Firefighters Stood Watch as Santa Anas Strafed Malibu

• Local Visibility and Air Quality Took Major Hits

BY HANS LAETZ

The Los Angeles County Fire Department was able to maintain extra forces in the Malibu area last weekend despite the major fires that were bracketing the Los Angeles basin to the north and east, officials said.
Everyone was affected, however, by the thick pall of smoke that moved into Malibu from Sylmar late Friday night and Saturday morning. Dozens of worried residents called the local sheriff’s office, deputies said, as visibility and air quality dropped after the Sayre Fire broke out at the north end of the San Fernando Valley at 10:45 Friday night.
By daybreak, the areas generally west of Las Flores Canyon were cloaked in thick smoke. As the day developed, the smoke filled the entire Los Angeles air basin from the series of firestorms enveloping Yorba Linda and Anaheim Hills.
A huge cloud of smoke was seen looming over the eastern horizon late Saturday afternoon, courtesy of the fires that started at Corona and swept west into Orange County.
Satellite images Saturday showed plumes extending west from Corona, and southwest from Sylmar, mixing and swirling over the Santa Monica Bay and western Channel Islands.
Santa Ana wind gusts topped out at 48 miles per hour Saturday at a mountaintop wind gauge near Santiago Peak, the National Weather Service said. Similar gusts were experienced in some parts of the west Malibu coast, but other areas experienced mostly calm, if smoky, weather.
In the mountains of Malibu, the Los Angeles County Fire Department stationed three strike teams at the King Gillette Ranch, totaling 15 firefighters on five engines and three battalion chiefs. Equal additional forces were stationed at Agoura Hills and Calabasas.
Those engine companies, from Watts, Paramount, Ladera Heights, and Inglewood, were cruising through Malibu all weekend. Many of those firefighters were ordered redeployed here while heading home from fighting the Tea Fire Thursday night in the hills above Montecito and Santa Barbara.
Sheriff’s deputies from the Lost Hills Sheriff’s Station were pulling extra duty patrolling for looters to help out Los Angeles police in Sylmar, and watching the Santa Clarita Valley during the evacuations caused by the Sayre Fire.