After hearing a reverse-911 call from the city manager, Reva, at 7 a.m. on Friday to immediately evacuate Malibu, we followed the instructions and left our home heading toward Santa Monica on PCH. From the western portion of Malibu for the first few miles, the highway was fine. As soon as my wife and I reached Kanan, the traffic was at a dead standstill, reminiscent of a summer day in Malibu when everyone visits the beach, but unlike that kind of day, no one could go north on Kanan. For those of you unfamiliar with Malibu, PCH is the only way in and out of Malibu when fires rage in the canyons. For the next five hours, we crawled along PCH until reaching Topanga. Only two lanes were available for our use, for the entirety of the city (13,000 full-term residents, not including renters), and the lights were all out.
As we were stalled in traffic by Winding Way, just moments down the road from the Escondido Falls Trail, I looked to my left and saw a smoke column rising over 10,000 feet in the air. My first thought was if the fire reaches us while we’re all stalled here, this would become a “Highway of Death.” There was no way for us to turn around and no other road for us to take.
As a past chair of the Malibu Public Safety Commission, I was listening to my fire ground radio and hearing desperation in the voices of the firefighters desperately trying to get ahead of the fire. I am very familiar with this, having lived through all the fires of Malibu since 1988, and know what a wildland fire can do during a Santa Ana event. In this case, strike teams from out of the area that aren’t familiar with our streets and access points should have been provided with a member of our local firefighting stations—this would have possibly increased response times to locations not readily known.
Once my family safely arrived in town, I found out at 2 p.m. all four eastbound lanes had been opened into Los Angeles. Why were we stuck on the highway for five hours? Why didn’t the protocol of opening the highway come into action sooner? What if the fire jumped PCH when we were all on the road?
For the locals who stayed behind and chose to fight the fires, they are a bunch of true heroes. But after the flames subsided, they were left to fend for themselves with no basic supplies. They had no food, running water, electricity nor gasoline to run their generators. Multiple people attempted to enter the city, trying to bring supplies to both the firefighters and the residents, and were turned away. Members of the community ended up having to charter boats out of the Marina and Ventura Harbor to bring in these necessary supplies. Why weren’t the city’s emergency bins opened for the residents who chose to stay? Why wasn’t the city’s Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) team activated during this emergency? I am a member of the city’s CERT team—isn’t this what we trained for? All members are aware of the locations of the containers and the lock-combinations necessary to open them.
Also, where was the staff of Malibu Urgent Care? Why were they not allowed to return to provide assistance to the community?
For days, evacuated residents waited with bated breath for timely and accurate information from the city. When that didn’t come, they resorted to the local news. Unfortunately, they were as lost as some of the firefighters, without knowledge of Malibu at all. We were led to believe Malibu High had burned down, and many were told their houses hadn’t survived the Woolsey Fire. When I returned to Malibu, I worked to send friends accurate updates about their homes, as many of the reports I had gotten were completely wrong. Some other locals and I tried to quell some of my community’s nerves by providing correct information. I kept thinking: Where was Malibu’s PIO during all of this, and why was he not in front of the camera giving proper, current and accurate updates? Actually, come to think of it, we haven’t heard from him at all.
The majority of our updates were coming from Lost Hills Sheriff’s Department, and not from our city. Isn’t this what we signed up on the city’s website for?
As a longtime resident of Malibu, I am frustrated with the way this emergency response was handled. Protocols are put in place for instances such as these, and in this case, failed to be effective or weren’t used. False information and even no information led many to believe the worst, and our community had to come up with back-up plans without assistance from the city. After living through past fires, this was by far the worst in my time in Malibu, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t prepared. We were, the city just didn’t respond in the way it should have.
Thank you to everyone in the community who helped make Malibu as safe as possible during this time. Thank you to all of the brave men and women who stayed behind to protect the Malibu we know and love—you are heroes. Let’s work to make this never happen again, and let us hope that we receive some answers to all of our questions on everything that went wrong.
David Saul