What’s this stuff about Pepperdine serving as Malibu’s tsunami emergency center? Emergency preparedness director Brad Davis has apparently forgotten that Pepperdine University red-lined themselves out of the city limits during the city’s incorporation back in March, ’91 and they didn’t even want to share zip code 90265 with us so they got their own, 90263. Based on the above, I think it would be foolish to trust that the Regents of Pepperdine have the best interests of the citizens of Malibu at heart.
If the director is concerned about tsunami debris washing against the City Hall steps, then he should be prepared and recommend that City Hall be moved to a tsunami safe location such as Point Dume, which could also function as the city’s emergency preparedness center.
Brad Davis also feels that it would be a bad idea to escape a tsunami by retreating to Pepperdine even though Pepperdine, according to Google earth, is more than 100 feet higher than Bluffs Park, has a huge campus which could accommodate hundreds of refugees, has east-west access to PCH, north-south access to Malibu Canyon Road, has an Olympic size pool and offers a complete cafeteria and dining service according to their Web site. What more could your average refugee want?
Another preparedness issue our director should address is the poor performance of our emergency radio station WPTD 1620 on our AM dial. Its signal is buried in static and at night the sky wave of Sacramento’s Immaculate Heart Radio KSMH 1620 AM can cause interference. If Immaculate Heart has a good heart they will modify their nighttime radiation pattern to give us some relief. The director could request this through the FCC. In addition, the director could stream WPTD’s audio through the city’s Web site, which would give us a static free TCP/IP Internet connection to the station from anywhere. Internet radio is offered by many stations worldwide as well as locals such as KABC, KNX and KFI.
Jack Singleton