Kate is a diagnostic medical sonographer for UCLA Health. Ed owns and operates Zuma Entertainment, an audio/visual equipment and installation company based in nearby Agoura Hills.
Ed and Kate Franey spent five years searching for their own small piece of Malibu. They finally found it 2015: a one bedroom, one bath fixer-upper located in the unincorporated mountainous area overlooking Western Malibu.
“We called it ‘Happiness on a Hill,’” Ed said. “It was our own little retreat up there, on five acres with breathtaking rolling hills and a peekaboo ocean view. For 3½ years, every single Saturday was spent dry-walling, sanding, painting and running wires – remodeling the whole thing. Literally a month before the fire, we finally finished it.”
Ed and Kate were both out of town when the Woolsey Fire hit. Ed was in Maui on a work project; Kate was on her way to visit her parents in Ohio. Ed recalled his first warning about the Woolsey Fire: “One of the original Malibu residents I’ve known for years is on Arson Watch; and he called me in Maui and said, ‘Hey, it’s looking serious,’ and offered to go up to our house. I figured he was just being the paranoid Arson Watch guy.
“Even though my parents only visit their Malibu West home a few times a year, they happened to be in Malibu at the time. They also called to say that the fire might reach Malibu. I wasn’t taking it seriously yet, so I said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’
“My brand new car was sitting at my house, and we had a Ziploc ‘go-bag’ in the safe with papers and jewelry – so I told my parents ‘Well, if you really want to do something, go out to the house and get the car and the bag in the safe’ (which they did).
“The irony was, the internet newsfeeds I was seeing about the fire were better than what my parents were getting on local TV,” Ed said. After watching the fire on various news sources, he realized he was seeing footage that his parents were not. He called and urged them to evacuate.
At this point, Ed said, “I couldn’t concentrate on work; my brain just wasn’t there. During my lunch break, somebody else called me about the fire and said, ‘It’s ‘super serious’ now. It’s jumped the freeway and maybe you should consider flying back.’ I checked and found there was a flight leaving in 40 minutes, so I got to the airport in six minutes and made the flight. As I was getting on the plane, I was texting like crazy and got a photo of my parent’s house with flames only 25 feet away.”
“One of my best friends picked me up when I landed at 9:00 pm. I just had to see my house. It took us four times longer than usual to get there because all of the main roads were closed. We eventually found a back way in.
“The scene was like Armageddon – like a post-nuclear war movie – apocalyptic. As we passed the ‘Bachelor Mansion’ (a local landmark where The Bachelor/Bachelorette reality shows are filmed), that’s when we saw all the power poles burning from the ground up. They were being suspended by phone wires and looked like burning crosses. As we made our way up, it got worse – the Cielo Winery and the Malibu Winery were both on fire.
“There were animals everywhere, almost like a flash death – literally they were frozen in position and dead - five or six deer, too many rabbits, birds, mice and rats. We got down to the golf course, which was on fire – the building and everything - and the ficus farm where they have weddings was on fire.
“We finally made it to our street at 1:00 am. As we came down the hill, a two-story house that should have been there was not: it had vanished. There was no sign of it; not even a pile of rubble – it was like it had evaporated into ash. At the next house, something blew up like a gas canister; and the next house was totally on fire.
“As we swung around, the next house was ours – and it was already heavily lit up. Your brain is playing tricks on you. Our house had collapsed and Kate’s car was just a charred shell. I had to see it, and that was it.
“There was no reason to stay around, so I decided to check on my parents’ place. As we drove down to the coast, two houses on the ocean side of PCH were on fire with fire trucks there. We headed down the coast and cops were all around but leaving everybody alone. By the time we got to my parents’ neighborhood, I initially thought that it looked okay – but then we saw three houses in a row gone, and then more. My parent’s house was totally fine but the backyard was on fire. I was still in a daze, but my friend had more adrenaline and shouted at me to get the garden hoses, and we stood there 45 minutes hosing down all the fires in the back yard. The sprinkler box melted completely, and the sprinklers were on and spraying everywhere.”
“At that point, I was exhausted and mentally drained. We saw one guy dragging a 500 pound fire hose at 3:00 am, hosing down people’s houses that were still on fire. We helped him drag the hose around. He looked like death – mentally and physically drained. We left him some water and he continued on.
“After that, we headed down the coast. Gull’s Way (Dick Clark’s former estate) was on fire, along with the old Beau Rivage restaurant.
“I had been out of cell phone range for six hours, and didn’t get reception until I got to Pepperdine University. Kate, who was ready to get on her return flight, was freaking out. It was eerie: hundreds of houses’ smoke alarms were going off. Helicopters were doing water drops in the middle of the night. The whole hillside around Pepperdine was on fire, with fire trucks driven up onto the grass. I finally got back to LA at 5:00 am.”
Kate picks up the story from there. “I left Ohio at 6:00 am Eastern, getting back to L.A. at 7:00 am local time. Ed was staying at an airport hotel with his family, so I met up with them there. Over the next five day, we had non-stop phone calls and texts from people checking in. It was overwhelming trying to handle all of the inquiries: for example, my elementary school choir teacher reached out to us from Ohio, along with all of Ed’s relatives from England. We seemed to go for days on end without sleep.”
“(Three months after the fire,) I’m still not sleeping. The night after the fire, we snuck back into Malibu (bypassing Sheriff’s roadblocks) driving a huge pickup for safety. I was finally able to see the site where our house was. We were crying so much, but you try not to get sucked down further into the negativity.”
“It sucks to lose the history of our 79-year-old house,” Ed added.
“We were only one mile from the fire station and we had a swimming pool. Our house burned five hours after the main firestorm passed,” Kate said. “So much for taking cookies to the guys at the firehouse.”
“People say the fire came down the canyon like a wave and was so hot and so strong that the land 100 yards in front of it was lighting up before the flames even got there because the heat was so intense,” Ed described. “It moved through our two-mile-long canyon in about five minutes – like light-speed. Some neighbors said they got blankets and soaked themselves in water, while another neighbor got into his water tank wearing scuba gear. One neighbor was traumatized because he watched his house burn to the ground.”
“It’s so seared into our memory. I only took a few photos on my phone, and I don’t even want to scroll through my phone and see them,” Ed said.
“This was Malibu’s 9/11.”
After the fire, “It was amazing to watch people pull together the way they did,” Kate and Ed said. “People opened up their homes to us. We’d lost absolutely everything.” Ed had landed at LAX wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, leaving everything else behind in Maui. Within 24 hours, a friend showed up with $1,000 worth of clothes and three friends showed up with toiletries.
“When everything burns, you have to buy everything – from nail clippers to electric toothbrush chargers - all those little things,” they said.
“It’s been painful the entire time,” Kate described. “Every time I go shopping, I’m so thankful we had the Ziploc go-bag ready and that Ed’s parents picked it up – that was huge.
“The things that suck are like losing all our dog stuff, like the footprints of my favorite dog cast in concrete,” Ed said. “And my grandfather’s pipe,” Kate added. “Those things are irreplaceable, and things that you will miss. We’ve had lots of dogs over the years and we had dogs’ ashes and collars from dogs that have passed away.”
“It makes you think about how you live your life and the things that have value to you. Like the expensive bottle of wine you were saving for a special occasion? You know what? Just drink that bottle of wine – don’t save it,” Ed philosophized.
“And that applies to other nice things that you try to save,” Kate added. “I had four Barefoot Dreams blankets that still had the tags on. I didn’t get them out and use them because I didn’t want dog hair on them. They burned up, but I got one since the fire, and I’m using it. Seize the day.”
