George Rebane
(continued from Part I: Our House Burns, concluded in Part III: Lessons Learned)
The morning after in Simi Valley found us at our friends Chuck and Lois’ house eating breakfast and talking about what we would find when we returned to Saddle Peak Road and how we would rebuild. The Malibu fire was still raging and would do so for two more days. The TV was on and several stations were carrying ongoing coverage of the devastation. Then we saw that one station was broadcasting live shots of the burning mountains from a helicopter and doing actual close-ups of charred remains of burned houses most of which were still smoldering. The ruins seemed oddly alone, the sweeping close-ups showed no humans and the reporter explained that no attempt was made to save these houses because of the sheer intensity of the firestorms in which they were engulfed during the night. Jo Ann and I were sitting on the floor with eyes glued to the tube waiting for a familiar shape or scene to appear from the panning camera. Again, the reporter had no idea what area he was covering; to him it was just “in the mountains above Malibu”. To us it was maddening.
Suddenly we saw a familiar bend in a paved road and the camera stabilized for a moment on two charred foundations the outlines of which we instantly recognized – they were the remnants of the ‘A-Frame’ and the ‘Ugly Dome’ diagonally across from our house. (In the sparsely populated mountains every family gave their own names to the houses in their neighborhood.) I remember going into a kind of numb state where the voices in the room sounded as if from a distance; we were ready to see the camera sweep across the road and show the remains of our house. Instead the view went directly across the road to the huge, almost finished ‘Bailey house’, our next door neighbor to the west. The Bailey house was gone, the rubble piles didn’t even reach more than a couple of feet above the foundation. The concrete walls on one side of the ground level garages had crumbled from the intense heat, the reporter was babbling something in the background about the “complete devastation” he was seeing. We were holding our breath not knowing how we would react as our property came into view.
It didn’t come into view at all; the camera panned away in the other direction and the scene switched to another lost reporter somewhere in the mountains talking about the heroism of the fire fighters during the night. Then more close-up pictures of burning hillsides and ruins of houses down by the beach. We almost felt like screaming ‘Dammit, show us our house!’, maybe we actually did. But now it was clear to us that our house was gone and Plan B for the rest of our lives would have to be finalized and put into action.
We kept sitting in front of the tube as another hour passed with no news of our house until suddenly there again was the picture of the A-Frame and Ugly Dome ruins. Again numbness and utter concentration on what we would see next. The camera once more panned the Bailey ruins next door and then north across our charred meadow down toward Dix Canyon where it came to rest on the ash heap that was the former ‘Finley Estate’ – the tongue-in-cheek name of our downhill neighbor’s house to the north. Once more the scene switched to somewhere else and we were left to thaw out still not having seen the remains of what had been our two acres in Eden.
This tortuous aerial coverage was repeated at least two times more as noon approached. And then there it was, the Bailey house again and the camera quickly swept across our house. From the split second view before the scene changed, we saw our white stucco home standing in full glory in the middle of our blackened ridge top. We just started crying and everyone hugged everyone else. The house that we and the architect had designed especially to withstand such fires had actually survived. We were instantly on our feet grabbing the car keys telling Chuck and Lois we’d be back later that evening. I don’t think that we took the time to dry our eyes or blow our noses before we were in the car.
We then realized that due to all the road closures, our usual way home was not an option. Fortunately we were ‘natives’ of the Santa Monica Mountains and knew all of the roads and trails in our neck of the woods (actually mostly sumac brush). Coming to a small road on the back side of Saddle Peak Mountain we ran into the expected checkpoint manned by a single LA Sheriff’s deputy. This time we were alone with the officer in this remote part of the mountains, and holding out my license again we breathlessly told him that, miracle of miracles, our house had survived the night’s firestorm that had swept our neighborhood. We just had to go home and hug our house. He understood, looked at our Jeep and simply told us to be careful because the roads were still covered with fallen boulders, power poles, and downed wires. Since the fires were still burning, the power in the mountains had been turned off but he was willing to let us try to get home.
We drove up a familiar windy road on a black mountainside that now looked as if Patton’s 3rd Army had just passed through hours before. After dodging power lines and boulders we finally pulled into our driveway and were immediately stopped by the charred skeleton of one of our Aleppo pines lying across the roadway. We got out and made our way toward the house passing the burned shell of our daughter’s Volvo stationwagon that she had parked at our house. Its burned hulk was surrounded by hardened puddles of different kinds of metals which apparently flowed like water during the intense heat. Smoke was still coming out of what had been the spare tire well. As we walked toward the house we were surprised to see that the two-hundred-foot-long windbreaks of compacta and red gum eukes had all survived. The fire had only burned the first couple of feet of bark near the ground, but the foliage had not caught. Another miracle.
I walked into the house ahead of Jo Ann who was inspecting the burned landscaping and wooden deck railings. The smell of smoke in the house was surprisingly strong. As I looked through the dining room toward the living room I noticed that it was very bright in there as if someone had left the lights on. One look at the room’s high ceiling explained the illumination – there was a twelve foot diameter hole to the outside world with charred lumber and pink insulation hanging down from the edges. I remember calling out, “Oh Honey, guess what!” Our trashed living room bore all the evidence of a very professional and successful fight to extinguish a fire that minutes later would have consumed the house. The details of this heroic action we would learn a month later from a young fire fighter from Placer County who brought his girlfriend up to our mountains to show her the defining episode of his short career.
After going through the house and taking stock we had two immediate tasks facing us. Find Annabelle and feed the companies of firefighters that we had passed resting by their trucks before being directed to their next action. Annabelle was a beautiful and gentle red-tailed boa constrictor which we had had for fifteen years. She was on one of her periodic ‘walks’ around the house when the fire came. She usually hid herself in a high place when she was done ‘walking’ and we had no time to find her during the aerobic evacuation described above. We were going to put a note on the door to the effect that ‘There’s a boa constrictor loose in the house, but don’t worry because she’s very tame and friendly.’ But we then figured, should they come, why give them a reason to leave.
We quickly found Annabelle behind the pooched out books on the lowest shelf of the big floor-to-ceiling bookcase in the family room. That she was there told us how much of the house had filled with smoke when the living room end was burning. Her usual hiding place was behind the rows of National Geographics on the very top shelf nine feet above floor level. We then went into our well stocked pantry and filled grocery sacks full of all kinds of food – lunch meat, sardines, crackers, cookies, chocolates, … - that could be handed to the fire crews. On the way up the mountain we heard on the radio that many of the fire crews had not been fed for over twenty-four hours and they weren’t sure when food would reach the isolated and engaged firefighters.
I was able to clear the driveway and drive the Cherokee up to the house. We loaded the food sacks in the back and were back on the road heading toward where we last saw the fire trucks. Sure enough as we slowly drove toward them, one of the fire fighters, still wearing his yellow suit and smiling, stepped away from his buddies and held up a hand-drawn cardboard sign to us, ‘Will fight fires for food’. They were in for a surprise.
I immediately stopped in front of them and we both jumped out. From the back of the car we took a couple of the bags and walked up to the surprised squad. They started protesting that the sign was only a joke and that their food would surely arrive soon. We told them that this food was no joke and handed them the food bags. After handshakes all around and many thank yous, we got back in the car and drove in the direction they indicated to deliver more ‘care packages’ to the brave men and women (yes, the distaff side was also present in the front lines of that fight) waiting for their rations.
On the way back after exhausting our food bags we stopped at a company of firefighters near our house and asked them what lay ahead. They said that they were one of several response teams strategically placed to respond to the random flare-ups common in such mountain fires. They would spend the night huddled around their vehicles until called. We insisted that our driveway was large enough to handle fire trucks and that they were welcome to spend the night comfortably in our house. They looked at each other in agreement and soon we were leading a very large fire truck up to our house, soon another one like it joined them. We now had twelve 'personal' fire fighters stationed in our house - Mama Rebane didn't raise a dummy.
Jo Ann got busy making the world’s largest pile of tuna and chicken salad sandwiches which she served on two huge platters. I offered beer and wine which they politely refused, saying they could not drink until they were given a ‘stand down’. Cans of juice and water from our emergency supply filled the bill since there was no water pressure in the mountains. One of the senior firemen quickly saw our ‘hole in the roof’ and asked if I had any plywood since there was a chance of rain in a day or two. Soon two of them were on the roof nailing together a sturdy makeshift patch from my store of plywood and covering it with plastic. I was surprised to see that one of the firefighting carpenters on our roof in boots and baggy pants was a young good-looking blonde whose firefighting outfit had successfully hidden her now obvious assets.
That evening we drove back to Simi Valley leaving two well-fed and comfortable teams of firefighters in our house with their remote radios and emergency lights making the place look almost normal. To help them pass time I brought out decks of cards and the poker chips. Before we left, a lively poker game had started around the breakfast table leaving the more cerebral contingent in the dining room playing bridge.
I think we cried again as we made our way down the mountain, out of the burn area, and into the lit streets of civilization. We would return early the next day with more food, and again the next day. Driving up on the third day the radio reported that the Malibu fire was now contained with a few remaining hotspots being mopped up. But on that day there was a sudden shift of wind to an on-shore flow, and we spotted a flare-up deep in Tuna Canyon canyon. Quickly it grew into a wall of fire that came up the unburned east side of the canyon toward our ridge which separated the community of Topanga from the open chaparral. Topanga Canyon had over 800 homes packed cheek-by-jowl, each with heavy vegetation. Most of that canyon had not burned since it first became a recreation area of small weekend vacation cabins at the turn of the 20th century. If the fire breached that ridge, Topanga would be toast. With that bohemian density of houses, the resulting firestorm would be a repeat of Dresden in 1945. Our house quickly emptied and all available fire fighters assembled on the nearby stretch of ridge where Saddle Peak Road joined Tuna Canyon Road. Standing on our ridgetop, to us those firefighters below looked like the three hundred Greeks at Thermopylae waiting for Xerxes’ armies.
We knew the call had been made and all of us on that ridge were searching the skies – where were the fixed wing air attack tankers? If the fire was to be stopped, we needed heavy lines of that thick red fire retardant which only the big airplanes could lay down on the ocean side of the ridge. Still no airplanes. And then we heard the distinct thump-thump-thump sound of a straining helicopter from the west climbing up Las Flores Canyon from the ocean hauling a very large bucket of sea water at the end of a long tether. The pilot was flying as close to the ground as possible, not wasting any time to grab one more foot of unneeded altitude before he could dump his load. The heavy-lifter, with gangly angled legs looking like a giant dragonfly, swung around low over our meadow and dove down into Tuna Canyon releasing the seawater precisely in front of the largest flame-mass. His steep dive continued down the canyon and through the narrow Tuna gorge to the ocean. There the giant beast stood on its tail like a rearing horse to slow over the water and refill the large 1,600 gallon bucket for the next run. But that single heroic crew would not be enough to stop the climbing wall of fire.
We were so busy watching that first spectacular approach and drop, we didn’t notice that following the first heavy-lifter was another and another and then another. Those four helicopters now flew in a precisely choreographed ring-around-the-rosy, grinding up Las Flores from the ocean with a full load, wheeling around our house on the ridge, diving over the flames, releasing their load, then the spectacular dive down Tuna Canyon with the empty bucket streaming straight behind to fill up and do it all over again. This coordinated attack did slow the flames but it did not stop them. We watched agonizingly as the fire line kept reigniting and crawl steadily up toward our ridge. About two hundred yards away was a cluster of neighbors’ houses that the fire had now reached. One company of firefighters left the main line of defense to do what they could for those houses. That single truck and crew with less than 600 gallons of water was able to save three of the four houses as we watched the unlucky one catch and burn.
Now the flames were so close that heavy-lifters were dropping their loads right on top of us on the ridge. Our house and two neighbors’ houses on the ridge were still in an unburned fuel path from the east. The pilots knew this and now started drenching the ridge. With the flames again so close, the spray of sea water on our faces was a glorious feeling. The bracing cold showers kept coming each with a wonderful roar of engines low overhead. Quickly the burned ground was wet, our cars were wet, our house was wet (thank you again for the patched hole on the roof!), and we were wet. Jo Ann went in the house to dry off while I ran down the driveway, now a whitewater creek of rushing seawater, to lend a hand at Thermopylae.
It was magnificent as I and other neighbors assembled there with the firefighters and their row of trucks. The water just kept pouring down from the sky, everything was wet. All of us on that ridge were licking the salt water from our lips and grinning at each other as each shower passed. And then it was over. The dreaded wall of fire was gone; only idle billows of smoke and steam still rose from a couple of places below us. So ended the great Malibu fire of 1993.
After we again thanked the firefighters and shook hands all around, I started the short walk up Saddle Peak Road to our house. The house with its sooty white stucco sides appeared to me defiant and alone between its fallen companions on the edge of ‘our ridge’ between Tuna and Dix Canyons. Our battle-scarred house now sported a giant band-aid of a plywood patch on its steeply-angled south-facing roof, proof that it had fought and won the fight of its life. It would shelter us and once more be a place where life happened.
During the last four days we had been schooled roughly and deeply on many subjects. Today here in the Sierra foothills of Nevada County, these experiences come to life as our community debates how it should protect itself from the inevitable fate of all forested land. Now it’s time to reflect on lessons learned.
(To be concluded in Part III: Lessons Learned)
Comments