clearance?
Big Rock Mesas property owners launch pilot
project created with the help of county fire
officials.
By Vicky Newman/Special to the Malibu Times
Lou La Monte is facing the fire season more calmly this year, thanks to 400 goats.
The animals, here for the summer to munch away at vegetation on the steep bluffs between the top of Big Rock Drive and Pacific Coast Highway, and Las Flores and Tuna canyons, are the product of a $35,000 grant obtained by the Big Rock Mesas Property Owners Association with the help of Los Angeles County fire officials.
“It’s amazing how much brush they’ve cleared,” La Monte, president of the association, says, pointing down the slope to where the goats are grazing. “If this pilot project works here, it can work anywhere.”
Inaccessible and steep, the vacant land in the area is difficult and dangerous to clear, La Monte, who saw the 1993 Old Topanga fire come to his living room, says. Brush clearance crews have to be lowered down with ropes.
Gisela and Wilfried Eckhardt, whose home was also nearly destroyed in 1993, covered their wooden deck in tiles and sheathed their wooden beams. Feeding a goat gourmet bread through the gate around their house, Gisela says she is “delighted” the animals are in the area.
Bill Schwarz, immediate past president of the association, deserves the credit for getting the grant, La Monte says. Schwarz, a 37-year resident, not only inspired the 250 homeowners to agree to the experiment, but worked tirelessly with fire officials for years to bring the project to fruition.
Schwarz met Chief Herbert Spitzer in 1998, when the fire official came to enlist community efforts in brush clearance. Spitzer gave Schwarz a chart showing that major fires in the Santa Monica Mountain corridors to Malibu had erupted every 10-12 years since 1935.
“My family and I, along with 50 other residents, were the victims of the 1993 fire which burned nearly 17,000 acres,” Schwarz said in a speech to property owners three years ago. “We had lived in our home over 25 years and lost everything we had.”
Schwarz told the homeowners that given a 12-year period between fires, he had used a third of his statistical fire time-four years-before he could rebuild his house and move back to the neighborhood, meaning he only had until 2005 before another major fire erupted.
“This experience made me highly motivated to get involved in vegetation management with the Los Angeles County Fire Department,” Schwarz said in the speech.
Spitzer and other fire officials presented a prescriptive burn project to then Mayor Pro Tem Carolyn Van Horn in 1999 and continued to research other “fuel reduction” projects from 1999 to 2001.
Spitzer came up with the idea of using goats, Schwarz says. Oregon and La Jolla had used them.
By mid-September 2001, the property owners had received a $35,000 grant from the California Fire Safe Council, an umbrella organization of 50 federal, state and local agencies and major insurance companies. The county fire department and the Big Rock Mesa Property Owners Association contributed $10,000 and $5,000 in matching funds, respectively.
“We are grateful to be selected for this grant,” Schwarz says. “We hope to get the message out to other communities.”
Adjoining communities to the west contain about another 2,000 homes and 4,000 residences, the grant application says. The dollar loss alone is projected at $50 million if just 50 of the homes in the Big Rock area burn again.
“This would be perfect for La Costa,” Stu Walter, secretary/treasurer of the association says. “The City [of Malibu] should be proactive in getting others involved.”
Councilwoman Joan House expressed cautious optimism on hearing about the grant. “It’s a creative solution and I think everyone is open to new ideas,” she said. “It’s a pilot project that should be expanded if it meets certain benchmarks. We will definitely be looking at the deliverables of it.”
Unfortunately, the state has not let the association touch their property, Walter adds. Jay Lopez, of the fire department’s vegetation management unit, is negotiating with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy about using goats on land north of Big Rock Drive.