Southern California Fires – Part I: Our House Burns

George Rebane

We lived our entire adult lives in SoCal; Jo Ann was born in Los Angeles where I arrived as a teenager.  The 25 years before we moved here in 2002 were spent on Saddle Peak Road on the crest line of the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu.  With sweeping one hundred-plus mile views of the ocean, islands, the city, and mountains it was the most scenic of places to live in that metropolitan madness.  But there was a price to be paid for all that natural beauty and wonderful wilderness so close to everything.

At the end of every September Jo Ann would take our important records, pictures, and memorabilia connecting us to the past, and put them in a row of cardboard boxes close to the slider in the family room.  Until the winter rains we would then spend the next three months scanning the skies to the north every time the notorious Santa Anas would start blowing.  We got real good at predicting them by watching when a high pressure area would sweep into northern California from the Pacific.  In case we missed the weather information in the paper, the local radio and TV stations would make sure that every nut and low-life from the San Gabriels to the Mexican border would be alerted to prepare his pyrotechnics.  Most SoCal hill country residents know that 8 out of 10 wildfires are deliberately set.

Our early years passed with annual excitements of fires that burned and threatened us, but were stopped or diverted by the sheer luck of wind shifts.  Many a time Jo Ann would have the boxes in the car when we could see smoke or flames in a neighboring canyon.  Living within two miles of the beach we had an enormous area to the north of us anywhere from which a fire could reach us in a matter of a few hours.  It was not unusual for fires starting north of Moorpark in Ventura County to sweep across multiple freeways and wind up burning down beachfront houses.  We had the added stimulant to exciting living in the form of sumac forests in Dix Canyon to our north that had not burned since 1959.  We once hiked down that canyon under a solid canopy of leaves five to ten feet over our heads while wading through dried duff that was knee deep.  In that surreal darkness I realized how the fire department arrived at those zillion BTU-equivalents per acre that fueled SoCal’s fall disasters.

Our turn came during the huge Malibu fire of November 1993.  I was attending a conference at the downtown LA convention center and decided that the afternoon sessions were not worth the fight through rush hour traffic in the early evening.  After eating lunch with a colleague I jumped in my Grand Cherokee and headed down the Harbor Freeway to turn west on the Santa Monica Freeway which would turn into Pacific Coast Highway at the beach.  As my car came onto the Santa Monica freeway I was facing west and saw one of the most horrifying sights of my life.  The entire western sky over the ocean fifteen miles away was an angry gray wall into which the afternoon sun was beginning to lend an angry red eye.  Looking at the torrent of smoke pouring off the Santa Monica Mountains where we lived, it appeared as if someone had detonated an atom bomb.

The radio told its usual fractured story of what was visible to all of Los Angeles.  The fire was not yet where we lived, but it was only a matter of time.  Pacific Coast Highway was a parking lot heading toward Malibu, the CHP was turning everyone back at Topanga Canyon. We lived at the top of Tuna Canyon, the next one over and the first ‘wild canyon’ out from the city.  I have no idea how I made it to Santa Monica with my eyes glued to the mass of wind-driven smoke pouring from the mountains.  Traffic on the freeway was already backed up into the city of Santa Monica and it took an eternity to crawl to and through the McClure Tunnel which empties the freeway onto PCH under the famous Palisades Park now overlooking a smoke covered bay.  As I inched out of the tunnel, everything was at a stop except for an occasional fire engine roaring toward Malibu in the opposite lanes.

They say Necessity is a Mother.  I knew that Jo Ann would have heard about the fire and would be home desperately loading her Cherokee.  Staying in line meant that I would join the thousands of other cars whose crawl up PCH for hours would end in anger and frustration at Topanga Canyon.  Then in the rear view mirror I saw another fire engine racing toward me.  Instantly my decision was made.  As the engine sped past I pulled out of line and tires screaming accelerated to catch up with the flashing lights and blaring siren in front of me.  Soon more engines caught up with us, but I stayed within twenty feet of that truck as our convoy of emergency vehicles and one Grand Cherokee raced the five miles up PCH to Topanga Canyon.  There the line of fire trucks was being passed through the road block to continue toward the fire.  I pulled out and over to the nearest CHP officer who was turning the lanes of civilian cars around, having to explain to each driver why he wasn’t going to let them through.

The officer looked up and saw what I had just pulled off.  As he came over I handed him my driver’s license and quickly painted the picture of Jo Ann alone on the mountain with three animals trying to stuff a brief summary of our lives into the back of her Cherokee.  I told him that on my own responsibility I would drive up the windy Tuna Canyon Road to my house and then bring everyone back down the same way.  For a moment he hesitated.  Then, as if realizing that the odyssey of a single determined civilian vehicle tucked into a convoy of racing emergency vehicles had yet to play itself out, he said ‘Good Luck’ and waved me through.

I raced up the familiar mountain road into a black sky that was snowing ash and pulled into my driveway.  There was the wife of my life with her car loaded and just about to add the final contingency of two nervous cats, and then make it down the mountain before the wall of flame came over the ridge to our west.  After hugs I took a look at what was in her car and was absolutely amazed.  The car was packed to the gills with exactly the correct items for the available volume.  Under enormous stress she had solved the ‘optimum packing problem’.  In addition to the prepared cardboard boxes, she had selected additional items starting with my computer (I was a consulting engineer at the time and our livelihood was in that box), a change of clothes, toilet articles, a few heirloom dishes, and a painting or two, selected rare books from our library, etc.  With what was in that car, we were ready and able to restart our lives.

To my car with the trailer hitch I quickly hooked our utility trailer.  We spent the next hour in what may best be called aerobic evacuation.  Now that we had another car and a trailer, we almost felt elated.  We could really take the kitchen sink if time allowed.  Instead, we just followed the procedure Jo Ann had established and filled the remaining space with the items she had already triaged but had had to reject because her car didn’t have the room.  Soon we were loaded and made one more round inside the house looking at everything for the last time.  I then noticed that Jo Ann had also prepared the house and grounds for the fire fighters as directed in LA County Fire Department brochures.  As our little convoy pulled out of our driveway, we were both choked up knowing that we were abandoning our home of fifteen years.  We had built that house (Jo Ann was the general contractor) on a windblown ridge-top parcel and had made it into a verdant garden park. 

Going back down Tuna Canyon we saw walls of flame coming up Las Flores Canyon toward our house which was at the apex of three canyons.  One fire cell across the canyon was the classical ‘inverse tornado’ with about a two acre footprint that was feeding a twirling flame mass that ended in a point almost three hundred feet high.  Down below we saw three fire trucks on a dirt road beating a retreat before they would be cut off.  Over a quarter mile away where we had stopped to look, the heat was uncomfortable on our faces.  We mounted up and quickly drove down Tuna Canyon to PCH and back toward town where the lines of cars pointed toward Malibu still reached all the way back to Santa Monica.

After dropping off our cats with our daughter in Santa Monica, we drove to Simi Valley to be with close friends who had a garage that would shelter our hastily loaded trailer.  We spent the evening watching the TV channels covering the fire as we had many times before at home.  This time our interest in the reports had an ‘up close and personal’ urgency.  Undereducated reporters and directors had always been comical in their ineptness.  The standard format was always the same, a reporter at a roadside with a mike in hand not knowing exactly where he was or what was going on behind him.  The studio director would alternately cut to close-ups of flames leaping out of dried hillsides or utter darkness - scenes that could have been archived fifty years ago and shown repeatedly every year with exactly the same information content.  No maps showing the current extent of the fire were ever available to anyone even though there was always a reporter broadcasting from the emergency control center.  Instead we were shown a general map of southern California with flame icons near the towns where the fires were burning.  Now that we wanted to know the fate of our home, the information free reporting was infuriating.  We would not know what happened on Saddle Peak Road until the next morning when we awoke with bleary eyes from a fitful night of sleep.

(Continued in Part II: Our House is Still There!, concluded in Part III: Lessons Learned)

Comments

[James Currier]

Well told, George! I love this story. Keep going.

[Jeff Pelline]

pretty long winded, but a point any of us who have lived in southern california for a long time are keenly aware of.

[Sini Fernandez]

I remember that November with disturbing clarity (and unrelated joy!) and I know how this story ends, but I'm completely tense after reading this description of events. Good job conveying the terror we all felt that afternoon. I can't wait to read Part II.
[Sini is our oldest daughter who then in Santa Cruz was confined to bed with twins who would be born in three weeks. gjr]