On Monday December 10th, 2024 - a date that will live in Malibu inflamey - I was in the toolshed happily embraced in the Bliss of Sleep - worn out by a long City Council meeting and swearing in and speeches and other business - all of it overshadowed by a Red Flag Alert and a PDS. 

Around 11:00, that Bliss was interrupted by a pound pound pounding upon the tool shed door. I thought maybe John had brought some leftovers from Bui, but it was worse than that: “Hey! There's another fire!” John growled. “Wake up!” 

I did not wish to wake up but the Starlink was still working and the electricity was still on so some Googling showed a firestorm moving down Malibu Canyon - similar to the Canyon Fire of 2007. Maps and visuals showed a glob of fire starting around Francisco Ranch Road - about a mile and a quarter as the Sikorsky S-70i Firehawk flies in a straight line from our spot on Malibu Road. According to the online maps, the fire blob was moving up and over the hills and dales and threatening Retreat Court, a cul de sac in the upper northwest corner of Serra Retreat: Home to a famous film director and other swells.

Francisco Road, not Franklin Road. Where did the Franklin designation come from anyway? Anyone? Anyone?

It’s so… random.

Drama! A few hours before, Assistant City Manager Joseph Toney asked incoming and outgoing City Council members to keep their speeches short, because Malibu was under a possible Public Safety Power Shutoff (PSPS) from SoCal Edison and a Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) - a kind of weird designation (that sounds like a Macaulay Culkin comedy) by the National Weather Service that the Santa Ana Devil Murder Winds were about to blow with great vengeance and furious anger through dry steep canyons lined with bone dry, oily, flammable shrubbery. 

After a fond goodbye to Paul Grisanti, a daughterly swearing in for Haylynn Conrad and solid speeches from Uhring, Silverstein and Haylynn, we bailed early on the three-hour City Council meeting and walked through an increasingly blustery night to take up positions at the Zinque bar with German Tim - an MD psychiatrist in residency from Munich who loves American football, loves surfing, loves food, loves California - even when it’s cold and it’s damp. 

He comes once a year with his lovely dermatologist wife Chiara, but he’d never experienced a firestorm or an earthquake.

Outside the wind began to howl and swirl and sweep and shake the trees. Because I have written a fair bit of Malibu history - and also have a pitch for a TV show called “Malibu Fire” - I earbashed German Tim MD with stories about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Malibu firestorms: 

Like the Canyon Fire of 2007, when First Point was firing - so to speak -  all day long on the Tuesday with maybe 20 people in the water: Good through low tide, hot offshore winds. Pumping. Weird and cool. Like going back to the 1950s. Or, I told everyone in the water: “Here is what happened. We all died in the fire, and this is heaven.” 
Smiles all around.

All those stories and caveats became very real around 11:00 PM on Monday night. German Tim was sleeping in his rented comfy van on Serra Road across from Surf Canyon. He too heard a pound, pound, pounding on his door. Fearing it was cops or highwaymen or crazed homeless zombies or Bible thumpers or Trumpers or something, Tim opened the van to find two very concerned but polite British tourists pointing out an orange glow flaming down Malibu Canyon at an alarming pace.

Tim texted a photo of that glow at 11:19. Welcome to the Malibu dude. Welcome to Cali! Everything’s okay until it isn’t.

Around that time John pounded on my door again and the urgency in his voice suggested I better take it seriously and get moving. I don't own much so I grabbed my Frankie on the Beach go bag and my backpack and groggily thought about taking all my unwrapped Christmas presents with me and should have grabbed my passport and birth certificate and other papers in case worse came to worse.

John's daughter’s Mercedes was in the driveway and he wanted me to take it to safe ground. As I left the tool shed I was shocked to find flames had blown from a couple miles up Malibu Canyon to Bluff’s Park and over the side lickety split and were licking at the ridge just above us and lighting trees on fire. 

In no time at all. An hour? Less?  Firestorms move unbelievably fast. They're like a fire breathing dragon from Game of Thrones. An unstoppable force. A fire tsunami.

So I got the heck out of there and should have taken some photos or noted the time but didn’t because when the flames are dancing, it ain’t not time for romanching.

I could write a book about the next seven or eight hours - and the next couple of days - riding it out in the middle of Malibu watching a scene that Hieronymous Bosch painted in 1490: Hell. 

Or maybe an amalgamation of Bosch’s “Hell” and Munch’s “The Scream.”

I'd seen firestorms before but never raging fully at night and it literally looked like Hades on earth. There were waterfalls of fire flowing down the ravine behind City Hall and all along that ridge. How does “Los Angeles is Burning” by Bad Religion go: “Palm trees are candles in the burning wind.”

That was correct, palm trees were igniting like Roman Candles: Wind, flames, heat, embers, sirens, more flames, more wind.Fire fighters call palm trees “California Candles.” 

Flames licked up Saddle Peak toward the Lloyd Wright House. Bluff Park was burning and I imagined the humanity if Scott Gillen lost all his extremely expensive mega-million-mansions he had toiled for years to build up on the bluff. 

Same for the New Castle built on the foundation of the old castle which I saw burn in the Canyon Fire of 2007 (I actually thought it was made of stone, but stone don't burn like that). The New Castle is a hyper-expensive sitting duck up there on the ridge.

And I also wondered if maybe the Edge was glad he’d been shut down - for 14 years and gazillions of dollars - by the Coastal Commission and Save Our Gophers and the Sierra Club and Scrub Unlimited and everyone else to build five houses on Sweetwater Mesa - which was ablaze.

Horrifying and exciting. Drama. The adrenaline of chaos, I suppose. Like war.

Malibu has a split personality like a bipolar loved one: Peaceful and benign and sunny and blue most of the time: 99.999% of the time, then in that .001% it all flip-flops, goes bizarro world and becomes the most dangerous place on Earth: Dark and toxic and deadly.

While driving back along Malibu Road I was thirsty and Zinque was closed dangit but then I saw Rob M hosing down his bushes as trees just across Malibu Road Chez Damavandi lit up like chandeliers - oddly beautiful. So I stopped to help and got a drink of water then hosed down bushes and vehicles

(That Tuesday, Olivia Damavandi emailed, from Connecticut: “It was so close, man. Our house has been in the crossfires so many times. My mom and brother saved it this time by refusing to leave and getting the firefighters up there, who told them the reason our house won’t burn is because they didn’t evacuate.  You basically have to be your own advocate.

You should talk to my mom and bro (if you want) for your story. They only woke up because our elderly dog, Moose, was crying. They immediately smelled the fire and saw it glowing over the hill of our house. They had to evacuate our giant, immobile and incontinent German shepherd. The fire tore thru Gretchen Wayne’s empty lot next door, which continued to burn and smolder for what seemed like forever.

I’ve attached a photo of what burned. )

Thinking about it in retrospect, maybe we should have been up there hosing down John’s humble abode and my tool shed, because in the aftermath of it all I wondered if a couple of low-pressure garden hosers risking their necks a few feet from leaping flames could have kept the flames off.

As Kanye West said: “I guess we’ll never know.”

Judging from all the time stamps on the photos and video I shot, the fire was fully raging at 2:00 in the morning. Around 4:00 German Tim MD slipped behind fire engines and over hoses, ran up our driveway and came back with the bad news that John’s house had been torched completely - but the tool shed was untouched and both of our bikes were okay. Yay.

I went up there and have a video time-stamped 4:16 of a firefighter hosing down the smoldering remnants of John’s home. A very sad sight. The place with squirrels, rabbits, displaced parrots, where hooting owls work in chorus with the crashing surf; the place where John threw so many great barbeques was now charburned. Unspeakable.

There was nothing to be done up there except save the bikes. Very early in a smoky, fiery, hellish morning I rode to the pier, where I found Rabbi Cunin standing by his car, looking nervously at the Chabad property, which seemed to be undamaged.

Heard later Zuma Jay’s shop was looted and ransacked by people who maybe needed killin’ - as they say in Texas.

Checked on Surf Canyon which was untouched, then up Serra Road where trees and vehicles were smoldering and flaming branches were cracking and falling. Then back to the parking lot at Ralph’s waiting for rosy-colored dawn to expose the damage - and also wondering how I would break the news to John that his place was gone. 

I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, because I know how much he loved the place, and had some idea of all that he lost: Tom Petty mugs and a Gold Record, tequila collection, clothes, vinyl records, big screen TV, family photos. All of it.

Made Christmas easier anyway. What do you get for the man who has lost everything? 

Everything!

JOHN’S PLACE: BEFORE AND AFTER

John is now the fourth J person I know to lose the lot: JAG, Janet (RIP) twice, Zuma Jay. Also Strider and Tom Moore and Alan Roderick Jones but their names don’t start with J.

(And after the Palisades Fire, include Sue, Trevor, Anthony, Matthew, Gidget, Gene and several others I’m not remembering.)

The sun came up to expose most of the houses miraculously still standing. Most of them. I made it up and around to Malibu Knolls Road, curious about the house formerly owned by Janet Macpherson that was half-burned in the 2007 Canyon Fire. A firefighter up there said the deck had been scorched, but that house and most of the houses up there were undamaged.

Sounds like LA County Fire learned some lessons from Woolsey because central, civilized Malibu should have burned and it didn't.

Made a mistake on Tuesday and drove all the way to Sunset Boulevard to buy gas. Then took hours to Obi wan Kenobi my way back into the ‘Bu. Got turned back at Topanga and PCH. Got turned back at Mulholland and LasLas Virgenes. Went back to Topanaga to Fernwood Pacific Road, all the way up to the top of Saddle Peak but got denied and pointed down Stunt. Then finally did the Point Dume Dipsy Doodle around the roadblock at PCH and Kanan. That worked and many miles and hours later, I'd burned all the gas I'd stupidly left Malibu to buy. Made it into town to find my EBike locked up, safe and sound.

LOS ANGELES IS BURNING

Random scenes from the Franklin Fire.

Tuesday night the power was off, the Wi-Fi wasn't working, there was no water pressure at the house and it was all very 19th century. An ill Sundowner wind flared the fire up again and again central Malibu was threatened. Again I sat in the parking lot at Ralphs and watched an eerie glow off to the West. Was that Pepperdine burning?

Looked like it. Imagine that. Pepperdine has never burned that I'm aware of and perhaps it is protected by some supernatural force?

The fire complicated a long-planned road trip north to watch the 49ers play the Rams at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Made it out on Wednesday morning and while passing Zuma Beach there were hundreds if not over a thousand firefighters under tents, the In N Out truck, scores of engines and support vehicles. 

An army. A very costly army. Quite a lot of them wearing prison jumpsuits as orange as the fiery glow Tim saw coming at him up Malibu Canyon.

California rules but even more so under winter light: Past Santa Barbara, through Los Alamos, Carmel Valley Road from the 101, Santa Cruz on Wednesday night. On Thursday, sat in cramped seats surrounded by drunk rowdies in Levi's Stadium and watched the 49ers lose to the Rams on a windy, cold and rainy-damp night. 

RANDOM ROAD TRIP VISIONS

Malibu to Los Alamos to Carmel Valley Road to Santa Cruz to Half Moon Bay to Santa Clara. Featuring: Pat Farley’s Christmas fetish.

So the rain fell where we didn’t want it and not where the rain was needed. Drove over Highway 17 the day before a fricking tornado in Scotts Valley injured five people - including a CalFire captain: Flipped his truck! 

Drove back to Malibu on Friday worried they wouldn’t let us in, but PCH was open.  There was still an army of human power and machines at Zuma and scorched earth all along until the middle of town. Scott Gillen’s expensive homes were still there, and so was Pepperdine. 
The damage report as of Saturday morning was 19 structures destroyed (8 single family dwellings and 11 outbuildings), and 23 structures damaged (14 single family dwellings, 1 multi family dwelling, 4 commercial, and 4 outbuildings).

Unfortunately John’s place was one of them, and maybe the only structure on Malibu Road to burn.

That’s just God or the fates or whoever being mean. From Madrid, Spain Her Awesomeness Pepperdiner Hannah M started a GoFundMe that was up to $10,050 by Monday morning and is now at $20,000+ almost two weeks after the Franklin Fire. Thanks to all who kicked in.
Build back better.

Had to wonder what this all cost: More than 1500 fire fighters, all their vehicles, gasoline, over time. According to Chat GPT, LACO Fire operates Sikorsky S-70i Firehawk at $3000 - $4000 per flight hour, Bell 412 is $2500 - $3,000 per flight hour, Super Puma is $5,000 per flight hour.

How many flight hours for this fire? Hundreds? Over a thousand? Do the math. At Zinque on Sunday night, LACO lifeguard T.M. said fires cost a million dollars a day.

German Tim flew home spinning on Saturday morning. He didn’t get the earthquake experience, just missed a tornado in Scotts Valley by a day but he’ll be back. He loves California, even when it’s cold and it’s damp. 

Or blazing like Hades.