Most Malibu residents praised the Fire Department and other agencies’ efforts in putting out the Trancas fire. However, some say more equipment needs to be in place to fight fires.
By P.G. O’Malley/Special to The Malibu Times
The usual Monday night quarterbacking has started about Malibu’s first major brush with wildfire this season, the Trancas fire that burned 759 acres and damaged three homes and an SUV in West Malibu on Jan. 6.
Los Angeles County fire officials give Malibu residents high marks for brush clearance, using fire retardant landscaping and building homes that resist fire, but while most residents praised the Fire Department’s efforts, there were some complaints about lack of timely information about traffic and the status of the fire while it was burning.
“Absolutely, there’s no doubt about it,” said Capt. Brian Jordan, County Fire Department public affairs spokesperson. “I saw a lot of vegetation with high moisture content and that helped.”
Superintendent Woody Smeck, the chief administrative officer in charge of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (SMMNRA), which backs up to Malibu, agreed. “I saw a lot of stucco and concrete homes with tile roofs, and a lot of landscaping with succulent plants, and I think that helped make the difference.”
Smeck says this kind of effort is particularly important in years like this where moisture in natural vegetation is already much lower than usual and the fire danger is extremely high.
“This is Southern California,” Jordan said. “Just because the grass is green doesn’t mean it won’t burn.”
Malibu Park homeowner Marshall Thompson is among residents who expressed concern about not getting the kind of information they needed during the fire, particularly about traffic. “What we needed was an hourly update,” said Marshall, who was in town when the fire broke out and had trouble getting home.
But city Web master Gail Sumpter said the city’s emergency incident page was updated almost hourly, “as soon as we got information from the Fire Department or the Sheriff.” Sumpter said the site got 7,000 hits the day the fire broke out-and a great deal of feedback about how well the city handled the emergency. Mary Linden, executive assistant to the city manager, confirmed the city’s hotline was also updated almost every hour throughout the first night of the fire.
Sumtper said the city has initiated two citizen advisory services, one where residents can sign up to receive real emergency information posted on the Web site via e-mail, and a second in which individuals can sign up to be part of a city-wide data base, which will notify residents by phone, fax or electronically if their area is threatened for any reason. To sign up for e-mail updates, visit the city’s Web site and click on “Breaking News” under Emergency News and Preparedness. To sign up to be part of the database, download the application form from the Web site and send it to Emergency Preparedness Coordinator Hap Homewood.
Other post-fire complaints centered on the restricted availability of a SuperScooper, the water-dropping, fixed-wing aircraft L.A. County leases annually during fire season, which had just been sent back to Canada when the Jan. 6 fire broke out. “In this fire,” Jordan says, “where the wind was blowing 40 to 50 miles an hour, the helicopters worked better than a fixed-wing aircraft because they could hover and drop 8,000 pounds of water directly on a hot spot. A fixed-wing aircraft can’t maneuver that precisely and because of this can waste a lot of water.”
Jordan says the SuperScoopers are typically not available to the county outside of its contract season, which runs roughly from October through mid-January “when most of the big fires occur.”
Jordan says the department has not invested in its own fixed-wing equipment because the 11 helicopters it owns do duty in rescue operations and hazardous materials incidents.
Asked what it would do if a big wildfire were to hit today, Jordan said the department would use a combination of helicopters and wing aircraft dropping fire retardant. The county’s Firehawks carry 1,000 gallons of water, 400 gallons less than the SuperScoopers.
“If anybody wants to complain about how the department is doing things,” Jordan said, “we encourage them to call our media line (323.881.2413) and we’ll tell them, for example, why the SuperScoopers aren’t here.
“We’ve logged the incidents they’ve been used on and how many hours in each incident and we’ve decided because they’re multipurpose, the helicopters are a better investment.”