Kay is a homeless advocate and recently retired after serving as director of the Malibu Methodist Nursery School for 38 years. Bryan is a theoretical physicist and Executive VP of National Security Research Group at Defense Group, Inc.
“I stayed at the house the last two times we had wildfires, but not this time,” Bryan said. “In those instances, we had fences, trees and corrals burn down, but never the house. This was a particularly wicked fire: it wasn’t the gentle brush fires we had before. I find it absolutely remarkable that there was as little loss of life as there was.”
“Our house was cement block with a tile roof and shouldn’t have burned,” Kay noted.
“After receiving notices from the City of Malibu and from KBUU-FM (Malibu’s only radio station), we evacuated around 8:30 that morning,” Bryan continued. “We had time to pack up a few things; and then went to Zuma Beach nearby.”
Snakes have been one of Bryan’s passions since he was about two years old. “As we started to evacuate, my first thought was to save the animals: a lizard, a tortoise a toad, and three very large snakes: an Australian Python, a New Guinea python, and an African python. We had cages for them built into our home, and they’ve been prized possessions for many years. It was like, ‘Somebody get me the pillowcases so we can save the snakes!’ Actually, we kept pillowcases near the cages to put the snakes in if they had to be taken anywhere. That was standard procedure.
“These snakes are big. We evacuated to our son’s apartment in Venice and they stayed there with us for a while, but now a pet shop is boarding them.”
While Bryan was dealing with the animals, Kay focused on packing up a vast number of family photos. “We had 20 three-ring binders of photos plus 20 boxes of photos. I’ve been helping to feed homeless people in Malibu for so long, that we had all these reusable shopping bags around that I used to transport food. Those came in handy, because I put the photos in them and got them all out of there.
“My grandson, 21, helped load our stuff into our cars – but his mother was furious when she learned he came out to help and said, ‘There’s no way he’s going to stay and fight the fires!’ So he came to the beach at Zuma with us. The view from there gave us the best sighting of our house. We watched Trancas Canyon catch on fire; then we watched the fire jump to Malibu Park, then to our neighborhood – Rising Hills. Our entire neighborhood was burning.
“Our sons, Jody and Joshua, drove up from Santa Monica as they always do when there’s a fire – and they decided to stay with the house when we left. When the fire got to our property, one son fought the fire from the guest house roof and the other son stayed on the main house roof. They weren’t all that far apart from one another, but before they knew it, the wind and smoke got so bad they couldn’t see each other anymore.
“For me, there was a 30-minute period where I was afraid my sons were gone – so nothing compares to that.” Kay described those moments as, by far, one of the most terrifying times of her entire life. “From our vantage point on the beach, we could see the smoke and the wind and the fire, and we kept calling our sons on the cell phone and saying ‘Get out, get out’ – but they didn’t answer. They probably didn’t even hear it with all the wind, and I was distraught.”
Bryan and his grandson immediately jumped in the car and tried drive back to the house to see if the sons needed to be rescued, but ran into a wall of flames at the end of Busch Drive.
Fortunately, the sons managed to get down off the roofs – but one was hit by flying debris and suffered a bleeding gash on his head. One of the sons had arrived in a four-wheeler so they hopped into that, leaving the other son’s car in the driveway (a Mustang, which later burned up). Luckily, they didn’t run into any walls of flame on their way to the beach.
“By the time they got back to us, I was so ecstatic,” Kay exclaimed. “They were there defending our house for one to two hours, but the main firestorm was fast moving with 70 mph winds. It had been so calm and warm when the fire chief first drove up our street and told us to evacuate. Then not long after, all the houses were gone.
“After checking out of the hotel, we stayed with one of our sons in Santa Monica. It was so nice not to be stuck alone in a hotel room. It was great to be with family, and they all came – the grandkids, etc. But as soon as we could get back into Malibu, we went back to see the house. We took our sons (who had grown up there) and our grandsons. That was difficult.”
Reflecting back on the experience, Bryan said, “My interest in this fire is more in terms of, ‘What have we learned from trying to deal with it? What changes do we need to make - policy changes by the fire department, the City Council and the City?’ Brush removal doesn’t help in a fire like this. And the CERT (Community Emergency Response Team) couldn’t get back into town after the evacuation, the fire department officials couldn’t get back in time (after being deployed to the Camp Fire in northern California); and dozens of fire trucks sat at Zuma Beach with no command and control.
“With a fast-moving, intense fire melting everything in its way (including steel and glass), it’s very difficult to figure out what to do first and where to put the resources you have,” he continued. “You’re never going to have enough resources, so we have to learn how to do that better because this will happen again. People choose to live in high-risk areas, and it costs the nation, the insurance companies, and the people a great deal of money – so learning how to do things better and improve living in those kinds of areas is important. It was an extremely unpleasant but unique laboratory for learning what to do for the next fire - what worked and what didn’t.”
“Both of us feel strongly that our job is not to point fingers, but to learn and move on,” Kay said.
