With residents frustrated by lack of updated information from the City of Malibu during last month’s fires, officials are working to update emergency and evacuation plans.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
News of natural disasters elsewhere, and a nearby brushfire last month, has residents and officials in Malibu worried that they cannot get the information they need to make reliable evacuation plans when the next fire, mudslide, tsunami or earthquake strikes the coast. And public safety officials concede that successful evacuations of Malibu would require residents and city officials alike to be armed with reliable, up-to-date information.
City Emergency Preparedness Director Brad Davis noted that the choice of evacuation routes would depend on the type of emergency. An earthquake or tsunami would block or endanger Pacific Coast Highway and force residents to head to high ground, via canyon roads. But the next big fire will force residents to the beach or Pacific Coast Highway.
“We are working on setting up a large evacuation center for fires at Zuma Beach,” Davis said. “But that would be the last place you would want to be if there was a large local earthquake, given the chance of tsunami.”
City officials have made plans with local law enforcement officials to add traffic control officers at key intersections should Malibu be evacuated. In 1993, the California Highway Patrol on the fly created a third southbound lane on Pacific Coast Highway for traffic fleeing the fire heading into Santa Monica.
And in case of a distant tsunami, canyon roads could be converted to one-way northbound, Davis said. Malibu Canyon Road would be maintained with one southbound lane for emergency equipment.
During last month’s Topanga Fire, officials at the fire command post in Calabasas got frequent updates on the fire’s exact path from infrared camera-equipped helicopters. Fire Department officials had a plethora of information to make decisions, said Los Angeles County Fire Department spokesman Ron Haralson.
A city of Malibu worker was at the fire command post, monitoring the situation and frequently calling in reports to the city’s Emergency Operations Center. But at City Hall, and on the Internet, there were no updated maps, and at times officials had to make do by guessing which Calabasas neighborhoods they were seeing threatened by fire on live television broadcasts.
“That’s always the most frustrating thing, trying to get up-to-date maps,” said councilman Jeff Jennings during the fire.
That left some Malibu residents who were trying to make advance evacuation plans unhappy with information that the city was distributing to its residents. Members of the public could not make decisions about whether to get ready to evacuate family members, pets or belongings, a frustration acknowledged by the city and Fire Department.
Jennings noted that new computerized predictions of fire behavior are just being developed.
“But I have heard that the Fire Department may be reluctant to put too much information out there, because it might make people over confidant,” he said.
Jennings agreed this may be a valid concern, but he said, “My theory is the more information we can give people to be prepared, the better.”
“We’re working on the ability to have real-time information for the public and emergency services agencies as up to date as it is happening in front of the infrared cameras and GPS (global positioning satellite) plotters,” Haralson said. “But we are not there yet.”
During the Topanga Fire, managers used large paper maps tacked up on walls at the command post in Calabasas. This data, so desired by Malibu residents and officials, showed up nearly a day later on Internet maps posted by the California Division of Forestry.
“One of the ongoing challenges is that every time we do this we revise our plans and try to do it a little better,” Davis said. “Maybe next time we can take pictures of that map and e-mail it back to the city.”
However, the city was prepared in case the fire moved toward Malibu.
“We had a city liaison officer at that command post, and if the wind shifted or the fire jumped the freeway, he would have called [city manager] Katie Lichtig at home and we would have implemented evacuation plans,” Davis said.
At the Fire Department, “as for knowing what roads are open, or where exactly the fire is, we use radio and television to communicate that out to the public,” Haralson said.
That left broadcasters as the only immediate source of information, a problem in that they are covering the story for a citywide audience and not focusing on exact parameters of the fire or flood, Haralson said.
But reporters cannot always be trusted to be adequately familiar with the local geography. During last month’s fires near Chatsworth, for example, one airborne radio reporter repeatedly referred to the blaze as being in the Santa Monica Mountains, which would have placed it south of the 101 Freeway and on the way to Malibu. That was not the case.
In addition, broadcasters often have other commitments. Longtime residents can recall being instructed to tune to a particular local radio station for evacuation instructions as the massive 1993 firestorm started, only to hear a network football game as flames raced into Malibu.
With Malibu residents relying on information to make evacuation decisions, city officials stressed the importance of each family having its own evacuation and reunion plan for various disasters.