLE

The solitude and serenity of wondrous Solstice Canyon ended at daybreak last Saturday when the Corral Fire roared onto the federal parkland from its starting point on state-owned holdings miles away.

The Chumash people, who historically used this area for food, water and shelter, would not have been surprised to see flames claiming land they called “the valley of smoke.”

Grasses where ranchers once grazed cattle exploded. Deer raced along hiking trails and rabbits scattered.

Lost to fire were four historic buildings, landmarks of sorts that served as occasional residences for National Park Service employees.

Two of the buildings were currently inhabited and evacuated safely, but almost all of the residents’ personal belongings were lost to the flames.

The structures include the Matthew Keller House, a stone cottage that was originally constructed in 1865 and is visible from Solstice Canyon Trail. It is considered to be the oldest stone building in Malibu.

Also damaged were the so-called “silo” and the “dorm,” landmarks of the early era of space exploration. The structures were built between 1960 and 1964 by Space Technology Laboratories, Inc., a subsidiary of Thompson-Ramo-Wooldridge (TRW), which rented 10 acres from the owners of Solstice Canyon, the Roberts family, from 1961-1973.

TRW ostensibly tested satellite equipment for space missions, including the Pioneer series, and conducted medical research in magnetic resonance imaging. Solstice’s remoteness and lack of human activity were the main attractions for some of the work that was labeled top-secret.

Recent improvements in the park, including a shelter used for educational programs and public restrooms, survived the blaze.

The National Park Service announced that damage assessments for the structures and natural resources are now underway.

A special events and tactical team is at the site to assist with security and continue patrols at the park, which remains closed indefinitely until fire weather subsides.

Also closed is the section of the Backbone Trail between Latigo Canyon and Malibu Canyon roads.

NPS spokespersons said it is too soon to determine whether the buildings can be restored and put back into service.

In addition, a Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation Plan will be prepared to address park soil and plant issues after the fire.

The Park Service indicated that closed areas will be reopened as soon as public safety is assured.

Total Containment of Corral Fire Expected Monday Afternoon

• Arson Investigators Urge Anyone with Information about How Blaze May Have Started to Call 310-456-6652 •

By Hans Laetz

At least 53 houses were lost, but many hundreds were saved, in the Thanksgiving weekend fire that showed how well careful fire planning could work, while demonstrating how one ignored factor could unravel everything.

Corral Canyon residents say their pleas for increased ranger patrols on State Parks land at the north end of Corral Canyon Road have been rebuffed for months. Arson investigators say the fire was caused by human activity and started in an area where people were partying under a full moon late Friday night.

Corral residents peppered officials with questions about why their pleas for increased fire patrols at isolated canyon party locations had gone unheeded. One angry person posed that question at a Saturday news conference. The commander of the Malibu-Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station, Capt. Tom Martin, said, “That particular area is State Parks property, we do get calls from time to time and we do respond but that is primarily their responsibility.”

Residents said they have been told only one state ranger is on duty at night to patrol the broad swath of mountain parkland from upper Corral Canyon west to campgrounds near Point Mugu, a drive that can take an hour.

As of Monday morning, the fire was reported 90 percent contained, and had burned 4902 acres. Total containment is expected by Monday afternoon. Demobilization was in full swing, with crews pulling out from the city-on-wheels at the Malibu Civic Center.

On Sunday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped over crunched tiles and walked through burned doorways to comfort several families that lost everything. “We lost 53 homes—that's the latest update that I've gotten—which is very sad,” the governor said. "We want to get those people back on their feet as soon as possible."

This time, the photo op was deserved, as it was the governor’s order to move hundreds of firefighters south of the Tehachapis that proved to be what saved Malibu. Trucks from Lake Tahoe and the Bay Area were among the first-in units last weekend in Escondido Canyon—on the scene within two hours instead of two days.

Dozens of Governor’s Office of Emergency Services fire trucks had been pre-positioned in Camarillo, and screamed into Malibu within two hours of the fire’s start. That made the difference, said L.A. County Fire Chief P. Michael Freeman.

“We had the trucks we needed, here at our disposal,” he said. Freeman said that, while more than four-dozen houses were lost, as many as 250 would have burned if reinforcements were not nearby.

“We lost dozens of homes, but it could have been up in the hundreds had we not had pre-positioned resources at the ready,” affirmed Cal Fire chief Tom Barry.

But 53 houses, maybe as many as 58 by some unofficial counts, were lost, as well as 27 sheds, barns or garages. Another 34 homes and 11 outbuildings were damaged, fire officials said.

Southern California Edison crews started to clear Corral Canyon and Latigo Canyon roads of about four miles of tangled power lines and charred, collapsed poles within 12 hours of their burning. By Sunday morning, circuits were restored to all Malibu customers except 55 houses, by Edison count, where meters didn’t exist anymore.

Verizon crews were working to restore lines up the canyons, but did not suffer citywide interruptions. That, again, was not the case with Charter Communications, which again blacked out nearly all cable TV, Internet and telephone service in its entire western L.A. county service area, from Malibu through Topanga to Calabasas, Agoura Hills and other areas miles from the fire area.

Company officials said they lost 12,000 feet of fiber line to their distribution center, just over a mile from the fire’s point of origination. The company said Sunday it had repair crews on standby to restring fiber up the canyon just as soon as Edison crews had finished their work.

Charter released statements Sunday and again Monday noting that a second fiber path into Malibu from its computer center in Monterey Park was only a few weeks from being completed. But with all utility lines down in Corral Canyon, it appears that Charter’s citywide cable, Internet and phone service would have gone down whether the new line was completed or not.

City Manager Jim Thorsen said Malibu City Hall has its own fiber link independent of Charter, and it never failed. The city sent out emergency alerts, but a number of Malibu residents report there were problems with the recorded messages.

Some Corral Canyon residents were complaining that the city had hindered fire response by choosing the middle of fire season to set up a one-lane detour to handle both uphill and downhill traffic on Corral Canyon Road at Solstice Creek, where a bridge is being rebuilt to allow steelhead trout to migrate upstream.

“I am not aware of any reports of any delays on that road,” said Chief Freeman Saturday, and other fire officials agreed. Thorsen said a gate on a bypass route, through the Malibu Beach campground, was opened.

Malibu Wildfire Redux: Saturday’s Corral Fire Claims Nearly 50 Homes

• Preliminary Assessment Is that Destructive Blaze Was Human in Origin•

By Hans Laetz

Forty-nine houses burned, but no one was killed or seriously injured, when a more than 4500-acre wildfire, possibly ignited by boisterous outdoor partiers at the top of Corral Canyon, came racing out of the Santa Monica Mountains early Saturday morning.

Residents describe an awful scene in the predawn darkness. Flashing lights and wailing sirens from sheriff’s vehicles, and pounding fists from deputies and neighbors, awakened several hundred people on streets off Corral Canyon Road, a dead-end ridgetop road, three miles inland from and several hundred feet above the ocean.

The fire raced southwest from its point of origin at the road’s northern dead-end, into several groups of houses. The 150 or so homes clustered in three hillside tracts in Malibu Bowl and El Nido had slim chances: only a few fire trucks could make it up Corral Canyon in the 45 minutes or so it took the flames to arrive.

By sunrise, the cluster of houses perched along the upper reaches of Corral Canyon had suffered a terrible toll – at least 32 houses in Malibu Bowl destroyed by 7 a.m. Streets such as Lookout Road, Lockwood Road, Ingleside Way and Corral Canyon Road were hit hard.

Down at the coast, most Malibu residents awoke Saturday to the all-too familiar drill of looking at water-dropping helicopters on television, trying to triangulate how far away the danger was from escape routes, and making plans to help themselves or their friends escape from fire.
Like a month ago, this weekend's brushfire caught the city sleeping, on a weekend morning. Many people along the 27-mile coastline had no idea of the peril until they turned on the television, or stepped outside to retrieve the morning paper, only to see the sky filled with a golden-orange glow as the rising sun caught the plume of acrid smoke.

Charter Communications, the city’s primary cable TV company, lost 5000 feet of fiber cable early in the morning, again blacking out much of the city’s TV service and some Internet and telephone connections.

As the sun rose, a wall of fire headed southwest toward the two clusters of hillside homes just to the west, along Latigo Canyon Road. An amazing work of fire helicopter aviation saved dozens of houses clustered near Ocean View Drive. A caterpillar line of fire trucks arriving from Los Angeles had crept up steep, narrow Latigo Canyon Road, one mile to the west of the burning Malibu Bowl.

Fire trucks were parked in most of the driveways of the 100 or so homes along Latigo Canyon Road, the homes draped across a steep ridgetop about three miles north of Pacific Coast Highway.

Fire burned up to and around the homes. Landscaping, playground sets and cars burned. But the first wave of fire burned right up to the cluster of houses near Ocean View Drive at Latigo Canyon Road, and was stopped on a house-by-house basis. Of the 15 houses facing the fire front, not one was lost.

Newell Road, where six Glendale firefighters were burned 11 years ago, was singed but spared. Six firefighters suffered injuries described as minor today.

But on the ridge further downhill, where Latigo Canyon Road makes a switchback, flames raced through several houses and over the ridge, crossing the road and racing down into Escondido Canyon. Houses on the ridge near the active landslide on Latigo Canyon Road, a familiar landmark for motorists, were particularly hard hit.

In the canyon bottom along Via Escondido, the front of the fire was largely stopped by reinforcements, including Cal Fire trucks arriving from a state command post in Camarillo. But burning embers rushed a half-mile ahead of the fire front, claiming at least three houses within a block or two of Geoffrey’s Restaurant.

As the day went on, it would turn out those were the last houses to be lost to flames.
The fire jumped PCH at Latigo Shores, singing the landscaping between the road and condominiums, but sparing the structures. By midmorning, the heavily protected BeauRivage Restaurant and nearby Union 76 station were surrounding by burning hills.

Although the first wave of fire spared the homes along Latigo, by 10 a.m., a new wave of fire had swung around to the north of that neighborhood, and was threatening to cross the road on the subdivision's northern side.

Flames topped 100 feet, measured against a three-story house across the street, as the front crested the ridge. Fire helicopters dropped water on either side of the main advance, and firefighters in the driveways below took up defensive positions.

At the very last moment, fire crews on the road lit backfires, and the hundred-foot wall of orange and black sucked the small backfires up the hill, robbing the advancing curtain of fire of its fuel.

Despite predictions of doom, firefighters said their trucks had no trouble passing the one-lane bridge over Solstice Creek.

By 11 a.m., the 200 houses still standing on Latigo Canyon Road were again saved.

Fire chief P. Michael Freeman said no houses were burned after the initial fire advance ended at about 7 a.m. By sunset, the familiar portable city of firefighters had been set up on Civic Center Way, the satellite trucks were deployed, and Malibu was again settling down for a night under siege.

And for the third time this year, the county fire chief and municipal authorities proclaimed that Malibu dodged a bullet. This time the cost was steep: 32 houses lost in Malibu Bowl, three houses lost in El Nido, five in Escondido Canyon, six along Latigo Canyon Road and several other houses in more remote areas.

A complete list of damaged and destroyed houses is available at http://www.malibu-ca.gov/download/index.cfm?fuseaction=download&cid=11426

Got Time? Multiple PCH Delays on the Drawing Board

• Los Angeles City Agencies Plan Big Digs that Will Adversely Impact Malibu’s Main Artery

BY HANS LAETZ

City of Los Angeles engineers have announced plans that will significantly increase the anticipated agony quotient for Pacific Coast Highway drivers. Two separate projects—one after another—will dig up a two-mile section of the highway at its most crowded point starting next year.

The Los Angeles projects are still under design, but, as currently envisioned, could block one of the four traffic lanes on PCH for several months where the highway drops from six to four lanes. At least two huge trenches will have to be dug through the complicated intersection geometry where Chautauqua Boulevard, West Channel Road, Entrada Drive and PCH meet on a bridge over a flood control channel.

The two L.A. projects are in addition to the City of Santa Monica’s two major, successive repair jobs just to the south. Toss in a Caltrans repaving project, garnish with Santa Monica’s plans to put up a new traffic light, and the next two years appear to guarantee missed appointments and cold dinners for many PCH commuters.

The L.A. Department of Water and Power last week announced plans to build a new underground power line from Brentwood to PCH at Chautauqua, and then up PCH two miles to Sunset Boulevard. This nine-month project is to bury a high-voltage line that will head out to sea at Sunset Boulevard, connecting the West Coast’s largest electric circuit to existing seafloor electrodes off the coast (see story on this page).

The DWP project also involves burying the large conduit on San Vicente Boulevard and through Santa Monica Canyon via Seventh Street, Entrada Drive and West Channel Road to the beach. The total project will take nine months, PCH traffic will be restricted for about five months.

Engineers hope to route the new cable under the newly-repaved parking lot at Will Rogers State Beach, avoiding PCH delays there, DWP spokesperson Carol Tucker said. But the trench will have to be dug into one of four traffic lanes winding north of the PCH choke point between Temescal Canyon and Sunset boulevards, she said.

Tucker said she did not know why the underground power line can’t head out to sea at PCH/ Chautauqua, but noted that DWP engineers are newly aware of traffic concerns and are still designing the project.

When that is finished, the L.A. Department of Public Works plans to install a new five-foot-diameter sewage pipe to take dry-weather urban street runoff from several canyons away from the Pacific Ocean and divert it to the Hyperion Treatment Plant.

That DPW sewage line will plug into the sewer pipe in Santa Monica that snarled traffic for three years, starting in 1999, during earthquake damage repairs. DPW needs to extend it north under PCH and through the same intersections and narrow spots all the way to Sunset, said DPW spokesperson Jimmy Tokeshi.

DWP and DPW engineers are trying to coordinate their projects, but say it may be impossible to put very high-voltage power ducts and large sewer mains in the same trench.

“There are a lot of utilities in the road that have to be dealt with,” Tokeshi said. Among those is the pipe that supplies about 20,000 Malibu and Topanga residents with water, and buried communication lines that connect the city to the outside world.

While those two projects are going on in L.A., the City of Santa Monica will be coning off one northbound lane during mid-day hours to stabilize the bluffs along PCH between the McClure Tunnel and Entrada Drive. That will immediately be followed by demolition and reconstruction of the crumbling, 77-year-old California Incline structure adjacent to PCH.

After hearing protests from motorists and Malibu officials, the bluff stabilization project will now avoid a 24/7 lane closure, Santa Monica project engineer Mark Cuneo said.

“We are going to close one northbound lane during non-peak hours with cones, and pick up the cones and leave when traffic gets heavy,” he said.

“One thing we have learned is that traffic on PCH is highly variable, depending on things like the weather,” Cuneo said. “We really don’t want to cause backups.”

Although the California Incline project will not require PCH lane closures, he said, closure of the bridge from PCH to downtown Santa Monica is expected to put heavy pressure on Entrada Drive and West Channel Road. Those are the same narrow, twisting two-lane routes that DWP now plans to dig up for its electrical project that may restrict travel there for 4-6 months.

In addition, pothole-laden PCH is due for its once-every-10-years facelift this spring, when Caltrans plans to grind and resurface the road through Malibu and Pacific Palisades. Repaving the L.A. section may be delayed until after DPW and DWP tear it up.

On top of all this, the City of Santa Monica has won tentative Caltrans approval to install a new traffic signal at a civic beach club it is building on PCH about midway between the California Incline and Chautauqua Boulevard. There has been no formal opposition to the signal, which is undergoing final design.

All of this would almost be a comedy if it wasn’t affecting the primary route between Malibu and points east. PCH is traveled by more than 80,000 cars per day, and the main alternate route is U.S. 101 and Interstate 405, which turns a 12-mile drive from Malibu to Santa Monica into a 40-mile slog on these already-overwhelmed freeways.

Engineers, facing the possibility of major excavation projects piling up on top of each other, have formed a group called PCH Partners to coordinate closures and planning. The group includes various departments in the cities of Santa Monica and Los Angeles and Caltrans, as well as the contractors on the projects.

“All these activities will be worked out, so drivers will face a minimum of possible delays,” Tokeshi said. He said the City of Malibu is not a part of the group.

During the sewage line project that started in 1999, traffic was delayed up to an hour in each direction daily when Santa Monica refused to use reversible lanes, or allow through traffic to use a center left-turn lane. Controversy also arose when traffic lights frequently failed and Santa Monica Police refused to direct traffic, causing three-hour delays.

Traffic reporters said then that the PCH bottleneck caused measurable ripple-effect traffic jams on freeways from Calabasas all the way to Long Beach.

That sewer project was supposed to take nine months, but difficulties with underground utilities and the local geology stretched it into a three-year ordeal.

Power Reliability Is Project Objective

• Underground Line Will Improve Link to Ocean System

BY HANS LAETZ

The underground power line project that will cause Pacific Coast Highway to be dug up near Malibu will be an important reliability link for the entire West Coast electrical grid, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials say.

The new power line will allow better grounding for the Pacific DC Intertie: the 500-kilovolt, direct-current circuit that carries vast amounts of electricity back and forth between Washington state and the Los Angeles area.

During the summer, surplus electricity from the Northwest flows south to keep California cool, and is sold to several Southland utilities. In the winter, surplus power from warmer climes helps heat Washington and Oregon.

The giant powerline parallels US 395, and by using DC it can carry more than twice the load of other high-tension lines that bring electricity to the Southland using AC—alternating current. DC lines need to be grounded, and only the Pacific Ocean is big enough to properly ground a power line this enormous, engineers say.

By improving the link to an existing grounding system in Santa Monica Bay, the intertie will operate more reliably and efficiently.

As planned, the expanded line will go out to sea near PCH at Sunset Boulevard, and terminate at existing large underwater electrodes.

These electrodes sit in a concrete cage, about a meter above the seafloor, and dissipate energy into ocean water without affecting sea creatures or people, DWP officials say.

Feds Stop the Clock on Woodside’s OceanWay LNG Project

• Coast Guard Imposes Fewer Questions than Ventura Proposal Was Hit with Last Month

BY HANS LAETZ

The U.S. Coast Guard has temporarily stopped the clock on the fast-track evaluation and approval schedule for the Woodside liquefied natural gas terminal proposed for 21.8 miles off Malibu’s Point Dume.

The list of 61 questions that the federal and state government wants answered by Woodside is much shorter than the comprehensive set of 396 questions that earlier this month sidetracked the competing NorthernStar proposal up the coast at Ventura.

Nevertheless, Woodside officials are faced with answering major technical questions raised by the state about the project’s total worldwide impact on greenhouse gases, an issue that proved to be a fatal problem for the BHP Billiton Malibu LNG project when it was rejected by the state in April.

The Woodside proposal, being marketed as “OceanWay,” would station a pair of large LNG regasification ships at a set of buoys about midway between Malibu and Santa Catalina Island. At any given time, one ship would be steaming further off the coast, accepting a new load of LNG from trans-Pacific tankers, while the other would sit at the buoy to regasify its cargo and send it ashore via pipelines at Playa Del Rey.

The plant is proposed by a local wholly-owned subsidiary of Woodside, an Australian-based company that is 34 percent owned by Royal Dutch Shell, and has rights to one of the world’s largest natural gas fields in the Indian Ocean off Australia. It views this proposed Malibu-area terminal as a key gateway that could supply the West Coast with one tenth of its needs for natural gas as a cleaner-burning alternative to coal.

Opponents cite likely local ecological damage and question the need for connecting the U.S. natural gas market to volatile overseas supplies, with the attendant strategic, political and military implications.

A spokesperson for the company said the list of 61 items that need further study or explanation includes no surprises, as the company has worked hard to anticipate issues that came up during the BHP Billiton hearings.

“Woodside is committed to providing the information needed for OceanWay to be in line with California’s monumental environmental and safety policies.” said Michael Hinrichs in an e-mailed statement. “We are especially proud of how different OceanWay is in design and how different Woodside is in its commitments to the public and regulatory agencies.”

One of the major questions from the state is how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the LNG project would release as the natural gas is extracted, compressed and shipped across the ocean. California has pioneered the so-called “life-cycle emissions footprint” measurement to determine if an energy project is as clean on a worldwide basis as its backers tout.

Hinrichs said Woodside is already conducting an extensive analysis of that issue. “We are pleased that the Coast Guard has now given us time to conduct a thorough evaluation.”

Other questions raised by the state and Coast Guard include a request for better information about whale and other marine mammal populations in the ocean where the ships will travel, and a request for better information on how marine life will be screened out of equipment that takes on water on LNG ships.

Questions about whether the state really needs the imported fossil fuel are also raised, as well as questions about how LNG imports will fit in with AB 32, the landmark California greenhouse gas reduction law.

The government also wants better smog emissions data on LNG ships that will steam across the Pacific to transfer their loads to the pair of Woodside ships off California. The Coast Guard said most of that data has already been presented by Woodside, and merely needs to be digested by federal and state regulatory agencies, however.

One issue not yet resolved is exactly how much fog will be generated by the LNG regasification ships, which will use humid coastal air to warm up LNG from its minus-260 degree state. The use of so-called ambient air regasification has never been done on a massive scale such as what would be used offshore, and critics such as Malibu Mayor Pro Tem Pamela Conley Ulich say it is an unproven technology.

The state also wants to know how Woodside will offset pollutants generated by LNG cargo ships and regasification ships within coastal waters, an issue that helped torpedo the BHP Billiton ship off Malibu.

As agencies consider the Woodside proposal, backers of the similar NorthernStar LNG terminal proposed to sit atop an oil rig off Ventura are also answering questions about that application. That proposal, which would be 35 miles up the coast and not visible from Malibu, appears to have a significantly longer list of scientific studies to undertake before its clock can be restarted.

CLARIFICATION

Two weeks ago, the Malibu Surfside News reported that neither Woodside nor NorthernStar have plans to treat imported LNG to bring its pollution levels down to the conservative California standards that existed prior to a change instigated by the LNG industry recently.

Although that is correct, the article should also have noted that Woodside includes plans for a nitrogen plant at its proposed Los Angeles facility that could be used to reduce the pollution level of its LNG imports, should courts order the state return to the lower pollution threshold.

Also, Los Angeles City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl, who opposes the Woodside proposal as a threat to Los Angeles International Airport, chairs the Southern California Airport Authority, not the L.A. World Airports Board.

Voices of Calm Urge Compromise on SM-Malibu Schools Split

• Board of Education Decision to Shift $13.5 Million from Malibu High Is Not Final

BY HANS LAETZ

Bitterness and rancor on the part of some Malibu parents has begun to subside as the citizens committee that suddenly stripped $13.5 million in bond dollars from Malibu High School contruction projects and recommended that money rebuild antiquated Santa Monica High has begun to reevaluate that decision.

Meeting in Malibu for the first time on Monday, the Measure BB Advisory Committee toured the joint middle/high school campus and was told by district officials that the local school, built in phases starting in 1951, has never been upgraded to meet high school needs.

One of the three Santa Monica school board members who attended the MHS tour said it left her “open” to revisiting the controversial reallocation, which was adopted by the board and has sparked a widespread campaign in Malibu to split the district, and vote down a critical funding ballot issue in two months.

Board member Maria Leon-Vasquez said “I heard some arguments I had not heard before, and I’m open to bringing it back before the board.”

Her comments came after Malibu principal Mark Kelly told the committee members that, without the proposed junior high classroom block that was deleted from construction plans, he does not have a way to separate sixth graders from taking classes amidst twelfth-graders. “That is something that is a major parental worry when parents consider sending their kids here.

“We are losing students to other schools because parents have that concern,” Kelly said. “This is a building that was built for a junior high school, and not built for the mix of students that we have here now.”

Assistant district superintendent Mike Matthews noted that, due to absences, only six members of the 14-person committee had voted to eliminate construction projects at middle schools and transfer the funds to Santa Monica High.

“That was a split vote, that resulted in a split board, which resulted in a split community,” Matthews said. The former Malibu High principal implored committee members to go back to work “and commit to a consensus. It will require long meetings, patience and professionalism.”

Parents from the district’s two middle schools in Santa Monica also criticized the committee’s decision to suddenly shift all construction money from the district’s middle schools to Santa Monica High.

Mario Romero, president of the John Adams Middle School PTA, said, “All the schools need help, immediate help. I would like to remind you that whatever decision you make, you are going to have to be equitable.”

Several parents from Santa Monica and Malibu criticized the committee for making building decisions when many of them had never set foot inside classrooms on many campuses. Chris Harding, a committee member from Santa Monica and supporter of the funding shift, said he had only peeked in windows when he visited the Malibu campus on a weekend before the controversial vote.

On Monday, Harding and other committee members were shown that many Malibu classrooms have been carved out of storage areas, employee lounges and closets. “We’ve got four special education classrooms in classrooms of less than 600 square feet,” district facilities manager Wally Berriman told the committee. “What we really need is a full-size classroom for these students, a therapy center, and offices.”

Berriman and Kelly sketched out a multiple-phase construction plan aimed at improving the high school quad and moving younger students out of the high school area, which cannot be done unless the junior high classroom block is built.

“The identity of a middle school campus and separate high school campus is very important for us,” Kelly said.

The Measure BB committee, most Malibu parents feel, was hijacked by a last-minute push from Santa Monica High parents to upend a years-long process of setting building priorities. Some parents told the board that February’s crucial parcel tax vote, needed to maintain $10 million in classroom services, will face certain death if Malibu taxpayers don’t see local construction that they were promised in the $268 million Measure BB bond election.

Last week, the SMMUSD board heard a series of Malibu parents complain about the decision, and all-but-ignored a request from board president Kathy Wisnicki to ask its staff to investigate if the decision-making process had somehow violated the state Open Meetings Act or board policies.

Malibu parent Colleen Baum was given 15 minutes to express her view that the board had improperly considered the matter, and her contention that Santa Monica parents on the advisory were unfairly connected to boosters for the larger school.

Another Malibu school advocate, Karen Farrer, told the board that some Santa Monica members based their vote to yank funds from Malibu on the fact that the school is lushly landscaped as a result of one Malibu parent’s years-long campaign. “Why does our campus look so good? Because we have one mom who decided she wanted it to look good,” she said.

“Why are we being punished for having that kind of volunteer help and that kind of leadership?” Farrer asked.

Another parent, Deborah Kramer, told the board Malibu parents “have repeatedly experienced betrayal and isolation and the sense of being on [the] fringe.

“They are ready to participate in what is possibly the logical next step,” she said. “Malibu became a city, and it is logical for Malibu to become its own school district.”

The six Santa Monica residents who make up the voting majority on the board rejected Wisnicki’s request.

“It’s just allegations being made, there are no facts to support any of those allegations,” said board member Leon-Vasquez. “I really wouldn’t want our staff to spend the time and energy to look for something that maybe isn’t there.”

“I have to say with great sadness that this is the first time that I have felt like the lone Malibu board member,” Wisnicki said. “In all the years that we’ve been together, I felt like we’ve been a very collaborative group, and I feel that there has been trust destroyed.

“There has been a disenfranchising of the Malibu community,” she continued, “even after members of the public [spoke], I’m still not sure that the members of the board really get the issue.”

The board had already referred the matter to the Measure BB committee, which took no vote after its Malibu meeting Monday. The committee will meet next when it tours Santa Monica High on Dec. 10.

For the Record: Two weeks ago, it was reported that the SMMUSD school board has 10 members. There are actually only seven board members, but the district website lists the three nonvoting student reps in the members box.

• The Publisher’s Notebook •

No Red Flag Holiday in Malibu

BY ANNE SOBLE

While the rest of us were enjoying our Thanksgiving festivities, fire crews and other safety personnel were patrolling the Malibu area around the clock. Even though weather forecasts for the week now call for less intense winds than first predicted, the wildfire danger remains high. Stronger winds are expected to return in a day or so, and the extra firefighting personnel and equipment that were assigned to Malibu at the beginning of the week and then redeployed as the fog held on and the temperatures stayed low, will return. Still, the Los Angeles County Fire Department cautiously kept an extra patrol vehicle and water tender on local watch, and one helicopter of the six on duty remained assigned to the Malibu area. Pending what the weather does, off-duty firefighting personnel are all on standby. The National Weather Service is now indicating that winds at the end of the week may be in the 20-30 mph range, a far cry from the 90-100 mph blasts that downed power lines and fueled last month’s Canyon Fire. Still, even these lower wind speeds constitute what agency officials call fire weather. Extra state firefighters will help patrol Malibu and other wildfire prone areas, Additional bulldozer teams and water tenders will be at the ready as well. The Forest Service also has brought in additional personnel and equipment to quickly respond to new blazes. The crews put their holiday celebrations on hold when the red flag waves.

We can contribute to their efforts by being aware of weather conditions and acting accordingly. If the weekend winds begin to build up speed, we should go over our household emergency plans. Better they be practiced unnecessarily than be put to the test on the front line. Malibu has much to be thankful for, as the local wildfire toll could have been much greater. The key sentiment now is preparedness.

Winter Shelter for Malibu Homeless Is Casualty of the Canyon Fire

• Old School Bus Provided Makeshift Sleeping Quarters during Cold and Rainy Weather

BY ANNE SOBLE

Nighttime temperatures have been in the fifties, and fog hangs heavy in the air. There are a small number of people in the community, mostly invisible to the residents of Malibu, who need refuge from the elements.

The Canyon Fire that transformed the Malibu Presbyterian Church into a mound of ashes also destroyed one such refuge—the community’s winter shelter for the homeless in the Civic Center area.

SOS Community Outreach, an all-volunteer group that quietly provided cold weather quarters to those in the community with nowhere else to go, was able to sleep up to 20 adults in a modified school bus that was parked out of sight in keeping with its general low profile.

The bus—its yellow exterior paint peeled off by the intense heat—was burned down to the frame when the 100-mph-wind-driven flames ravaged Malibu Canyon on Oct. 21.

The converted school bus was the only formal overnight emergency shelter in the Malibu area.

SOS Community Outreach began in the fall of 2000 outside a local coffee shop. Its members include a mix of local residents, among them many Pepperdine University students and staff.

The group operated in a low key way to prevent the shelter’s misuse. The lack of attention would also discourage possible critics from saying the bus could attract problems to the Civic Center area location where the bus was parked during the winter.

During non-inclement times of the year, the bus was stored on the grounds of a nearby nursery, which is where it was when the Canyon Fire struck.

Christyn Garrett, a member of SOS, said that the group’s members, none of whom take a salary and operate on an as-needed basis, are concerned that they will not be able to set up another shelter before the start of the winter rainy season, if there is one.

She said the group has no backup funding. It only had liability insurance coverage on the bus, but as a 501c3 charity can accept tax-deductible donations.

Garrett said SOS made initial inquiries about the possibility of disaster assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and was told that it would not qualify.

However, Amanda Bicknell, a FEMA public affairs officer for the recent fires, said there are special public assistance programs for which the group might qualify. She said privacy constraints prevent discussing the specifics of a particular disaster situation, but she encouraged SOS to initiate an application.

Bicknell indicated that there will be a public assistance briefing in the Los Angeles area on Nov. 29 and said SOS can contact the City of Malibu to obtain more information about initiating paperwork for this specialized application process.

Bicknell said no “qualified” group that has been adversely impacted by the wildfires “is going to be left out in the cold,” but she acknowledged that a need for immediate short-term funding might require multiple approaches.

Concern about the current nighttime temperatures has prompted SOS to issue a call for community financial support to help provide an alternate shelter or assist in the obtaining of emergency quarters.

Garrett noted that the group organized in response to news reports that a homeless man had frozen to death during a winter rainstorm. She said, “We want to try to prevent that from ever happening to anyone out here.”

More information about the group is available at www.sosmalibu.org

Taxpayers’ Litigation Against SMMC Faces Next Hurdle

BY BILL KOENEKER

The state Attorney General’s office is seeking a dismissal of a lawsuit filed by a taxpayers group alleging the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy misused state bond funds in developing its parks and trails plan that is currently pending before the City of Malibu, according to conservancy sources.

The unraveling of the challenge started when it was learned the law firm Stradling, Yocca, Carlson and Rauth, which represents the taxpayers failed to disclose that it represents the state of California in other bond matters. The judge imposed an injunction and the law firm apparently no longer represents the plaintiffs including the Ramirez Preservation Fund.

Neither a spokesperson for Stradling, Yocca, Carlson and Rauth, nor Steven Amerikaner, an attorney who represents the Ramirez Preservation Fund was immediately available for comment.

Conservancy officials contend the law firm which is a bond counsel to various state agencies including the state treasurer did not tell the court nor the defendants about what SMMC officials call a “blatant conflict of interest.” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Richard Wolfe concurred. Insisting the case has been tainted because Stradling, Yocca, Carlson and Rauth had 14 months during trial preparations to possibly share confidential information with the taxpayers and their lawyers, the matter should be dismissed. A hearing date on the issue is set for next month.

The suit alleges that the conservancy improperly granted state bond funds for public park purposes including developing the trails and park plan.

SMMC officials maintain that the bonds were pre-approved by the state attorney general prior to any action by the conservancy. The AG’s office remains of the opinion that the grants were within the purview of the SMMC and the litigation is without merit.

SMMC officials insist the goal of the trails and park plan which includes overnight camping is to increase public access to the parks already owned by the conservancy and the Mountains Recreation Conservation Authority, a sister agency, and the plan would also offer trail connections between Ramirez Escondido, and Corral Canyon parks connecting National Park Service land at Zuma/Trancas canyons and Solstice Canyon Park.

The provision about overnight camping, especially in Malibu city-owned Charmlee Park has generated the most controversy.

The city council is expected to consider the plan. If municipal officials approve the plan in the form of a Local Coastal Program amendment, it then will be considered by the California Coastal Commission for certification.

Malibu Wildfire Losses Now Set at $14.5 Million

• Firefighting and Other Costs for the Oct. 21 Canyon Fire Are Still Being Tallied

BY HANS LAETZ

Los Angeles County fire investigators this week released the estimated total value of structural damage from the Oct. 21 Canyon Fire that swept into the city from dropped power lines in Malibu Canyon, but said any final determination on responsibility for the blaze may take months.

Officials said losses to homes, utilities and businesses totalled $14.5 million, not counting contents. Several buildings lost to flames, such as the landmark castle in Malibu Knolls, reportedly contained furnishings and collectibles worth millions of dollars.

Firefighting cost estimates have varied, but are now tallied at $5.2 million, said Los Angeles County Fire’s Maria Grycan, the department’s community services representative for Malibu.

State and county fire arson investigators continue to probe power poles that snapped in Malibu Canyon during hurricane-force winds, sparking the blaze. Fire crews on the scene at the time of the collapse said the poles snapped just north of the Sheriff’s Honor Ranch monument, about a half mile south of the tunnel.

A similar failure several miles to the north in 1996 caused a brushfire that burned from Calabasas to Latigo Canyon in a half day, trapping and burning six firefighters. State officials opened a criminal probe into the Southern California Edison Company over the condition of power line supports, and raided corporate offices in the San Gabriel Valley in 1997 in connection with that fire.

Edison pledges full cooperation this time, and has stated that the 100 mph gusts in the canyon that Sunday morning were more than any power pole is designed to withstand.

Malibu City Council Backs Off Controversial Conservancy Plans

• Members Are Divided on Major Aspects of Proposal

BY BILL KOENEKER

As Santa Ana winds blew and television broadcast cameras lined up to shoot a standing room only crowd at this week’s Malibu City Council meeting, members got bogged down in the details of a highly controversial parks and trails plan sought by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and continued their deliberations until Wednesday, Dec. 5, at 10 a.m.

Nearly four dozen individuals spoke to the council on the highly charged issues, many of them urging the council to eliminate the overnight camping aspects of the plan that includes campsites at Corral Canyon and Charmlee Park.

Also there were the head of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, the superintendent of local State Parklands and SMMC Executive Director Joe Edmiston, who all argued that there is a need for more camping in the local mountains.

However, homeowners near Charmlee, Corral Canyon and other areas spoke about the threat of fire and how overnight camping, despite what city officials said would be just cold camping—that is only allowing propane stoves—was still considered to be too great a threat in such a highly flammable location as Malibu.

Council members also heard from Winding Way residents, who took issue with a parking lot planned for a meadow near their homes, and Ramirez Canyon neighbors, who spoke to the council about how any plan that allows more activities at Ramirez Canyon Park where the SMMC is headquartered would be unacceptable to them.

Some council members said the controversial issue about overnight camping had become politicized.

Councilmember Sharon Barovsky questioned whether the council could eliminate any kind of fire by prohibiting all cooking in derence to the community’s fears of fire.

“If you take fire out of it and it is still opposed, it is strictly Nimbyism,” she said.

However, Councilmember Pamela Conley Ulich, who said she would oppose any overnight camping provisions in the plan, which is a Local Coastal Program amendment, said she disagreed that opposition was just a case of Nimbyism.

“The last couple of weeks, the fires are so fresh. When it comes to overnight camping, it is not good for Malibu. I can’t support it in good faith,” she said.

“I agree with Sharon,” said Mayor Jeff Jennings. “If fire is a legitimate concern and, if we remove the flame, why is that not acceptable?” he added.

Councilmember Ken Kearsley said he thought the fire element of the issue was a red herring and was being used by “rabble rousers,” in the audience.

“I call it the Willie Horton minute, calling out ‘fire, fire, fire,’” said Kearsley, who was referring to plan critic Marshall Thompson’s repeated yelling of the word at the end of his testimony.

But the council never got past the comments about overnight camping and did not deliberate further on the matter, saying it would be addressed at the continued meeting.

However, it was when the council talked about how to establish limitations on the activities at Ramirez Canyon Park that the deliberations that continued past midnight broke down, and the city attorney suggested members needed a rest.

The council got bogged down in deciding how to proceed with establishing restrictions because of trying to encourage the conservancy to build an alternate road to Ramirez Canyon Park from Kanan Dume Road.

An intense back and forth between council members and Edmiston ended with the SMMC head suggesting he was being held hostage to a road that may or may not be able to be built because of financial or environmental considerations that are out of his hands.

The council was trying to find a way to encourage the SMMC, though incentives, to proceed with the alternate access as a means of allowing the conservancy more activities at the canyon park.

When the council could not agree on a strategy, it was decided to send the matter back to the staff for further refinement.
When Edmiston was asked for a response to the council action, he tersely said, “It is up to you to do whatever you want to do.”

Commission Continues Airing on La Paz Center

• Proposed Shopping Mall and Office Complex Could Exceed Size of Malibu Colony Plaza

BY BILL KOENEKER

Given the turnout at last week’s planning commission meeting—there was one speaker who expressed concern about geotechnical issues and a neighbor who complained about a two story section of the proposal—there seem to be few concerns about a proposed 100,000-square-foot Civic Center shopping center.

The planning commission was not expected to take action last week on the two sets of plans for a retail/office complex proposed for the Civic Center property known as La Paz, which is being aired at two separate hearings.

The commission listened to a staff report, heard from the applicant’s consultant, and took public testimony from the sparse public turnout and then continued the hearing until Tuesday, Dec. 18.

Municipal planners agree that they have not seen much opposition to the plans other than from a neighbor.

Other testimony focused on the technical aspects of how the proposed center would handle its treated wastewater discharge.

Commissioners were told the modeling used by the consultants for how much treated effluent could be discharged via evapotranspiration was not viable and that the amount described in the Environmental Impact Report was highly unrealistic.

The plans for the 15.2 acres of vacant land located just east of the public library include nearly 100,000 square feet of commercial development.

The two projects are being proposed simultaneously. Depending upon which configuration is eventually approved, the shopping center complex would be as large or larger than the Malibu Colony Plaza.

So-called Project A entails a development agreement that includes the donation of a 20,000-square-foot space for a city hall with a cash payment to the city toward the construction of new quarters.

The proposed development agreement would require a Local Coastal Program amendment and subsequent approval by the California Coastal Commission for both the development agreement and LCP amendment.

In exchange, the developer would be allowed to build at a 2.0 floor area ratio design that would grant entitlements for a 112,058- square-foot shopping center complex, including retail, restaurant and office space.

Project B is essentially a pared down proposal that includes no development agreement, city hall or any public benefit component. That design proposes a 1.5 FAR project, totaling 99,117 square feet.

The commission could make recommendations for the two proposals, which will be passed on to the city council for consideration. The planning panel cannot approve development agreements or LCP amendments.

The commission could, in theory, approve Project B, the stand-alone project, but that would complicate matters if the council wanted Project A with the development agreement, according to city planners.

Consequently, the commission may make only recommendations for both sets of plans and pass the proposals on to the city council for consideration of approval.

It is anticipated that the commission will recommend both projects, and the city council will do the same.

If the matter goes to the CCC because the council approves the development agreement and LCP amendment (both must be certified by the coastal panel), the developer would have a fall-back position in case of rejection or unacceptable revision of the agreement or LCP amendment, according to municipal officials.

• The Publisher’s Notebook •

Prioritizing Malibu Wildfire Hazards

BY ANNE SOBLE

When the issue of wildfire concerns and camping on Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy parkland is finally settled politically—at least until someone files a lawsuit—perhaps public attention can get back to some of the wildfire threats that are of greater importance than a dozen campers, particularly those wearing leg braces or dependent on wheelchairs to move about. Obviously, wildfire is an emotionally laden issue. That the community has just dodged the bullet on another major conflagration means that nerves are frayed and reasoning is strained. Could a negligent camper, disabled or not, start a fire? Yes, but so could any local resident, commuter, outdoor laborer, or even an idling leaf blower or chain saw. The camper is the least likely threat. A greater concern should be the current condition of wood utility poles and overhead transmission lines. Climate change is expected to mean more frequent strong winds of longer duration unless public policy changes are implemented to reverse the trend toward hotter, dryer weather and the increased wildfire risk that accompanies it. The corporate energy behemoths want to pass off equipment failings, whether poles or lines, as the result of supernatural phenomena. But utility companies should not be allowed to contend that poles can’t withstand 80 mph winds if 80 mph winds become the norm. They have to dip into their swollen profits and do the capital construction to assure public safety.

A comparable issue is the inability to prevent smoking anywhere there is brush, including along Pacific Coast Highway, as last January’s wildfire would attest. Several replicable public safety studies show that someone at the wheel of a car who is holding a lit cigarette is as distracted as a cellphone user. They are not only more prone to accidents but can ignite an inferno with a carelessly tossed match or cigarette butt. In addition, not all vehicles adhere to standard factory exhaust systems. After-market modifications and catalytic converter alterations not only increase noise levels, but when these vehicles are driven off road, or are involved in accidents, their sparks can cause fires. Local law enforcement agencies may be overworked, but these ostensibly minor equipment infractions need to be curbed.

Would that several hundred people turned out to demand that the city council focus on local emergency communications and preparedness. The energy that is being channeled into public protest about a small number of campsites could motivate the municipal government to better prepare Malibu for the next wildfire that will occur.

City to Meet on SMMC Park Plan

• Critics Say Overnight Camping Increases Wildfire Threat

BY BILL KOENEKER

A special workshop and meeting focused on the proposed Local Coastal Program amendment on the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy’s trails and park plan, including overnight camping in Charmlee Park, will be held on Saturday, Nov. 10, from 10 a.m. to noon at the Point Dume Elementary School auditorium, City Attorney Christi Hogin announced last week at the city council meeting.

“Representatives from the Conservancy, the fire department and the city will be on hand,” said Hogin, who noted the council will consider the LCP amendment at a hearing on Nov. 13 at City Hall.

Municipal officials are quick to point out that is not the end of it after council consideration. If the LCP amendment is approved by the council, it must be heard by the California Coastal Commission for certification.

Councilmember Sharon Barovsky said the workshop meeting would be an opportunity “to get some misconceptions cleared up.”

Barovsky said she hopes the workshop would also provide a forum for a free exchange of information and dialogue.

Municipal officials have watched a growing number of opponents speak out about overnight camping in the mountains because of a fear of campfires and the possibility of campers starting a fire above their homes.

The opposition reached a fever pitch when a civic group, the Malibu Township Council, took out ads last week in the local media, criticizing the council for “considering allowing overnight camping in our narrow canyons.”

Both city and Conservancy officials insist that no campfires would be allowed and that even camping gear would be limited.

Critics maintain that no new camping is needed given the opportunities that are currently available at four state parks in the area and a commercial RV park and tent camping facility located on the coast.

In an unusual move that reflects the importance of the issue to the city attorney’s office, Hogin submitted an opinion piece to the local media to preface Saturday’s meeting.

The city attorney revealed that besides the 44 campsites the Conservancy was originally considering—currently the SMMC plan calls for 24 sites—the state agency is considering at least a half dozen campsites on federal parkland in Zuma Canyon.

Hogin noted the city considers camping in Escondido and the Zuma Canyon area fraught with “unmitigatible adverse impacts.”

The city attorney has fashioned the situation for city officials as having only two options with the city only being able to retain control over one of them.

Critics contend those two options are self-imposed parameters of a proposed settlement agreement since the city did not want to litigate the issue with the Conservancy.

Later, during last week’s meeting, the city council, without comment, quietly approved a $100,000 engineering and design contract for a consultant to come up with plans for a Charmlee Wilderness Park nature center, in part perhaps because the funding will come from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

The funds will be used to hire the consultant Roesling Nakamura Terada architects to complete conceptual plans, perform a topographical survey, develop a working construction budget and other preliminaries required to build a 3000- to 5000-square-foot nature center at the park, according to a staff report.

The design may include a small amphitheater, additional restrooms, living quarters, classrooms, meeting room, city staff and docent offices and live and preserved animal displays. Some docents, who are also opposed to the SMMC’s plans for overnight camping in the city-owned park, privately complain that an entirely new center is not required and the $100,000 could be better spent to refurbish the existing facility that is used for a center.

Although, the numbers are not known at this time, the costs to build a nature center would be in the millions of dollars and it remains unclear where that money would come from to construct a new building and other appurtenant facilities.

“With costs that high, nothing may ever get built and they could have used the $100,000, to make improvements to the existing center,” one docent said.

Neither SMMC nor municipal officials will acknowledge that there is any relationship between the $100,000 grant to the city and the Conservancy’s attempts to get though its park and trails plan which includes overnight camping at Charmlee.

Recently, the planning commission unanimously approved the SMMC proposal over the objections of some Charmlee docents, nearby residents and neighbors.

SCE to Cooperate on Study of Power Pole Role in Malibu Canyon Fire

• Residents Question Cost Rationale on Maintenance of Overhead Lines by Mega-Utility Corp

BY HANS LAETZ

Southern California Edison officials say they will cooperate with state and county fire investigators probing a stretch of power poles that some Malibu residents said were substandard when they snapped and apparently sparked the Canyon Fire last month.

But the company said its power poles on Malibu Canyon Road met all legal standards, and were not overburdened or spindly, as some have charged in the wake of a pole that snapped with disastrous results last month.

“All the poles that are up meet the requirements and the design criteria,” said Southern California Edison vice president Steven Conroy late last week.

An official investigation continues, and may continue for several months, fire officials said. But firefighters who were at the point of ignition on Malibu Canyon Road above Rindge Dam at 4:55 a.m. Oct. 21 said an Edison pole snapped near its base, fell, and started the fire.

The 4565-acre blaze took six days to put out, and claimed nearly a dozen houses, businesses and classrooms in Malibu. No damage total has been released, but state officials say it cost $5.8 million to extinguish.

Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors voted last week to investigate the challenge of hundreds of miles of powerlines in fire-prone sections of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the Malibu area, said before the vote that the time has come to determine whether existing standards for poles or routings need to be changed.

Conroy said the company would participate in any study “to review Edison facilities in high-risk situations.”

A similar power line failure caused the 1996 Calabasas fire, which burned houses in Latigo Canyon and injured six firefighters. Edison officials were alleged to have not assisted state investigators in that probe, and state fire marshals actually raided Edison corporate offices in the San Gabriel Valley to seize records on how power poles were being maintained.

That investigation ended with Edison being charged with failing to cut brush and grass near its lines, but the company’s maintenance of the poles was determined to not be at the criminal level, authorities said in 1997.

Conroy said longtime Edison line personnel “say they have never seen winds” like the 80 mile-an-hour sustained gusts, peaking above 100 mph, in the canyon that night last month.

“We are aware that there were power poles and lines that did come down in Malibu Canyon,” he said, “but at this point it is too early to determine exactly how Edison poles and facilities performed in that fire.”

Conroy acknowledged that high-voltage poles that once only carried powerlines now also bear the weight of cable TV, cellular phone and fiber-optic lines.

“Did they come down because of anything other than the wind?” Conroy posed. “We will look into that, but we take every reasonable precaution to design, maintain and construct our overhead lines in the safest way possible.”

LNG Firm Wants Coast Guard Concerns Applied to Competitor

• NorthernStar Move Could Be Sign that Offshore Development Options in Southern California Are Dwindling

BY HANS LAETZ

In what may be a case of “corporate tit-for-tat,” the company asking to build one offshore liquefied natural gas terminal near Ventura has demanded that another, competing LNG terminal closer to the Malibu coast address a long list of environmental concerns—concerns originally proposed by the government for the first plant.

Officials for the Woodside Natural Gas LNG terminal, proposed for 21 miles off Malibu’s Point Dume, said they “find it odd” that their competitor filed the letter in the official comment file for Woodside’s proposed OceanWay gas terminal.

The Ventura applicant, NorthernStar Energy, was hit with a list of 396 environmental questions by the U.S. Coast Guard last month, ranging from how LNG tankers will avoid killing whales to whether the Clearwater Port project is needed in the first place.

That list, first revealed in the Malibu Surfside News last week, could delay the NorthernStar terminal for many months, officials said, as they strive to conduct research and compile answers to the 396 items.

Now, NorthernStar has taken the same government list and demands that its competitor meet the same 396 standards.

“It’s just a matter of basic fairness, just to ensure parity,” said NorthernStar vice president Joe Desmond. “We are concerned that different regulatory agencies may apply different criteria to two projects that are very similar.”

Although the Coast Guard is handling both projects, its local partner in Ventura is the California State Lands Commission, which has already addressed LNG issues in its rejection of the BHP Billiton LNG terminal in Malibu. The local partner for the Woodside request off Malibu, is the City of Los Angeles—which has no LNG experience.

Woodside vice president Laura Doll said her company expected some questions to be raised about its proposal, but “we just really didn’t expect it to come from an LNG company.”

Doll said the Woodside’s OceanWay proposal was designed over several years to answer the questions posed in the NorthernStar letter. “We honestly haven’t seen anything filed in the comments yet that would make us think we left something out,” she said.

The Woodside plant in Santa Monica Bay is somewhat different from NorthernStar’s oil rig repurposing project, as Woodside would employ two regasification ships that would alternate cruising out beyond the Channel Islands to accept transfers of LNG cargoes on the high seas from trans-pacific carriers.

At any given time, one of the two carriers would be anchored halfway between Point Dume and Catalina Island, unloading its cargo.

The other ship would be in the designated transfer areas, and the U.S. Navy has voiced opposition that the transfer process would interfere with naval exercises, including live firing of missiles in the Navy’s Point Mugu Sea Range. Several retired admirals have publicly opposed the concept.

Last week, the Navy formally dropped its objections and said it could live with LNG carriers in its missile test range so long as Woodside acknowledged that the Navy has first dibs on the waters, and that the company would schedule its ship movements around Navy exercises.

In other news, last week the Santa Monica City Council formally went on record opposing the Woodside proposal. City council members said the placement of two two-foot-diameter gas pipelines in Santa Monica Bay would be detrimental to marine life.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl also came out swinging against the LNG terminal in Santa Monica Bay. He said the terminal and its gas pipeline across Los Angeles International Airport would make LAX a vulnerable terrorism target, and the LNG regasification ships would be targets like the U.S.S. Cole.

Rosendahl also said the project would adversely affect LAX runway relocations, would make extension of the Green Line difficult, and would disrupt environmentally sensitive sand dunes at Dockweiler Beach.

Rosendahl is chair of the LA Airports board, and chair of the L.A. council’s public works committee, both of which have veto over the proposal. The natural gas pipelines would cross his district as they come ashore at LAX and head east.

And the Los Angeles Unified School District said it wants Woodside to explain what safety precautions would be taken at 21 locations where proposed high-pressure, 24-inch gas pipelines would pass within 1500 feet of public schools in Westchester, Watts, South Gate and Cudahy.

Environmental laws provide special protections to low income areas in the interest of economic justice, and community organizers on L.A.’s south side have yet to be heard on this issue.

Impetus to build LNG terminals in the coastal waters of California may be affected by two proposals to build new natural gas pipelines into the west from new gas fields in Utah and Wyoming.

Both the Kern River and Spectra gas pipeline companies filed legal notice last week that they plan to add California-bound gas capacity if customers can be found.

If both of these pipelines are built, their capacity would approximately equal the LNG capacity proposed by the Woodside and NorthernStar projects combined.

And finally, a San Diego company that will start up its new LNG import terminal at Ensenada, Mexico announced Thursday it will build a $150 million addition to treat its LNG imports to remove the “hot gas” threat. Sempra officials said they would treat LNG cargoes with nitrogen to lower their burning temperature, thus dramatically decreasing the amount of air pollution that will be caused by burning the natural gas.

Although California regulators have approved the so-called hot gas for use here, smog agencies have filed suits to overturn that because of the large amounts of smog that would be generated.

Neither of the two offshore LNG terminals have plans to limit or treat imports to bring them in line with lower-burning standards.

School Board Action Leads to Rumblings about Malibu Secession

• Local Parents Voice Displeasure with Construction Funding Shift from Malibu High School Campus

BY HANS LAETZ

With some Malibu parents angrily calling for a divorce, members of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District have decided to revisit the decision to strip all short-term construction funding from the district’s middle schools—a decision that shifted $13.5 million from Malibu High to Santa Monica High School.

But the board’s decision may be too little, too late for incensed Malibu residents, some of whom promise to vote down a crucial tax measure next February, and work to cleave a Malibu-only school district from the western end of the SMMUSD.

“You had to know you were playing with fire,” said Malibu City Councilmember Andy Stern, parent of an MHS student. “I think that was the single worst destructive decision this board has made in decades.”

Parent-Teacher Association officers also told the board, meeting in Malibu last Thursday, that they support splitting the district. “You have a group of parents looking at something that is very exciting, and that is Malibu becoming its own school district,” said parent volunteer Cathleen Baum. “I think you are going to see that happening.”

The board last month bowed to an angry, last-minute campaign by Santa Monica High parents, who pointed at a clean and well-landscaped Malibu High and worn, dirty facilities at Samohi, which is 70 years old.

Malibu High, a mixed middle and high school, lost $13.5 million to Samohi, a move that indefinitely delays a promise to Malibu voters that passage of last year’s bond election would remove temporary classrooms from the campus and pay for a new classroom wing.

The district has about $174 million in construction bond money from Proposition BB. A citizens committee had recommended that Samohi get $38.4 million worth of construction for its 3300-student campus, and Malibu High would get $27 million for its 1200-student campus.

The board, dominated 9-1 by Santa Monica residents, yielded to Santa Monicans who want $65 million spent at their children’s school. The board postponed most middle and elementary school construction and shifted that money to Samohi.

At the latest meeting, Board President Kathy Wisnicki, the lone Malibu board member, got little support from the five Santa Monica board members present. Four other Santa Monica board members did not make the trip to Malibu.

“I would like staff to really take a look at the projects slated for Malibu High School because it is one campus,” Wisnicki said. “We’re not talking about a high school campus or a middle school campus. We have sixth graders talking classes in the same building as 12th graders.”

That didn’t impress Santa Monica board member Maria Leon-Vasquez, who dismissed the Malibu parents’ insistence that the middle school is an integral part of the high school as “semantics.”

“Whether it is one high school or middle school—whatever—then we are going to open [the process] up for all the middle schools,” she said, waving her hand.

Board member Oscar de la Torre noted that $38 million in bond money is unallocated at this time, and said the board could consider that as a reserve that could be tapped to fully fund the Malibu High projects. And some district officials have said they are confident that there is enough money in the pot right now to take care of both schools.

But the last-minute decision to shift the initial spending from Malibu to Santa Monica infuriated even longterm parent volunteers who have in the past organized election campaigns for bond and parcel tax votes.

“Our unified school district of Santa Monica and Malibu is a concept that I don’t think makes sense any longer,” said longtime school district supporter Karen Farrer at Thursday’s meeting. “It’s time for everybody to acknowledge that our communities are very different: we are the appendage out here geographically [and] numerically.”

The district has two land areas: the City of Santa Monica, and a disconnected section that includes Malibu, with a chunk of the Los Angeles Unified School District separating the two halves. That arrangement dates back to the 1930s, when largely uninhabited Malibu’s school children either attended a one-room primary school in Decker Canyon or took a bus to Samohi.

Malibu property taxes generally raise more money per student than Santa Monica’s, but the City of Santa Monica donates a large chunk of sales tax revenue to all district students, including the 15 percent who are Malibu residents.

A split-the-district movement five years ago attracted some initial support, and a feasibility study was conducted. But the study was never released, and support fizzled.

The Santa Monica parents’ actions have stoked that support: “It’s time we really do just part amicably and go our separate ways and allow each community to work on the issues that are most important to them,” said Farrer, who has organized electoral support for district issues over past years.

Stern said he would lead a campaign to reject next February’s parcel tax election, which if defeated would likely cause music, arts, PE and core subject teachers at all 17 district schools to be laid off.

The city council member said he voted for the bond issue last year over his misgivings, because school board members told him to trust that the money would be spent fairly. He noted that Malibu taxpayers are financing 30 percent of the construction costs, but only getting 12 percent of the money spent at local schools.

“That was the last time I will ever vote for a nickel to go to this district,” Stern said.

• The Publisher’s Notebook •

Emergency Communication

BY ANNE SOBLE

Even though we should now be at the point where we step back and assess the community’s strengths and weaknesses during the recent wildfire, politicization is starting to rear its head and people are becoming defensive about their performance or participation (and that of others) throughout the days that followed the Black Sunday of the Canyon Fire. That there are contradictions and other misstatements may just reflect human nature, but the tendency toward denial or avoidance has no place when hundreds or more lives could be involved. Of greatest importance, the City of Malibu and the surrounding unincorporated areas that are intertwined by dint of physical access and other services must be able to communicate with all residents. The city has to take the lead. Other fiscal wants and needs should take a back seat until Malibu has an emergency response system that can assure virtually instantaneous communication. Pepperdine’s campus alert program might be one place to start looking at alternatives. Admittedly, a campus is a more homogenous and regimented environment, but the success with which students were contacted and organized speaks to the ability of the appropriate system to make a difference during a crisis. There are much more sophisticated mass notification systems both in operation and on the drawing board that can serve whole municipalities.

Even with a damaged or destroyed power-based communications infrastructure, there are mass notification systems that can reach out via land lines, cell phones, satellite phones, e-mail, faxes, pagers, SMS/text messaging, PDAs or any other handheld device that can function without power. The system can be designed to canvass for all operable communication paths. Any system should have off-site hosting and enough redundancy to account for every contingency. Thousands of people could be reachable instantly with accurate information, reducing panic and the kinds of mistakes that can spell tragedy on a small and large scale. Message receipts can be documented for risk assessment planning. But even a state-of-the-art system will find the Malibu area to be a communications challenge. Some areas will require specialized attention. There are difficult communications pockets in places one might not expect them. My satellite phone passed muster calling from the rain forests of South America, but can be limited in local canyon areas where trees and topography block a direct path skyward. Even though Mother Nature trumps technology every time, Malibu has to use every tool at its disposal to try to even the odds.