I have to get up to speed on this rapido, so let me ask: How long have you been with MRCA?

Well, let's see. I was a board member in the 80s and came on staff in 1990 so I'm actually a Conservancy employee. So about 40 years.

And your expertise is? 

I'm a biological sciences major with a master's degree, and then I've been working on these fire issues and fire response issues since the late 1980s.

At the town hall last Saturday, January 25, MRCA was a four letter word, and people looked down and spit on the ground every time Joe Edmiston’s name was mentioned. A lot of pointed fingers at your organization. 

I’m aware there was some calumny.

Do you think that’s fair?

No. We did not start the fire: The fire start wasn’t even on our land. We do brush clearance. It’s a long-standing thing in Malibu to not like us, that’s for sure, mainly re public access.

SCOTT DITTRICH’S LETTER TO WSJ EDITOR JANUARY 22, 2025

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Above is Scott Dittrich’s letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal published January 22, 2025.

In response to an email asking for clarifications, Dittrich said:

Talk to Jo Drummond about MRCA and lack of brush clearance in Big Rock.  They’ve been putting Malibu in danger for years, I suspect hoping to cheaply buy land after it burns.

Yes there was one resident who argued against the controlled burn.  She is a friend – Georgia Goldfarb - who is part of a tiny environmental group called the Chaparral Institute.  Their position is that controlled burns do not stop fires since embers can travel so far. 

That is true to an extent, but it was the burn area of the Franklin Fire (1/3 the way down Carbon Canyon) that stopped the Palisades Fire from going all the way to Pepperdine and which stopped the 2018 Hill Fire (the one that LA & Ventura was prioritizing while they let Woolsey get out of hand), but the Hill Fire ran straight into the burn area from the Spring Fire of several years prior.

A controlled burn when conditions are damp with no wind burns at 1,000 degrees and does not kill the root system of the chaparral, while a wildland fire in a strong Santa Ana burns closer to 2,500 degrees and kills the root systems.  There was water flowing in Las Flores creek on January 8th because the dead chaparral released all the water it was holding.

I think we have a unique – and short lived – opportunity to make a difference and stop the cycle of fires. The focus is now on fires and rebuilding and that will soon disappear. Your article in the Times was great, though I think we lost 1,500 homes in City and County from Woolsey: Six years later many homes have still not been rebuilt. A travesty.

We’re getting the same platitudes as after Woolsey. Residents are angry, thinking the City is doing nothing.  Of course much is beyond our control, but without a City Manager we are adrift. Also look at the homes that survived while those around them burned.  Drive up Rambla Pacifico (tell XXXXX, our guard, that you're a friend of mine and doing a story). 

My address is XXXXX.  Push the right gate open and walk to the top of the drive to look.  Our 1955 house is still standing. Then drive up the street. Those who had hardened their homes aggressively and had good defensible space mostly survived.  Others mostly burned.  I could tell before the fire which ones would be turned to ash in a fire.

Best

Scott

JO DRUMMOND RETORTS

Originally from Canada, Jyoti (Jo) Drummond and her family came to Malibu in 2013. She served on the Board of Directors for the Big Rock Property Owner's Association for five years then was elected President. After the Woolsey fire she arranged supplies and donations from Eastern Malibu and gathered generators to power the water pumps in Big Rock during power outages and wildfires.

She is responsible for the repair of 20 out of 24 dewatering wells and over half of the hydraugers of the formerly deteriorated system in Big Rock.

She was appointed to the Malibu Public Works Commission in 2022. She will be joining the city’s Planning Commission soon.

After standing up for Big Rock and Malibu for many years, Drummond lost her house in the Palisades Fire.

On February 1, I ran a draft of this interview by her, and she sent this emphatic email:

CLICK TO ENLARGE

WADE MAJOR RESPONDS

Wade Major is a lifelong Malibu resident and survivor of numerous fires since the 1970s. He has served as a Public Works Commissioner since 2020 and is presently also president of AMPS (Advocates for Malibu Public Schools). 

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BACK TO RORI SKEI

The vibe was that the MRCA’s refusal to do brush clearance has been a source of some of these fires. So MRCA does do brush clearance?

Oh absolutely: the 200 feet of clearance  from structures that’s required by Los Angeles County. That’s done every year.  LA County assists in some areas.

I think what people want when they refer to brush clearance is  the mountains landscape - manicured. That’s not how it works.

A ROUGH RECTANGLE OF 40,000 ACRES THAT COULD BE CLEARED

That’s not possible, is it? On Google Earth I made a rough rectangle with Decker Road a straight line down to the east, then under Point Dume, through Pepperdine and along PCH to Will Rogers then north to a point in line with Saddle Peak, then through Saddle Peak to Decker Road - that’s about 40,000 acres of vegetation that threatens everything from west Malibu almost to Brentwood. Is it possible to denude all of that, or responsible?

It wouldn’t be physically, economically or even ethically or ecologically warranted. No fire scientist promotes that. It makes no sense at all. 

From what I saw on Tuesday night January 7 and Wednesday morning January 8, I think the Franklin Fire possibly saved central Malibu because that fire created a mile long fire break up and over Sweetwater Mesa. Saddle Peak is basically rock now, there's nothing up there, is there? 

But that was like one when within a year, actually within a month. And of course, that was State Park land.

How much land does MRCA control and how much does State Parks control?

MRCA-CONTROLLED LAND IN THE SANTA MONICA MOUNTAINS

We have about 19,000 acres in the whole Santa Monica Mountains, and I don't know how to break it down but just in Malibu  I think it might be about 3000.. California State Parks owns more - about 35,000 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains and the National Park Service has several thousand acres.

Saddle Peak is State Park land? 

Yes the Franklin Fire started just near the tunnel.

FIRESTORMS ARE BRUSH CLEARANCE

I wrote a long story called Sedimental Journey about the Army Corps plan to remove Rindge Dam and all the sediment. I say it’s a shame the Franklin Fire didn’t do the Army Corps of Engineers a favor and torch all the trees and jungle and scrub on top of the sediment behind Rindge Dam. I’ve climbed down to that sediment, and it’s a jungle down there. I don’t know how they intend to remove all that, but a well-placed brushfire would have saved time and money.

Although that would be more sediment coming down and ruining the steelhead habitat. Nonetheless, the problem with prescription - not controlled burns - prescription is the word for it. It’s a big deal.  MRCA or the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy would not initiate those, nor State Park or National Park Service. That would be LA County or CAL FIRE, and if they basically… almost every square foot of the mountains has had multiple fires, the natural fire return interval really should not be any more than 30 years to maintain the habitat. 

A big fire every 30 years is natural and normal?

That’s what the scientists say, so putting more fire on the Santa Monica Mountains doesn't really achieve protection.

On the website you sent me it states that the frequency of fires used to be every 30 to 120 years, and now it's like every five years. We had two and a half fires in three months.

Yeah, and it's type-converting the shrubby, more fire resistant vegetation to non-native grass, flashy fuels,  which is not good.

You say controlled burns would be LA County and CAL FIRE, but would they be allowed on MRCA land?

It would depend. I mean, obviously we work very closely with both entities, especially with the county,  if they identified a senescent strategic area that had not burned in years.  And  in fact, in the past they had proposed a small prescription burn. I think it was at Big Rock in a ravine that's next to the road, and they had a CAL FIRE grant to do it. It's partly on our land and we said: “Go ahead.” But Malibu residents  created a huge objection to it so the County Supervisor said “No.”

There are some detailed arguments about Big Rock in the long version of this on my website.

The same with goats.

They said no to the goats also?

Yeah.

Well if I can riff off Gordon Gekko from Wall Street: “Goats, for lack of a better word, are good. Goats work.” Brush-eating goats are one of the most effective things I've ever seen. I had a friend in Watsonville who ran goats. They’ll go through eight feet deep and four feet high of blackberry and poison oak like locusts.

No question and that’s one of the reasons why we would love to use it more on our defensible space - the 200 feet required by Los Angeles County.  But there are problems. First of all, goats aren’t cheap, they’re pretty expensive like $1,500 an acre. The other problem is, they  can eat up everything - desirable native plants as well.

Well they do a thorough job on poison oak and blackberry. And if they can eat that, they can eat anything.

We found goats also are very picky. We'd love them to take on mustard, but if things have dried out, they don't really like it very much. So they're not very effective on dried areas. And then the goat herders actually have to have good access.

There really isn't a solution, is there?

The real solution is really actively trying to do ignition prevention. And more, even more, is the structure hardening - with house out measures, including  a zero zone of nothing next to the house five feet out,  not even rose bushes. And the  attic vent ember screens, they really are effective,  a simple measure but total home hardening can be an expensive proposition. It has to be entire neighborhoods that do it. Because, you know, if one house ignites, it can ignite all the rest of the houses.   I refer folks to www.defensiblespace.org for excellent advice.

Ember screens? 

Yes in the attics. You know how you have those attic vents? Really fine mesh screen applied there can absolutely save the house, because those wind-blown embers can go in doggy doors.

A lot of houses are about to be rebuilt and I’m sure those regulations will be there. They need to analyze those houses that are unscorched and still standing in the middle of devastation. Saw them with my own two eyes: All along PCH and up into the Palisades. And they aren’t all modern construction. There’s a house on the corner of Charm Acres and Albright that was built in 1946. Not a scratch - externally anyway.

CHARM ACRES IN THE PALISADES: WHY DO SOME HOUSES COME OUT UNSCRATCHED AMID DEVASTATION?

Hope so, I really hope so, with non-combustible materials and real diligence about keeping leaves out of gutters and furniture, overhanging wood decks, open eaves,  all those things just become a problem. We're also investigating the new fire retardants that can be sprayed and last apparently, up to a year. It’s called Fortress: apparently pretty benign. If you spray it on the roadsides along the brush, it may prevent ignitions.

On Saturday January 25 I did a ride along with CAL FIRE through Palisades. Have you been up there yet?

I've only seen it from the air. I know our rangers have all been up there. And it's just… devastating.

It's unbelievable, like, I call it “satanic” - not a natural but a supernatural, evil force just went out and roasted the whole town and then every five or six blocks there will be a house that's just sitting there, pretty as a picture, untouched in the middle of…

Devastation.

I said it’s what the people of Gaza must feel like returning home right now, but that got cut.

When the fire alarm went out we knew, because we have Temescal Gateway Park in the Palisades, which is a more than 100 year old conference and retreat center in this beautiful park that has lots of structures and lots of vegetation. Our MRCA fire division deployed there immediately, and they were there 30 straight hours, but they managed to save the most important historic structures. There's still a lot of devastation there. We'd already done a lot of pre-work in there -  structure hardening and removing eucalyptus trees…

My mom had a phobia about eucalyptus trees. She didn't like ‘em. And during the Franklin Fire I watched eucalyptus and palm trees go off like Roman Candles. The firefighters call them California Candles.

We didn't get them all, but removing a number did help. And then the MRCA crews  had to go deploy up to the San Vicente Mountain Park - the Nike missile site - the Palisades fire swapped over into Mandeville.  They managed to save that too.

So the MRCA has a fire-fighting team with engines?

Brush engines and patrols…  rangers and the fire division responded there. We're just sick that Will Rogers State Historic Park burned. It’s really too bad they didn't have anybody helping there.

Just from that ride I did last Saturday with the PIO - I don’t think a lot of the Santa Monica Mountains are controllable. Too much of it, too steep, too deep. 

It’s rugged, very rugged. And then it goes back to the efficacy. You can’t hope to try and transform the entire fuel load in the Santa Monica Mountains. It wouldn’t work, it would be too expensive with no ecological integrity whatsoever. Animals would be gone and that's not what we do. When we're talking about brush clearance, we're dealing with the defensible space, which is 200 feet from structures.

Also on every Red Flag Day, we have a 24-hour patrol on Mulholland Drive and some of the other problematic areas. 

My final thought is, I know that  emotions are super elevated. After the Woolsey Fire there was a lot of recrimination. But the attacks are not fair. The Executive Director of SMMC  lost his house in the Palisades. We're not immune to fires.  So the point is to try and be proactively fire resilient.