Ben Marcus Rules

MIKE DAVIS: THE CASE FOR LETTING MALIBU BURN (1998)

At least once a decade a blaze in the chaparral grows into a terrifying firestorm consuming hundreds of homes in an inexorable advance across the mountains to the sea. Since 1970 five such holocausts have destroyed more than one thousand luxury residences and inflicted more than $1 billion in property damage. Some unhappy homeowners have been burnt out twice in a generation, and there are individual patches of coastline or mountain, especially between Point Dume and Tuna Canyon, that have been incinerated as many as eight times since 1930.

• Let Malibu Burn (1998) by Mike Davis from Ecology of Fear

The Los Angeles Times began publishing in 1881 - a newspaper striving to be taken seriously in a city striving to be taken seriously.

Not surprisingly, one of the first mentions - if not the very first mention - of Malibu had to do with brushfires circa August 28, 1883.

Going farther back than that into the 19th Century, in Mike Davis’ excellent, definitive, prophetic Let Malibu Burn (1998) he namedrops Richard Henry Dana sailing past the Malibu coast - 200 years ago - and seeing what we’ve all seen three times this fire season already - a massive plume of black smoke, besmirching the blue skies, floating out to sea on the wind.

From the beginning fire has defined Malibu in the American imagination. In Two Years Before the Mast, Richard Henry Dana described sailing northward from San Pedro to Santa Barbara in 1826 and seeing a vast blaze along the coast of José Tapia’s Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit. Despite—or, as we shall see, more likely because of—the Spanish prohibition of the Chumash and Tong-va Indian practice of annually burning the brush, mountain infernos repeatedly menaced Malibu through the nineteenth century. During the great land boom of the late 1880s, the entire latifundio was sold at $10 per acre to the Boston Brahmin millionaire Frederick Rindge. In his memoirs, Rindge described his unceasing battles against squatters, rustlers, and, above all, recurrent wildfire. The great fire of 1903, which raced from Calabasas to the sea in a few hours, incinerated Rindge’s dream ranch in Malibu Canyon and forced him to move to Los Angeles, where he died in 1905.

I remember once reading that there were more Chumash Indians living in the Channel Islands than on the mainland. For a while that satellite of information orbited my Gulliver because I couldn’t think why that would be so. And then I had what alcoholics call “a moment of clarity:” Easy to imagine Chumash campfires or brush-clearing going out of control when the Devil Winds blew up and out of the canyons, and igniting what we now call a a firestorm. Probably happened all the time, so the mainland was either burning or recovering most of the time - as the Chumash in the islands probably learned quick how to control their fires, and watched the smoke drift over their heads.

There is nothing new under the sun. Whiners whine that California has no forest and brush management: Sorry, but firestorms are forest management and brush management, a natural process going back centuries and millennia.

Humans are just in the way.

There’s something about the beauty and danger of the Santa Ana winds - and the sometimes resulting firestorms - that have inspired writers and songwriters going way back.

According to the Cultural Wikipedia, the Santa Ana Winds are mentioned in Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories (1938) by Raymond Chandler. 

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Joan Didion quotes Chandler in Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and those Santa Ana Devil Winds are name-checked in Erle Stanley Gardner’s Double or Quits (1941), Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Elecric Sheep (1968), Less than Zero (1985) by Bret Easton Ellis, White Oleander (1999) by Janet Fitch, Clive Barker’s Coldheart Canyon (2001) and several times by Dean Koontz like in The Husband (2006): 

Eager breathing, hissing, and hungry panting arose at every vent in the eaves, as though the attic were a canary cage and the wind a voracious cat. Such was the disquieting nature of a Santa Ana wind that even the spiders were agitated by it. They moved restlessly on their webs.

Click here for a list of popular songs that mention the Santa Ana winds, a list that includes Steely Dan’s Babylon Sisters, the Beach Boys Santa Ana Winds, Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars and the song I intend to use as the theme for a TV show idea I have been pitching for many years called Malibu Fire.

Los Angeles is Burning by Bad Religion is the musical version of Mike Davis.

Santa Ana winds and Malibu fires have been mentioned in word and song going back to the early 1800s, and right up to the present.

The Palisades Fire inspired a tremendous amount of static on the news and social media. There was a lot of finger-pointing, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching and yaddayaddayaddaing blaming Gavin Newsom, Karen Bass, the Democratic party, liberalism wokeism and other people and ideologies for lack of coordination, budget cuts, loss of water pressure, DEI hiring and reservoirs left dry.

But the truth is, blaming Newsom and Bass and others for the Palisades firestorm is akin to blaming the governor of Hawaii and the mayor of the Big Island for a volcanic eruption or the president of Peru for an earthquake or the Governors of Florida or Nebraska for a tornado or a hurricane.

The Palisades Fire was not a brushfire, it was a firestorm: An unstoppable, deadly destructive force in the same category as earthquakes, tornados, volcanos and tsunamis. 

Of all the words generated by the Palisades Fire, a retired Disney Imagineer who goes under the Facebook handle Joe Rohde summed it up best. These words were framed by a harrowing video of a firestorm in full threat:

THUS SPAKE JOE ROHDE

If you are not from around here, you might be unfamiliar with the particular wind conditions that have made these fires so destructive. There are two.

The first is more common: the so-called Santa Ana winds. These winds originate far to the east in the desert and become increasingly warmer and drier as they rush towards Southern California. We have had a very dry year, but these winds suck all the remaining moisture out of everything they touch, and most of what grows out here is dry and full of creosote and oils as an adaptation to dry weather. We don’t really have forests in the way that other parts of the country do. Most of what grows here is a low thick, highly flammable scrub that regrows quickly after each fire, providing fuel for the next one.

Santa Anas are strong and can have gusts over 60 miles an hour. They tend to run from the east to the west, partially because the unusual mountain formations of Southern California run east west.

The second phenomenon is more rare. It is called a mountain wave. Winds hit the mountain range perpendicular to the mass and become dramatically compressed. These can reach well over 100 miles an hour and behave more like tornado winds, creating extremely localized, but very strong damage. I once saw a 6 foot wide swath totally stripped of all leaves on hedges and trees right down the block. Weird.

This second category of wind also accompanied these fires. This is unfightable. Embers can travel over a mile in less than a minute, over your head and start a fire behind you. Flames can lie down flat and shoot between two houses and torch houses on the other side of the street. 

A friend of mine in Malibu once watched the embers from a fire near him rise into the air, glowing in the night, blow out over the ocean, still glowing, head up the coast about a mile, still glowing, and land a mile up the coast again, setting another fire.

This disaster is not the product of incompetence. We have the best firefighters in the world. But a municipal water system is not designed to combat a firestorm. It is designed to put out the occasional house fire and keep your toilet running. There is nothing anyone can do.

Or in Terminator terms: “It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity! Or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop!... ever... until you are dead!” 

You’d have to pick up that entire Pacific OCean and dump it on Pacific Palisades and Malibu - or any firestorm - to douse it. And that ain’t gonna happen:

“Oh, Superman, where are you now

When everything's gone wrong somehow?

The men of steel, the men of power

Are losing control by the hour”

You can no more fight off a firestorm than you can a fire-breathing dragon or a tsunami or an earthquake. The difference with a firestorm is they can be sparked by humans - and there are more than a few arson theories going around. When you look at the high-rent places that were torched: Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Altadena, West Hills - a conspiracy theory would suspect malevolent, jealous, opportunistic forces. 

Would someone start a firestorm to short the stock of an insurance company? Maybe.

A lot has been said about Santa Ana devil winds and the threat of firestorms and the inadviseability of building densely-packed, landscaped neighborhoods in steep ravines lined with oily, combustible bush. A lot has been said, a lot is being said, and a lot will be said in the future.

Check out the Before and After photos of Pacific Palisades by The New York Post.

If there is a silver lining in this, it’s that the Palisades Fire is going to allow some urban renewal along around five miles of Pacific Coast Highway - from the Geffen/East Carbon access on Carbon Beach, and for about five miles to Topanga Beach.

BEN’S BIG ADVENTURE

On Sunday, July 12 2025 very concerned friends asked me to check on their apartment on the inland side of PCH, past Dukes - their two cars, all their posessions and a lot of hard drives were vulnerable. Was it all still there?

There was a roadblock at Colony House Liquor and not even my Malibu Times Press Pass could Jedi past it. So I snuck down the Zonker Harris access and rode along Carbon(ized) Beach on a perfect, blue winter day. Very much Yin/Yang: Natural beauty to my right, charred destruction to my left.

Made it through the rocks at Carbon Point and Dukes. Was suspected as an EBike looter by a guy who had a shotgun handy.
Didn’t get shot.
Photographed the apartment and cars intact, then rode back into the setting sun: Mission accomplished.
I’ll fill in captions later but these are some of the visuals.

On Sunday 1-12-2025 I went on a stealth mission, riding my bike along the beach to get around the National Guard/Sheriff roadblock at Colony House Liquor and scooting along the hard sand on a perfect January day to check on houses of two very concerned people who left their cars and hard drives and everything in their apartment.

They really did not want to join Team Lost Everything and it was my mission to reassure them.

That was an adventurous ride on an absolutely perfect day and it was hard to say what was more impressive: The January beach weather, or the level of destruction.

Made it past Dukes and used some stairs that belonged to T and D - friends of the people I was on the mission for. There was an open door, the lights were on but no one seemed to be home. I helloed the house several times but no answer. It made me nervous to leave my bike on the beach and cut through private property, but had to complete the mission.

Found a brick stairway to the road. Dodged a lot of SCE and SoCalGas and fire vehicles and ran up and around the back and saw that their cars were safe and everything was intact. Texted them photos and they were ecstatic.

On the way back, a homeowner saw my Ebike parked against his stairs, assumed I was a looter and called the cops. He even had a shotgun leaning on a post just inside his gate - something I agree with, because looting in the aftermath of a firestorm should be a shootable offense.

Ask Zuma Jay about that.

But we got it sorted. He knew me from around town and turned out to be the father of K, who works at a local restaurant.

I rode back along the beach, thinking about what I had seen at street level: CalTrans has a plan to make PCH kinder and gentler through Malibu: Spruce it up, slow it down, make it visitor and local friendly.

Just from what I saw in the three miles from the Malibu Pier to my friend’s apartment: That area is nuked. Hard to imagine how long it will take to remove all that twisted steel, charred wood and shattered glass, or how much it will cost.

No idea what will be allowed to be rebuild along there, and how long that will take and how much that will cost.

The 21 Miles of Scenic Beauty just got more scenic, and people are going to enjoy all those sparkling ocean views unobstructed by a wall of buildings that range from dingy, dusty mid-20th-century apartments to 21st Century megamansions.

There’s another three miles of destructo from Dukes to Topanga Beach, and that means six miles of the 11 miles between the Malibu Pier and Will Rogers Beach will have to be replanned and rebuilt.

How about a bike path? A safe, secure bicycle path that connects Santa Monica to Malibu? Can you imagine how popular that would be?

And how safe? Riding a bicycle on PCH from Malibu to Santa Monica is loco and incredibly dangerous. Make it safe, and create a solid path for bicyclists.

If you’re looking for a model of a kinder, gentler, safer PCH through Malibu, look at Laguna Beach: The speed limit is 35 MPH on either side of the middle of town, and then 25 MPH in the densest business and residential area along Main Beach.

That’s what PCH and Malibu could be and maybe should be. A NASCAR track through a business area is no bueno, and you would think the citizens living along PCH would feel better backing their cars into 25 MPH and not cars going twice that fast.

A dream? As Boog said in Diner: “If you ain’t got good dreams, you’ve got nightmares.”

It’s Sunday evening after the Carbon Beach Stealth Mission Accomplished. I am sitting under the tent at Broad Street, where they have electricity on a Sunday afternoon, and a bipolar WiFi signal making this story hard to finish.

The sun is setting and Golden Hour is even more golden when filtered through orange-smokey haze, and shining on Saddleback Peak which has been torched down to bedrock.

A gentle breeze is coming out of the mountains smelling of smoke and many things. That’s the Devil Wind pacified, and it’s very pleasant: Like a fire breathing dragon apologetically nuzzling to apologize for causing so much destruction and death.

The breeze is pleasant, the sky is blue and Malibu is back to its lovely self: If you have a bipolar friend or relative, Malibu is like a bipolar person who just went manically berserk for a week, but is back to normal and seems to have forgotten all the trouble it caused.

This whole megillah is a little hard to fathom and still going as an army of humanity and machines are pouring into town, lighting up the Chili Cook Off property like a scene from Close Encounters.

MALIBU’S WILDFIRE HISTORY

This graphic of Malibu wildfires covers a span from 1929 to the Woolsey Fire in 2018. It doesn’t include the January 2007 fire that destroyed Suzanne Somers house on Malibu Road and three others, a fire similar to the oddly-named Broad Fire on November 6, 2024. The Broad, Franklin and Palisades Fires are not included in this map. To see the whole article: https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-malibu-wildfire-history/

There’s even more humanity and machines at Zuma. Approaching from the west at night, it looked like the entire squid fleet had run aground - the entire parking lot at Zuma was filled with humans and tents and command posts and vehicles from one end to the others.

Because those Devil Winds are about to return with a vengeance.

The past week reminds one of that line from No Country for Old Men where the younger Deputy Wendell says:

“It's a mess, aint it Sheriff?”

And Tommy Lee Jones as Sheriff Ed Tom Bell says:

“If it aint it'll do till a mess gets here.”

BU BACK BETTER 1929 - 1932

After the Colony was torched to brick fireplaces in 1929, Malibu people got to work. Perhaps using Hollywood set-building people left idle by the Depression, the Colony was completely rebuilt back better in four years. This is how the smoke and as looked by 1932.
The world moves faster and slower now, in the 21st Century - impossible to know how long it will take to clear all the debris, plan and permit new homes and restore PCH through Malibu.