The husband and wife veterinarian team who own and operate Malibu Coast Animal Hospital have three children, four dogs, a cat, a pig and koi fish. Dana’s mother also lives with the family. Dean has lived in Malibu for nearly 20 years and purchased their home in 2006.
“Just like everyone else, I hadn’t been too worried when the fire was still in Thousand Oaks [across the Santa Monica Mountains from Malibu],” Dean said. “I didn’t think it would come over the freeway.” That all changed when the City of Malibu issued a mandatory evacuation order the next morning.
The family owns a vacation home in Lake Arrowhead, nearly 120 miles from Malibu (and very far away from the fire) – so they immediately arranged for their children, pets and mother-in-law to go there. In the process, they saved almost nothing from their own home – focusing all of their attention instead on getting to the animal hospital and overseeing the evacuation of their furry patients.
For an independent veterinary practice, Malibu Coast Animal Hospital is a big operation with five other veterinarians and a support staff of about 27 employees. “My wife only cared about the animal hospital and drove straight down there, although it took several hours because of the evacuation gridlock on PCH,” Dean said. They had nearly 50 patients in the hospital that morning; fortunately, they had an evacuation plan in place that the employees had already put into action. Their first order of business was to immediately contact the owners to come and pick up their pets, if possible.
“We then enlisted our employees and sister animal hospitals in town (CARE and Stewart Animal Hospital) to take the rest, and many of the animals had already been evacuated by the time Dana finally got there,” Dean said.
“In the meantime, I stayed at the house piling up animal crates on top of the car. I wish now that I’d been grabbing stuff out of the house. All I took was some clothes and the computer. I had a boat and an antique car there, but no truck to haul them, so they later burned,” he said.
“I stayed at the house until the fire came over the hill at Malibu Park (across from Zuma Beach), then drove down to Busch Drive,” Dean said. “Evacuation traffic was still so bad that it took me three hours to get to the animal hospital, but I stayed there until midnight. I was not going to let this place burn – even if all I had to defend it with was a garden hose.”
Two employees stayed with him at the hospital, along with two animals: the family’s pet pig, Daisy, and another pig which was left there by its owner. “None of the other animal hospitals would take them,” Dean said.
Once he realized the hospital wasn’t going to burn down, Dean finally drove to Lake Arrowhead to be with his family. “At first, we were fine at Lake Arrowhead. Then I heard our house burned down from a sheriff friend,” he said.
After the evacuation order was lifted, the family came back to stay at a friend’s house in Malibu so that they could reopen the animal hospital as quickly as possible. “We’re lucky to have a business and a lot of support,” he noted. Other than a gold cross necklace that had been in his wife’s family for generations, he felt that everything else the family had lost was replaceable. “My wife looked at it as a cleansing of all my junk. We have a good attitude about it.”
The family plans to rebuild, and even managed to get the original blueprints for their 1953 home - one of the first to be built in their neighborhood. Dean just happened to be on the property one day when a woman came to the gate – telling him that her father had built the house, and that she still had the original drawings.
Dean also noted that, “We had a koi pond at the house, and they managed to survive in just a foot of water.” The fish are now living in a friend’s pond until the family’s house is rebuilt.
