Investigators have not released any theories as to what started the massively destructive Woolsey Fire, but authorities have begun painting a picture of what occurred to turn the blaze into what some are calling the largest disaster in the history of Los Angeles County.
As of Tuesday, Nov. 20, the Woolsey Fire had resulted in three known deaths, three injuries to firefighting personnel, 1,643 structures destroyed and 96,949 acres burned.
According to Malibu Mayor Rick Mullen—a fire captain for the Los Angeles County Fire Department—it was a combination of factors that contributed to the fire’s intensity and destructive power. Mullen, a 20-year veteran of the department, spoke to The Malibu Times about his experience fighting the fire, but he did not speak on behalf of the fire department.
“I’ve seen this type of behavior [in other fires],” Mullen described, “but on a smaller scale.”
Mullen said one factor was the fuel: Heavy brush in areas that hadn’t burned in over a half-century.
“Some of these areas haven’t burned since the 1950s, so as these bushes grow and die … they have inside them a lot of old fuel, so the longer it’s been since they burned, the more energy they give off,” the fire captain explained. Mullen, whose territory with Fire Station 72 includes Decker Canyon, said he would often think of the fire danger there.
“I used to look at it while I was driving to work, thinking, ‘Some day this is going to go off,’ but I used to think of it in terms of—one canyon, for example, going off, but they all went off. Everything north of Malibu Canyon. So, the amount of energy that was released was nuclear in scale, really, if you think about it.”
In addition to fuel, wind was a factor in driving the fire—increasing both its intensity and spread.
“It’s just like if you blow on a fire. It’s going to give it energy, which is one of the things it uses—oxygen, you’re force-feeding oxygen,” Mullen said. “It carries the embers from those dead bits and pieces of things that are burning and carries them a long way, so you can have fire spread—fire in one spot and then on the other side of the canyon.
“It’s not just one fire moving [uniformly] all the way from the 101 [Freeway] to Malibu, it’s … leapfrogging in different areas, which spreads out the resources in areas they have to cover,” the fire captain described, adding, “The wind gives energy to the local fire spot but it spreads it when the conditions are really dry, so it leapfrogs from one canyon to another really rapidly, and that’s really what I think happened here was that the movement of the fire was rapid because of these spots.”
At some points, those spots dropped down into a canyon and began burning upward, increasing danger to structures, firefighters and anyone else in the area.
“If you’re in a canyon, let’s say, and the fire’s at the top of the canyon going down, it’s not as dangerous as the fire below you coming up, because that comes faster,” Mullen said. “With that kind of spread, it’s possible that now you have a fire coming at you from both directions, so topography is very big and wind is very big.” Because a fire burning at the bottom of a canyon heats brush up the slope, whole hillsides can ignite in seconds. “It’s preheating all those bushes; they’re giving off flammable gas.”
Another major consideration in the destructive power of the fire came from its path—spreading from the 118 to the Pacific Coast Highway in a wide charge. The massive spread of fire led to a thinning of resources in individual neighborhoods.
“This fire started on the 118 [Freeway], went through Chatsworth, Oak Park, Agoura, Calabasas, Malibou Lake and then, by the time it got here, it was a wide, wide front—so even if you don’t take into consideration there were already resources up there working on all those places where there were homes on fire, it’s the same fire department, that works in Calabasas and Agoura et cetera, as it is here,” Mullen said. “So, even if you don’t take into consideration those people, by the time it gets to Malibu, it’s Malibu Canyon all the way to Leo Carrillo, and beyond.
“So, just that wide of a front in the town of Malibu is significant, but the resources that were deployed from the same fire department—and Ventura County, of course, also in all those towns which have a lot more people than ours do, before it got to us, is a factor,” Mullen said. “Everything is spread out.”
From Mullen’s perspective, he said he was working with a single engine on structure fires that would have involved four engines under normal circumstances.
After helping to facilitate an evacuation from Castro Peak in the Santa Monica Mountains on Friday morning, Mullen and his engine helped direct shelter-in-place strategy at Campus Kilpatrick, a juvenile detention facility. Then, blocked by fire from returning to their zone, he and his team took Kanan Dume Road back into Malibu and began working on neighborhoods in the western part of town, beginning with Malibu West.
“If you have one house on fire, you generally have four engines and plenty of guys and it’s no problem. This had 10 houses on fire and three guys, so you can’t really leave it when the winds are blowing, until you get it down to a point where it’s not going to be a threat to the other houses,” he described. “So, you arrive on the first one, it’s licking the eaves of the next house. And we stayed long enough to reduce it to where it wasn’t going to be a factor. Extremely time consuming, extremely exhausting, for three guys instead of 12 guys, which is what it normally is.”
Mullen said as much as his engine wanted to move on, they were stuck with the time consuming job of taking it one house at a time. “It’s frustrating, because you want to leave because there are plenty of other things that are going on that you want to take care of,” he said, “but if we leave this before it’s to the stage where it’s not going to be a threat, every house on that street is going to go up—and you saw that in some other places, where … whole streets went up. Unfortunately, I don’t know what happened in those other places, but that’s an example of the kind of thing that can happen.”
When it came to allegations of firefighters refusing to attack flames and fire engines sitting idly by, Mullen said he and the city wanted to hear from residents.
“Anybody who’s got any observation that they think is important and where they think that things were less than what they should have been or there could have been improvements, let’s hear about it,” Mullen said. “There may be answer to it and we’ll look into it.”
The mayor said the one positive from the fire was how successful the evacuations were in preserving human life, from Malibu as well as other cities.
“The fact that more people weren’t killed here is the silver lining in all of this,” Mullen said. “As much destruction as there’s been, we’re really lucky that we got as many people out as quickly as we did—and i don’t just mean the city of Malibu, of course … the figures I’m hearing from the fire department are something like 250,000 people evacuated in a 10-hour period.”