Malibu Burning
The Woolsey Fire started at 2:22 PM on November 8, 2018, on the Santa Susana Field Laboratory site, a shuttered Cold War aerospace research facility that stretches across an accordion of folded canyons in the mountains of northwestern Los Angeles County. Two minutes before the brushfire was first reported, technicians with the electric utility Southern California Edison noticed a malfunction in their equipment in the same location—almost certainly caused by the Santa Ana winds then gusting out of the north-northeast at 40 to 60 miles per hour. Conditions, both natural and cultural, were perfect for a firestorm. The downsloping wind had driven the humidity down to just five percent. The steep terrain, covered in sere grasses and brush, dangerously dry after more than six months of drought, was primed for combustion. The initial firefighting response was slow to arrive: nearby crews were racing towards a different fire, started an hour before, 13 miles away in Thousand Oaks, in neighboring Ventura County. Regional firefighting resources were already committed to other fires in the north of the state. Further hampering the initial attack, suppression aircraft were unable to fly due to the winds, until 5:00 PM. By then, the fire front had spread quickly to the south and west. At 5:15, fire jumped the 12-lane US 101 freeway near Liberty Canyon, between the exurban cities of Calabasas and Agoura Hills, and blew onwards into the even-more rugged and steeper terrain of the Santa Monica Mountains, thickly clothed in bone-dry chaparral, much of it standing dead after years of drought. Before noon the next day flames had leaped another six miles to the Pacific Ocean—covering 15 miles from the ignition point in just 22 hours. Flames also spread in contrary directions: north into parts of Bell Canyon and the West Hills neighborhood of the City of Los Angeles, and west into parts of Oak Park, Westlake Village, and Thousand Oaks.
In its path, more than 295,000 people evacuated, many backed up in their cars for hours on choked, winding mountain roads and the four-lane Pacific Coast Highway, the main artery in and out of the coastal Malibu area. Failures of communication hampered both the evacuations—many residents did not receive warnings—and firefighting efforts, with cooperating units from other areas at times stalled in place by lack of localized maps and information.
The Woolsey Fire wasn’t fully contained until November 21. It had burned 96,949 acres—about 151 square miles, roughly the size of Santa Fe, New Mexico, or half the size of New York City. It destroyed 1,643 structures and killed three people. Just within the Malibu city limits, some 670 structures were lost, including more than 400 single-family homes with an estimated median market value of $3.47 million, and a total valuation of $1.6 billion. Individual burned homes had been valued at up to $25 million. Other losses were harder to easily or immediately quantify: for example, 88% of the federal parkland in the mountains was burned.
The Woolsey was the largest fire in the history of the Santa Monicas, and of Malibu. It had shown extraordinary fire behavior: explosive spread and long-range spotting driven by fierce sustained winds, simultaneous movement on multiple fronts, extreme distance and speed traveled, and number of structures destroyed. At face value, these characteristics were not atypical, but the metrics were. It clearly fit into the terrifying new normal of fire in California and the West: bigger, hotter, more destructive, and nearly impossible to combat, despite the formidable capabilities of modern firefighting, until the fuels were consumed and the winds died down.
The Camp Fire in the mountains of Northern California started the very same day. Also driven by downsloping winds raging through dry fuels, it destroyed several communities in its path within hours, ultimately burning 153,336 acres, killing 85 people, displacing more than 50,000, and destroying more than 18,000 structures, including 13,861 homes, causing an estimated $16.5 billion in damage. It was the most expensive natural disaster (by insured losses) of 2018—and remains the most costly and the most deadly in state history. Like the Woolsey Fire, it was caused by electrical utility equipment—in this case, power lines downed by high winds. And like the Woolsey, the response was hampered by inadequate evacuation routes, poor communications, and poor pre-fire planning.
Experts agreed that the Woolsey and the Camp fires were stark demonstrations of the new normal of fire in the era of global warming. As of 2024, the ten biggest fires in California’s history had occurred in the previous five years; 12 of the 20 biggest had occurred in the previous decade, and all but one of the 20 had occurred in the 21st century (1932’s Matilija Fire in Ventura County being the exception).[1] The Camp Fire is one of 13 of the 20 most destructive fires in California’s history that occurred in the five years prior to 2022 (all but two of the twenty occurred in the 21st century).[2]
It even seemed to some as though the Woolsey and other recent mega-fires were testaments to a terrible new world of uncontrollable conflagration, both natural and cultural, whose challenges were beyond the abilities of our existing public institutions and emergency services. At around midnight the night before the start of the Woolsey Fire, just a few miles from its ignition point, 12 people, seven of them students attending nearby colleges, including Pepperdine University in Malibu, were shot dead by a disturbed Afghanistan war veteran in a Thousand Oaks bar. Fewer than two days later, the local community was left in layered, multidimensional shock and mourning.
Or, was the Woolsey Fire an old story: déjà vu all over again? The Santa Monica Mountains, and Malibu, the 27-mile length of the mountains’ coastline from Tuna Canyon at the southeast corner to Point Mugu on the southwest, has been burning forever. In this piece, we will use Malibu as a shorthand or case study for Southern California’s experience with wildfire. In multiple ways, Malibu has made itself to burn. Its ecosystems evolved with fire and are adapted to it, in very specific ways, to maintain their balance. For many thousands of years, Native peoples also adapted to fire, and used it in complex and subtle ways to maintain their balance with their natural surroundings. Spanish and Mexican colonists began to change these fire systems, but not in wholesale ways, as their numbers were few and their footprint on the land relatively light. Arriving Americans, however, began a systematic reworking of traditional fire arrangements which in short order erased them and replaced them with a new regime of astonishing dysfunction: an entire cultural apparatus—urban, organizational, financial, political, and ideological—that ignores what it means to have a balanced fire system in favor of trying to eliminate it or wish it away. In spite of the impressive technical and theoretical learning achieved by our fire services, our society has failed to learn from repetitive experience, instead digging deeper into a failed paradigm of ill-conceived urban growth supposedly defended by fire suppression—putting more assets, lives, and the underlying ecosystems that draw people to the place to begin with, in harm’s way. The result has been a spiral of repeated, ever-escalating losses, cost, and effort. Fire today is more destructive, more costly, and more of a threat than ever in history, and the trajectory is ever worse. This spiral has perversely come to define our society’s relationship to nature, not just in Malibu and Los Angeles County, but in California, the American West, and increasingly, much of the rest of the United States and the world, as well.
The natural conditions of the Santa Monica Mountains and Malibu make it one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the United States. The terrain is overwhelmingly steep and clothed in forbidding vegetation. The Spanish exploring expedition of 1769-70 led by Gaspar de Portolá, traveling west from the Los Angeles pueblo seeking an overland route northwards to Santa Barbara and Monterey, found no way along the Malibu coastline nor through the mountains, and was forced to turn north through the Sepulveda Pass, then the Santa Susana Pass into the Simi Valley, bypassing the Santa Monica Mountains altogether. The climate is classically Mediterranean, with winter rain and summer drought of six months or more. From an ecosystem point of view, there are functionally three seasons: a spring, a fall, and drought. The first rains come in October or November, making that season the ecosystem’s “spring” season of new growth, which lasts through the traditional winter months. “Fall,” the first drying after the rainy season, when leaves begin to yellow, typically lasts only a few short weeks in June. By mid-July, drought and dormancy are back in place, until the rains return. In zones with between 8 and 30 inches of rainfall, the dominant vegetation type is chaparral—sclerophyllous or hard-leaved plants with closed stomata to minimize evapotranspiration—a shrub-dominated ecosystem similar to those in Mediterranean climates worldwide. In California, where precipitation is less than 8 inches or evaporation rates are higher than normal, chaparral is replaced by desert plant communities or coastal sage scrub—the latter of which dominates in the Malibu coastal lowlands. Where precipitation is higher than 30 inches, it is replaced by conifer and mixed evergreen forests. Chaparral’s range spans the entire length of California, a small portion of southern Oregon, some mountains in Arizona, and the mountains of northern Baja California, Mexico. Chaparral is the most extensive vegetation type in the state, covering 8.5 million acres.[3]
The climate is generally mild—its gentleness, in combination with the area’s spectacular, Big Sur-like scenery of steep mountains meeting the ocean, have long made Malibu one of the most attractive locales for people on the planet. But it has a fierce and dangerous flipside: dry winds stalk the mountains. While wildfire is possible at any time the vegetation is sufficiently dry, which generally includes the summer months of June, July and August, summer typically sees light and moist diurnal seabreezes not conducive to rapid fire growth, and is therefore not the primary fire season.[4]
September opens the windy season, and with it, much greater risk of wildfire. Summer’s high pressure over the West Coast, perpetrator of deadly heat domes but not of notable wind, can shift instead over the Great Basin, pushing easterly winds back towards low pressure over the Pacific. Blowing from the high elevation interior to the coast, the offshore winds—locally called Santa Anas, and by meteorologists katabatic from Greek or “downsloping”—warm and dry as they descend the gradient due to compressional heating. Air temperature rises 5 degrees Fahrenheit for every 1,000 feet of elevation loss (1 degree Celsius per 100 meters). Humidity drops with temperature, and the already dry interior air gets drier and sucks up moisture, reaching relative humidities below 10 percent at the coastal plain, where temperatures during Santa Ana conditions are much higher than the deserts and mountains—reversing summer’s pattern. The winds desiccate everything they touch, setting the stage for combustion; then, if they find flame, fanning it with an aerial ferocity unknown in any other weather. While September through December, at the end of the drought, see the most concentrated bursts, Santa Anas can blow at any time of the year. Similarly, while offshore wind events can come from many directions, most often, Santa Anas follow well-worn pathways: through the passes and canyons that join the coastal plains to the interior deserts. Los Angeles County has four main passes through its formidable mountain ranges: Tejon Pass, following the route of I-5 south from the Central Valley; Soledad Pass, leading from Palmdale and the Antelope Valley down the route of SR 14 before joining I-5 in Santa Clarita and then entering the San Fernando Valley; Cajon Pass, descending the route of I-15 from the Victorville area of the Mojave Desert in San Bernardino County; and San Gorgonio Pass, following the route of I-10 into the Basin from the Palm Springs direction and the low Colorado Desert of Riverside County. For the Santa Monicas and Malibu, the first two, Tejon and Soledad, are lined up perfectly with the main canyons that funnel air between the valleys and the coast, and these canyons—Topanga, Malibu, Corral, Latigo, Zuma, Arroyo Sequit, and others—are the hosts of frequent, repeating pathways of fire.
During the 90 years prior to the Woolsey Fire,[5] at least 30 “significant” fires have been recorded in Malibu.[6] Over the period, their average size, in acres burned, has steadily increased, while their destructiveness has increased in nearly geometrical terms. This is because, in the early years of the sequence, fire in the wildlands was considered a problem largely of watershed management—keeping vegetation intact to control erosion and runoff. Fire was largely seen as an urban issue, correlated with wooden buildings, overcrowding, and ignition.[7] This was the case until urbanism came to the wildlands. In Malibu, settlement was slow, blocked, until the 1920s, by May Rindge, owner of the Malibu rancho lands, and a determined foe of development. Even after her defeat and the opening of the ranch lands, settlement remained sparse, with a few houses alone in the mountains or in clusters near the water. With postwar road-building, subsidies to suburban expansion, and crucially, advances in and extensions of fire protection services, development penetrated farther and farther in.
In October, 1935, 50 mile-per-hour Santa Anas drove a 50-foot flame front southwards down Latigo Canyon and into drainages to the west. Despite aggressive control efforts, including backfires from fuel breaks and extensive hose lines, it burned more than 28,000 acres. But few structures were harmed, because few structures existed in the fire’s path.
In November, 1938, the wind-driven Trippet Ranch Fire, originating in Topanga Canyon, crossed over ridges to the west and east into Las Flores and Mandeville Canyons, consuming 14,820 acres and 350 buildings—becoming the largest in LA County history to that date. Only an extraordinary effort—600 men deployed on the fire’s eastern flank in Pacific Palisades and Brentwood—limited the losses (Will Roger’s famous estate was saved).
In 1948, fire burned through Topanga Canyon again, but, ten years later, 1,250 homes were threatened. The worst was averted only when a single D-9 dozer operator risked his life to stop the advance.
The day after Christmas, 1956, fierce Santa Anas fanned fire through many of the same canyons as the 1935 burn, all the way to Kanan and Decker Canyons, burning a similar area—26,000 acres. Only, 21 years later, much more was in harm’s way: 100 homes were destroyed, including five burned on the sand on Trancas Beach, and one person, Frank Dickover, was killed. We have an eyewitness description of the “Newton” fire from Lawrence Clark Powell, university librarian at UCLA from 1944 to 1961 and author of more than 100 books, including “Ocian in View”: The Malibu, published in 1958. Sleeping the night of December 26 in his house on Broad Beach Road, at the mouth of Encinal Creek, he woke to the smell of smoke and the sight of the adjacent mountainside in flame. “Sparks came like bullets on the wind,” he wrote. He and his neighbors fought desperately to keep their houses from igniting, even as “fences, cypresses…weedy lots” burned around them, in a sea of smoke and flame. “We used dribbling hoses—water was giving out—shovel, hoe, wet sacks, anything, for we knew that if one house caught fire, all would be lost.” Most were saved, but not all.
Powell and his neighbors were not alone: lots of firefighting support had been sent to the burn: pumper engines from fire departments all over Southern California bound together by mutual aid agreements—the first of which had been negotiated by Greater Los Angeles fire departments in 1941. After patrolling for hotspots and occasional flareups in the ravines and beach cliffs, Powell “drove down coast to Zuma Fire station, headquarters for the fighters and their machines, which had arrived from as far away as San Diego and San Luis Obispo, and found it like a scene behind battle-lines—hundreds of men, arriving and leaving, eating and resting, with heavy equipment of all kinds, some pieces with engines idling, the air full of a rumbling both fearful and reassuring. The county services had performed heroically.” Nevertheless, “A hundred dwellings had burned,” he lamented. “There was no consolation in the words of the County Fire Chief who said, ‘There is only one thing certain. It will happen again.’”
It did happen again, in short order. On December 2, 1958, the Liberty Fire roared down Malibu Canyon, spreading to the west into Corral Canyon, consuming roughly 18,000 acres, torching 74 homes, and injuring eight firefighters.
Clearly, the fires and the losses were not for a lack of firefighting effort. As historian Stephen J. Pyne and others have detailed, beginning in the early 20th century the US underwent a radical shift towards redefining fire from a manageable and sometimes beneficial fact to an extraordinary menace and threat to be eliminated at all costs. Massive fires, such as the Big Blowup of 1910, catalyzed the change and led to huge increases in funding for fire control, with suppression as its goal. Military equipment and tactics were immediately brought to bear. California enthusiastically participated, launching the nation’s first forest fire patrols using airplanes in 1919, a collaboration between the Forest Service and the Army Air Service—an effort that soon spread to other states. Beginning in 1921, the L.A. County Fire Service and U.S. Forest Service flew two-person blimp patrols over the Angeles National Forest, and used one to map the entire Santa Monica range. The fleet was joined by a war-surplus DeHavilland DH-4 biplane, flying from Griffith Park; it was soon joined by more planes, based at Glendale, Riverside, and San Diego.[8]
The nation’s subsequent trials deepened the commitment. During the Great Depression, fire suppression was cast as “the moral equivalent of war,”[9] in Pyne’s words. In 1935, US chief forester Silcox proclaimed the “10 am rule,” vowing to extinguish any fire by 10:00 the morning after its report. An unprecedented expansion of federal fire resources fed off of the New Deal, and would have been unthinkable before it. World War II, termed by Pyne the “war of fire” due the extensive use of aircraft, bombing, and incendiary weapons on all sides, “reinforced these trends,” he wrote, drawing the military into fire control and militarizing the civilian services with aircraft, smokejumpers, bulldozers, and other war-derived systems. The Cold War only increased them, with enormous transfers of military equipment and the development of more new technologies, chief among them the air tanker/bomber. In 1953, Donald Douglas, test director of Douglas Aircraft, used a 4-engine DC-7 to drop water on Muroc dry lake in the Mojave Desert. Within three years, converted WWII planes were in regular firefighting use, including with the LA County Fire Department.
The year 1954 saw a nearly year-long interagency experimental program, Operation Firestop, staged at the US Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton in San Diego County. Participating agencies included the LA County Fire Department, LA City Fire Department, US Forest Service, California Department of Forestry, US Weather Bureau, and the University of California. Helicopters joined planes in tests dropping water and new fire retardant chemicals being developed at UC Berkeley, including sodium calcium borate, added to water to make a heavy slurry. Other trials studied the effects of rugged topography and winds on fire behavior, and tested methods of backfiring, hose laying, fuel breaks, and other tactics.
Firestop was part of a broad national effort to raise the public profile of wildfire and of firefighters, and to increase support and funding for prevention and suppression efforts. Smokey Bear, a US Forest Service publicity campaign, first appeared on posters in 1944. Later represented by an actual, live bear in popular publicity stunts, Smokey became a celebrity in his own right, receiving more letters than the White House, at the address: Smokey Bear, Washington, DC, 20052. A national Smokey Bear award was given in 1957 by President Eisenhower.
During the postwar years, Southern California, doubling its population every decade, led the nation out of the cities and into the suburbs—which in many cases meant into fire-prone landscapes made accessible by the extension of freeways, power and water supply into remote foothill and mountain areas. Whereas—again in the words of Stephen Pyne: “the modern suburb can be relatively conflagration-proof,”[10] with the natural land transformed into paved roads, sidewalks, lawns, and widely-spaced houses, “the conversion in Southern California was often incomplete. The brush was considered part of the natural aesthetics of the scene, a barrier between wealthy and merely affluent suburbs and a stabilizing agent for watersheds… Many residents allowed—even encouraged—brush to engulf their structures.” For firefighters, “The emerging fuel arrangements were a nightmare.” This was in spite of the official message from fire services that vegetation suppression was the firefighter’s friend. Homeowners were urged to create “defensible space” around their structures, thereby eliminating or greatly reducing the threat of vegetation to structure ignition.
Southern California had entered a new place, new kind of urban condition, comprised of fragments of the city mixed with wilderness—since dubbed the wildland-urban interface, or WUI (pronounced “woo-ee”)—in which fire was dared, willfully ignored, fought, and paid dearly for, but not tamed or eradicated. The combustibility of the WUI was made far worse by design and construction decisions driven both by cost and fashion. The immediate few postwar decades were the era of the “ranch” house: one-story, with low angled pitched roofs and deep overhangs, inspired by early Spanish and Mexican-era ranchobuildings but built not with flame-resistant adobe or stucco and tile roofs as the ranchos had been but with traditional American farm materials: wood siding and wood shingle roof coverings. The ranch house was part of a national phenomenon: a generalized nostalgia for an imaginary rural life as the country raced to suburbanize. Movies and TV promoted faux rural and frontier imagery: Westerns ruled the screen, most churned out at former ranches turned movie lots in LA County’s San Fernando and Santa Clarita Valleys. They were joined by a crowded slate of rural and small-town stories: The Andy Griffith Show (1960-68) filmed on a stage in Culver City, with its woodsy exteriors shot in Franklin Canyon in the Hollywood Hills; followed by The Beverly Hillbillies (62-71), Petticoat Junction (63-70), and Green Acres (65-71), to name just a few.
Fire departments and building experts had long known that shingle roofs were terribly dangerous. A 1959 report by the National Fire Protection Association warned that “the increasing use of wood shingles in these brush areas of Los Angeles”—would result in disaster. And yet, to the broad public, and even to housing lenders and insurers, inserting such literal tinderboxes into the brush wasn’t seen as the problem: fire itself was, and more firefighting, with an ever-escalating cost and technical complexity, was seen as the answer, a necessary commitment to defend the new suburban lifestyle. A symbiotic relationship grew between expanding suburbs and expanding fire services. The LA County Fire Department, enabled by the terms of 1956’s Lakewood Plan to take on paying client cities just like a business enterprise, grew apace, adding scores of covered cities in the decades after, building new stations, hiring hundreds of personnel, and developing its own air force, an accoutrement envied far and wide in the firefighting world. On September 14 of that year, to cap its rising fortunes and visibility, the department named Walt Disney the honorary fire chief of Los Angeles County, staging a photo op with Walt and his Mouseketeers.[11] By the end of 1967, 23 cities were contracted with LACFD: Artesia, Baldwin Park, Bellflower, Bell Gardens, Bradbury, Cerritos, Commerce, Cudahy, Duarte, Hawaiian Gardens, Hidden Hills, Industry, Irwindale, Lakewood, La Mirada, La Puente, Lawndale, Lomita, Norwalk, Palmdale, Paramount, Pico Rivera, Rolling Hills Estates, Rolling Hills, Rosemead, San Dimas, South El Monte, Temple City, and Walnut—making the department into one of the largest fire services in the nation.[12]
As the city came to wildfire; wildfire came to the city. Most of the Santa Monica Mountains east of unincorporated Topanga Canyon lie within the city limits of Los Angeles: the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades, Brentwood, Bel Air, Beverly Glen, Beverly Park, and the Hollywood Hills. The topography is similar to Malibu: deep canyons and steep ridges clothed in chaparral. During the spectacular growth of the postwar decades, homes spread along winding roads pushing up the canyons and along the ridgelines. By necessity, the roads were few, with limited connections, making access difficult at best. Lush landscaping, often of fast-growing pine and eucalyptus trees, embraced expensive homes, a high concentration belonging to celebrities.
On November 6, 1961, a brush fire started near Mulholland Drive, at the top of the Bel Air neighborhood. Santa Ana winds gusting to 65 miles per hour quickly drove the fire down into the canyons below. Pieces of burning vegetation—firebrands—were picked up and blown far in advance of the flaming front. When they landed on wood shingle roofs, the shingles ignited, in turn producing new firebrands. Flat and lightweight, burning shingles are ideally suited to fly in high wind conditions, and they did, by the tens of thousands, lifted high into the air by strong vertical updrafts, then dropped out, spreading the fire into adjacent canyons. After flying through a barrage of firebrands, one helicopter crew landed and pulled blackened shingles from its cockpit. Air tanker pilots reported seeing burning shingles at altitude above the fire, and seeing burning houses well in advance of any burning vegetation. Blocks of houses were set alight by shingles landing on their roofs, even as the surrounding brush did not catch fire. It quickly became apparent to firefighters that they were not engaged in a brushfire fight but in structure protection across a wide, scattered front. Hundreds of houses were burning at once. A firefighter with LAFD Engine 92 that day recalled: “Homes were burning from the roof down. It was difficult to see as the sky was blotted out. Brands and sparks filled the air, along with smoke, making it very difficult to breath.”
Cascading problems plagued the effort: low hydrant water pressures, especially on ridge top roads, smoke and low visibility, spotty communications, narrow roads making it difficult to turn trucks—to name some. Lacking water, some firefighters resorted to shoveling dirt onto homes. Nevertheless, the response was swift and strong: 85% of available LA City resources were committed within hours, including helicopters for observation and B17 bombers for water and retardant drops. The wind-driven firebrands could not be stopped, however. They flew over the lush golf greens of the Bel Air Country Club, igniting trees and roofs on the other side, producing more firebrands on the wind. They flew across the brand-new San Diego Freeway through the Sepulveda Pass (later numbered I-405), invading the Brentwood neighborhoods of Kenter and Mandeville Canyons—all steep, with dry brush primed to burn, and peppered with shingle-roofed ranch houses on winding roads.
In spite of the huge firefighting response, the Bel Air Fire destroyed 484 homes and 21 other buildings, and burned 6,090 acres. 200 or so firefighters were injured, many with eyes damaged by flying embers and smoke. The fire was immediately pronounced a “wood shingle conflagration.” Analysis of the damage confirmed the predictions of the 1959 report. Of the 505 total structures lost, 382 had wood roofs—more than 70%. But buildings with wood roofs made up just 58% of all the structures in the fire zone. Of the 42% of structures with non-wood roofs, fewer than 12% were destroyed. Of the total, 66% were first ignited on the roof—indicating that, even though most structures were exposed to brush, their combustible roofs were the weak point. Other structural features common in the new hillside subdivisions also contributed: while just 2.8% of the houses in the fire zone were built with cantilevered or stilt foundations, 44.5% of them were damaged or destroyed. Buildings with large, unprotected eaves or exposed floors and window openings also fared poorly.
The phrase: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” has been widely but mistakenly attributed to Albert Einstein. But apparently, the first version of the “definition of insanity” quote appeared in 1981, in a document published by Narcotics Anonymous.[13] That the thought originated in a drug addiction treatment program is entirely appropriate to a discussion of WUI fire in Southern California. It helps us to understand how we, in California and elsewhere, have for so long managed to ignore what has long been abundantly clear: that the manner in which we were building and living in wildfire zones is untenable. Addiction is not just a useful metaphor, it is explanatory. Our society’s addiction to growth, enabled by the collection of factors known as the Growth Machine: the subsidized provision of roads, water, power, sewerage, sanitation, schools, firefighting, police, mortgage finance, and insurance. These have been subsidized because they are paid for collectively but with disproportionate benefits flowing to those living in new, peripheral development—and especially in the case of fire protection, living in the WUI. Until only recently, outward growth seemed an unstoppable centrifugal force, its certainties rarely questioned. In the context of Malibu and fire, one item sums up its accepted inevitability in the postwar, Cold War era: in 1963, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power planned to build a nuclear power reactor in Malibu’s Corral Canyon, bigger than any nuclear plant then in existence, enough to power “every home, office, and factory in Los Angeles for four hours a day,” according to the agency. No mention was made of the area’s proclivity to massive, wind-driven fires, nor to its proximity to earthquake faults.[14]
The costs of rebuilding after fire, for those affected, was not only bearable, but repeatedly so, due to confluence of factors. One, the Growth Machine formula would pay for rebuilding infrastructure, at no cost to those who built in harm’s way. Two, collectivized insurance meant that disproportionate risks were not penalized with appropriate premiums. Three, the region’s governmental fragmentation and the self-protecting tendency of what is referred to as “home rule,” made zoning and building codes weak or lacking entirely. Four, and most importantly, ever-rising home values made rebuilding with little change a foregone conclusion. Almost from the beginning of the development of Malibu, the phenomenon of “fire gentrification” was obvious to observers. After the Christmas, 1956 fire that nearly took his house on Broad Beach Road, Lawrence Clark Powell noted that fire in Malibu is a phenomenon not simply of nature, but of culture—an urban problem: “The longer one has lived here, the more painful it is to see urbanization spreading like a rash.” More than 20 years afterwards, in October, 1978, another fire, driven by Santa Anas roaring down the same canyons, did destroy the house. “At least we were spared seeing it happen…There was no one there to save anything of ours…although it is doubtful that it would have made any difference in the face of the wind-driven wall of fire.” The Powells sold their vacant land. It was soon replaced “by an impressive two-story mansion,” he wrote, where their one-story cottage had been. He lamented the cycle: “In a feverish buying and selling of land, the coast has become utterly transformed and unrecognizable. Each succeeding house, bigger and grander, takes the views of its neighbors in a kind of unbridled competition.”
By the logic of the addiction, doubling down on development in the fire zones requires doubling down on fire protection. Southern California agencies have tried hard to rise to the challenge, inventing new forms of interagency cooperation and coordination and new technical capacities. After a spate of deadly wildfires over two weeks in 1970 burned more than 500,000 acres across the region, killed 16, and destroyed more than 700 structures, it became clear that shortcomings needed to be addressed at the regional level. Different agencies and jurisdictions were hampered by poor communication and by incompatible radio frequencies, equipment, and operating procedures. With federal funding, a program named FIRESCOPE (Firefighting Resources of Southern California Organized for Potential Emergencies) was developed over the course of two years to place teams from different agencies under one, unified field command (dubbed Incident Command System, ICS) and to coordinate equipment and operations. FIRESCOPE soon spread to cover the entire state. Its ICS in turn became the model for the National Incident Management System (NIMS), was adopted by FEMA in the 1990s for responding to hurricanes and other emergencies, by the US Coast Guard after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March, 1989, and by emergency services in Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.[15] The LA County Fire Department continued to expand its aerial capabilities, as well. After more Malibu firestorms in November, 1993, it began leasing “Superscooper” aircraft for making water drops.[16] Beginning in 2010, the department outfitted 69 Bravo, a mountaintop base for refilling water-dropping helicopters, on leased private land above Topanga Canyon.[17]
Nevertheless, the words of the County Fire Chief in 1956 remained true: “There is only one thing certain. It will happen again.”
In 1970, the Wright Fire raced down Malibu Canyon, closely following the path of 1958’s Liberty Fire, consuming 28,202 acres and razing 103 homes.
In October, 1978, the Kanan Fire burned 25,589 acres and 230 homes, making it the most damaging fire in LACFD history to that date. (This is the fire that destroyed the Powell’s house.)
On October 9, 1982, the Dayton Fire burned over the Malibu Canyon corridor, coming over the top of the ridge into Corral Canyon and westward to Latigo and Ramirez Canyons, reaching the ocean at several points. It burned 43,097 acres and destroyed 85 structures, including 15 homes in Paradise Cove. (The author witnessed this fire burn all the way to PCH at Corral Beach, where threatened wooden houses, including his family’s rented cottage, were defended by engine crews from all over California.)
On November 3, 1993, the arson-caused Green Meadows Fire consumed 38,479 acres in the western, Ventura County portion of the range, destroying 53 homes. Firefighters cite their failures in this blaze as a learning point—that wind-driven fires cannot be fought frontally.[18]
On the same day, another arson-caused fire, the Old Topanga Fire, roared down Topanga Canyon, largely following the path of the 1970 fire, but burning through parts of the burn scars of seven previous fires, in fuels from 8 to 70 years old. It consumed 16,468 acres, destroyed 369 homes, and killed three people.[19]
Elsewhere, 19 other wildfires were burning in Southern California.
In the Santa Monicas, the beat continued, unabated. 1996, the Calabasas Fire burned 12,513 acres. In 2003, the Pacific Fire burned 806 acres. In 2007, the Canyon Fire consumed 3,839 acres and the Corral Fire, 4,708.
And then, in 2018, came the Woolsey Fire. Its scale and its speed placed it in a new class of fires, which did not conform to the dominant paradigm of WUI fire, wherein adequate defensible space where vegetation has been cleared plus well-funded and prepared firefighting services could be relied upon to defend our ever-growing commitment of assets in the line of fire. The new paradigm is clearly linked to global warming, with higher temperatures, drier vegetation, and especially, higher sustained wind speeds fueling larger and faster fires. In the last 40 years, the state’s annual burned area has quintupled, in step with intensifying climate change-driven drought and heat.[20] And the fire season, which used to be August through November, between the onset of the Santa Ana winds after summer’s heat had thoroughly cured the vegetation “fuel” and the start of winter rains, is now year-round. Fire behavior usually seen in June is happening in January. From 2016 to 2019, Southern California saw a significant fire at least one day of every month.
The speed of fire growth has also alarmingly increased. A NASA study of 60,000 fires in the West from 2001 to 2020 found that fire growth rates increased through the period, especially in California, and that the fastest-growing fires caused the most damage: the speediest 2.7% were responsible for nearly 80% of structures lost, and more than 60% of fatalities and fire suppression costs. The 2018 Camp Fire marched through almost 55,000 acres in fewer than 12 hours; its speed was the decisive cause of most of the 85 deaths suffered during the blaze. And, the study noted that some of the most damaging fires didn’t require chaparral or even forests, indeed barely required vegetation at all. The 2021 Marshall Fire outside Boulder, Colorado burned little more than 6,000 acres, but with 110-mile-per-hour winds driving the flames over dry grasses, it incinerated 1,000 homes, most of them ignited not by grass but by their burning neighbors. A complex of wind-driven grass fires across Kansas and Oklahoma in 2017 grew by more than 520,000 acres in one day. August, 2023’s horrific fire in Lahaina, Maui, in which 99 people were killed, was similarly a wind-driven fire in dry grasses, ignited by a downed utility power pole. Researchers have found that, in nearly every year since 1990, grass and shrubland fires consumed more land in the United States than forest fires.[21]
The old paradigm’s confidence in “defensible space” around structures has been severely challenged. The recent spate of mega-fires has taught that removing vegetation around structures, while important, will not protect them in a wind-driven fire. Big wind-driven fires are an ember phenomenon: most structures are ignited not from direct flames from close-by vegetation, but by wind-blown debris that catches in combustible parts of the building. During 2014’s Colby Fire in the Angeles National Forest, a then-unusual January fire, Santa Ana winds carried a burning palm frond from Azusa four miles through the air to where it landed at a Los Angeles County fire station. The October, 2017 Tubbs Fire in Northern California, driven by winds approaching hurricane strength, destroyed 5,643 structures, many of them from direct building-to-building ignition. In urban areas of the city of Santa Rosa entire neighborhoods that had negligible vegetation were shockingly wiped out, the buildings ignited by wind-driven embers blown sideways as if from a spark cannon. Flames jumped 8 lanes of the 101 freeway and an arterial road to consume a K-mart store completely surrounded by asphalt parking and roads. As wind speeds and event durations increase due to climate change, how we build to withstand wind-driven flame becomes as or more important than how close vegetation is.
With the increased wind speeds, power infrastructure has emerged as a frightening multiplication factor. Transmission lines and transformers, often old and in poor shape, are everywhere, snaking into the most remote corners of the state, often following roads through canyons or ridgelines in rugged topography prone to high winds that topple trees onto lines and equipment, starting fires. Electrical infrastructure is now the third most common cause of human ignition, after equipment use and burning debris.[22] Since 2015, powerlines and equipment have caused 6 of the 20 worst fires in state history,[23] including the 2017 wine country fires (including the Tubbs), the 2018 Camp Fire, and the 2021 Dixie fire that burned nearly 1 million acres and more than 1,300 structures. In response, utilities have turned to power shutoffs “for public safety” when the wind howls. In LA County, these now routinely affect foothill communities of the San Gabriels from Pasadena to Sylmar, most of the Antelope Valley and the Northwest County, including the City of Santa Clarita, and Malibu and other communities of the Santa Monica Mountains.
The Woolsey Fire contained another, more hopeful lesson—the obverse of the lesson of the Bel Air Fire of 1961. Structures clad with stone or stucco, roofed with tile, and without deep eaves that can catch embers, fared much better than their wooden neighbors. Whether free-standing houses or clustered together condominium or townhouse complexes—most of the latter built over the objections of neighbors worried about too much density in their rural-feeling city—largely escaped destruction. The clearest example was provided by the campus of Pepperdine University placed high on the coastal slopes, surrounded by chaparral-covered ridges. The campus had been explicitly modeled in 1970 by its architect, William Pereira, after Mediterranean models of fire-resistant construction, especially the fire-hardened, pedestrian villages of the island of Patmos, Greece, which sits in the Aegean Sea in the path of fierce seasonal katabatic winds, and has endured millennia of what is in effect WUI fire. Even though the flames of the Woolsey Fire ate up the surrounding hillsides, burned into parts of the campus, and actually blackened walls in numerous places, the university escaped essentially unscathed. Its buildings — constructed with steel frames, concrete, stucco, and tile or metal roofs, with little exposed wood and no deep eaves to catch flying embers—occupy just 330 of the campus’ 830 acres and are clustered around paved plazas and lawns. They embody the architect’s vision of “tightly knit buildings and protected open spaces.” The campus has survived six fires since its construction in the early 1970s.
In 1965, Pereira crafted a master plan for the heirs of May Rindge for the development of their lands in Malibu, along the same principles, calling for clustered houses surrounded by expansive natural preserves. The plan, commissioned in secret, was never made public, much less implemented, and Malibu’s hillsides and canyons were instead developed piecemeal and haphazardly, ignoring the reality of fire. Had it been, many of Pepperdine’s neighbors might have fared better, too.
Cities have learned in the past and changed when they rebuilt. The hardened villages of the Mediterranean, which evolved their defenses over millennia from simple wooden antecedents as the region was deforested and fire became endemic, offer one such example. After the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed London, timber buildings were banned. After Chicago burned on October 8, 1871, losing 17,500 buildings and one-third of its wealth, new kinds of fireproof construction, including safety elevators and low-cost steel frames, allowed it to rebuild, upward, and the skyscraper was born. Neither city has suffered large conflagrations again.
In California, changing our building types will help. As important is de-incentivizing scattering homes across high-hazard zones. That would include shifting the true cost of providing utilities, services, and even firefighting, now subsidized by the more centralized majority, to those who choose to live in isolated locations. Clustering together into safer, more defensible communities would also allow people to “shelter in place,” as thousands did at Pepperdine during the Woolsey fire, avoiding the dangers of crowded evacuation routes. Native Californians for at least 10,000 years used fire as a tool to manage the land, and, by burning frequently and in small patches, to manage the severity of unintentional wildfires when they occurred. In some areas, such as the forested landscapes of the north, where low-intensity undergrowth burns are possible, we must welcome fire back into our midst, in the form of managed burning. In the dense chaparral of the south, where too-frequent fire destroys the ecosystem’s ability to regenerate, leaving it susceptible to replacement by even more flammable exotic grasses, managed burning will have a lesser role, whereas better urban design will play a larger role. With more fireproofed and denser, semi-urban spaces, we’ll be able to better survive the new era of wildfire. In Southern California, we may in fact be forced to retreat from some of the most fire-prone landscapes. But if we’re to survive in an overheating California, we will have to become a fire-embracing society, no longer a fire-denying one.
Wade Graham is a writer, historian, and landscape designer with a practice based in Los Angeles. He is also an affiliated scholar with ICW’s West on Fire initiative.
His writing, on cultural history, environment, urbanism, landscape, art, and other topics, has appeared frequently in the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and Harper’s, among other publications.
His books include Braided Waters: Environment and Society in Molokai, Hawaii (University of California Press, 2018), Dream Cities: Seven Urban Ideas That Shape the World (HarperCollins, 2016), and American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyard, What Our Gardens Tell Us About Ourselves (HarperCollins, 2011).
Read more about his work: https://wadegraham.com/#intro
[1]https://www.fire.ca.gov/our-impact/statistics
[2] https://34c031f8-c9fd-4018-8c5a-4159cdff6b0d-cdn-endpoint.azureedge.net/-/media/calfire-website/our-impact/fire-statistics/top-20-destructive-ca-wildfires.pdf?rev=9e4974c273274858880c2dd28292a96f&hash=29E21CBFCE8D9885F606246607D21CEB
[3] Richard Halsey, Fire, Chaparral, and Survival in Southern California, 2008.
[4] A 2015 study showed that areas prone to Santa Ana winds have two distinct fire seasons. One, in summer, is the dominant fire season in most of the American West, typically burning in inland, high-elevation forest zones. The second season is far more consequential: from Fall to Spring, but predominantly Fall, when winds push fires three times faster than summer season fires, and have caused 4/5 of economic losses in these areas since 1990.