September
• A blazing hot Labor Day Weekend brought large crowds to the beaches, heavy traffic, two fires and a motorcycle fatality on Kanan Dume Road. At 4:50 p.m. on Labor Day, a 52-year-old Studio City man traveling northbound on Kanan Dume lost control of his motorcycle and was thrown off and received fatal injuries. There were two weekend fires in the 95-degree heat, one at Rambla Pacifico and Las Flores and another at Corral Canyon and PCH, which were both quickly extinguished. The Malibu Search and Rescue Team was also vey busy and 2017 looks to be a record setting year for the number of calls (125 as of early September).
• The city council, in a 4-1 vote, changed its mind and decided to go along with a $220,000 Environmental Impact Report (EIR) to find out if Malibu Bluffs Park could be expanded to include more ball fields and other park facilities. The EIR was opposed by some environmental purists who don’t want anything more at Bluffs Park. Unspoken—but probably in their minds—was the threat by Joe Edmiston of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy that if the city didn’t want to do anything with Bluffs Park they could just undo the swap of Malibu Bluffs Park for Charmlee Park.
• A spurt of Hepatitis A cases in Los Angeles and San Diego among the homeless population pushed the county into providing a vaccine for free to homeless in LA County, including some in Malibu. It’s a highly contagious and sometimes-fatal liver disease brought on by lack of sanitation, primarily because of the absence of public toilets and places to wash up.
• FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has released a new series of ocean flood maps and immediately ran into a buzz saw of opposition and controversy. The maps had all sorts of inconsistencies, where adjacent parcels on the same beaches had very different designations that didn’t appear to make any sense. The maps are important because they impact the construction of new or redevelopments in the ocean zone and also insurance rates. The council decided to hire its own consultant to do an analysis.