When warnings come of Santa Ana wind conditions, Malibu residents know what to look out for: fire danger.
The National Weather Service had issued a wind and fire danger advisory warning for the weekend, citing 33-55 mile-per-hour gusts. Many residents, who felt or heard the strong wind overnight, were on guard.
Malibu Times Multimedia Director Julie Ellerton was one of those people. Awake at 3 a.m., Ellerton said she first smelled smoke.
“I wasn’t sleeping very much,” she said. “ … There was a [Pulse Point] alert by that time. We looked outside and … we’re on the street side in the Colony—you can see a glow over by the library.”
The two-alarm brush fire broke out early Monday morning in the 23500 block of Civic Center Way. According to a spokesperson from the Los Angeles Fire County Fire Department, the fire was initially called in at 3:11 a.m. and was thought to be a six-acre blaze. Soon after, the department determined that the initial guess was wrong and that 2.6 acres had been burned.
Ellerton rushed to the Civic Center and had the chance to speak with William Lutz, an employee of Malibu Towing, who said he was the one who first reported the fire.
Lutz had gone back to Malibu Towing, which is located on Civic Center Way, to get a flat bed truck to retrieve a car.
“It was just after 3 a.m. There was a little bit of noise, brush fire smoke and I was looking around,” he said. “ … Just a few moments later, [there was] this big ol’ flame behind Malibu Tow, up on the hill.”
He then made a few calls, including one to the fire station across the street, which responded “pretty quick.”
Lutz called it something akin to luck, saying that something pushed him to return to Malibu Towing.
“If I didn’t do that, it would’ve been way bigger,” he added.
Residents were notified of a fire in a Nixle alert sent out at 4 a.m. and later by a City of Malibu alert sent out at 4:07.
LA County firefighter specialist Tony Wright said 213 firefighters were on the scene.
The brush fire threatened structures in the area—especially in the Malibu Knolls neighborhood, leading to mandatory evacuations in Malibu Crest Drive, Harbor Vista Drive, Colony View Circle, Malibu Knolls Road and Coast View Drive.
A helicopter was sent to the scene to make water drops. Firefighters on scene had the fire 95 percent contained just before 5 a.m., with no structure damage. They then focused on identifying and cleaning up hot spots.
As of 6:52 a.m., almost four hours after the fire was reported, evacuations were lifted for the threatened areas.
Arson investigators then came on scene, something Wright calls “normal protocol where we can’t easily determine [the cause].”
In the days since the fire was first reported, there has been much speculation as to the cause of the fire, with some pointing fingers at the homeless encampments behind Civic Center Way, but officials are adamant that, as of Tuesday, Jan. 30, the cause had not yet been determined.
Residents such as Paul J. Morra (who wrote a letter to the editor this week) questioned why it took the city 45 minutes to send out a notification to the community.
Susan Dueñas, the City of Malibu public safety manager, said the Monday morning notifications went through the Lost Hills/Malibu Sheriff’s Station.
“They don’t have time to wake us up and do it,” she said, in a phone call with The Malibu Times.
In a disaster situation, she explained that the notifications are targeted, meaning that those who are “most at risk” will get the notification first, with officials “draw[ing] a shape over a neighborhood” on a map.
Numbers for the neighborhood’s residents are then pulled from a system so that the notifications go out to them at the same time. They might then set another parameter close to the original area to send out a batch of notifications.
“There’s some overlap,” she said, of the city’s and sheriff’s department notification systems. “ … Redundancy is better than not [at all].”
