From the Publisher/ Arnold C. York
The first thing I always feel when I go outside on a balmy January day is that warm sweet soft air on my skin. The next thing is that terribly uneasy feeling way down in the pit of my stomach, accompanied by the thought, “This could be a bad one.”
Pre-November 1993 fire, I never worried because bad stuff just happened to other people. I lived in a good neighborhood, paid my bills on time, and brushed and flossed everyday, so what could go wrong. Catastrophe was something I watched on the TV news from a camera up in a helicopter, not in actual real life. It only took one fire, with a house burned to the ground, to rid me of that totally irrational sense of well-being many of us have, until you lose it. And once lost, it never comes back in quite the same way.
That’s why, when the Santa Anas blow, I can’t shake that uneasy feeling, especially when I feel the wind picking up. You don’t feel the wind as much in East Malibu because the hills shelter you until you get to the open space near the Civic Center. And then it blows. If it’s blowing hard in the Civic Center, it’s guaranteed to be blowing twice as hard out toward Trancas. That’s when we began to hear stories of 60 to 70 mph gusts and the first fires at Corral and Latigo canyons, and the first fears. By Monday afternoon it was the Trancas area, just west of Trancas Canyon, and emergency crews were coming in from all over Los Angeles. A five-engine group from Beverly Hills and Santa Monica went streaming down Pacific Coast Highway, sirens blazing. Then it was a South Bay contingent: engines from Redondo, Hermosa, Manhattan, El Segundo and Torrance.
By two o’clock Monday afternoon I was getting so nervous I had to go see for myself. The truth is, I was so nervous I just wanted to move my body, so I put on my press pass and headed toward Trancas. Now a press pass is a litmus test. It will get you through roadblocks if things are not too bad and still under control. But if a fire begins to cross Pacific Coast Highway, or the winds are swirling so bad firefighters don’t know where it’s going, they just shut down and don’t let anyone through. Sometimes you don’t know which it’s going to be until you get real close. I got through the Kanan Dume Roadblock OK, which was the first good sign. Not only that, but they weren’t convoying people, which was good sign No. 2. When I got to Trancas Canyon there was another road block and they made us all leave our cars in the shopping center and hike up PCH about a half mile where officials set up a temporary command post and press center among a cluster of emergency vehicles.
It’s amazing how many different agencies are in the fire emergency business. These weren’t the engines, which were all up at the site of the fire. These were just the command cars-L.A. County cars, Fire Department cars from a variety of cities, state Office of Emergency Services, park rangers, city vehicles, arson watch volunteers and a variety of other cars with logos that I hardly recognized. Every few minutes a helicopter would land on the highway, refill with water from a tanker truck and take off again to go make another drop. The firefighters were rushing to beat it down as best they could before the sun set, because they were nervous the winds might pick up after dark.
Someone told me later that the winds did start to pick up a bit between 10 p.m. and midnight but then settled down, and the firefighters were able to get control of the fire.
Meanwhile, what they did was incredible. It wasn’t so much that they put out the fire as they guided it, away from structures into the open where they could get at it, and then gradually outflank it and close in on it. It isn’t easy, and it’s dangerous. I saw the smoke up on the hills. Suddenly it would flare and there would be a wall of flame, then thick black smoke and it would die down again, only to flare up again a few moments later.
As we go to press, the fire is 100 percent contained, saving almost all the homes in the area. The firefighters did a hell of job for which we all own them our thanks. And, as Yogi Berra said, “It’s dj vu all over again.”