As an assistant art director and set designer (the first to create 3D digital sets for Hollywood studios), Richard Reynolds has worked on major films like “Avatar,” “Minority Report,” “Terminator 3,” and two of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. Michaela Anderson is a retired social worker.
Richard has a harrowing first-hand account of staying to defend their home. “On the morning of the fire, we were kind of oblivious to how at-risk we were. Foolishly and misguidedly, we thought the fire was going west towards Oxnard. But at 8:30, we heard (Malibu-based) KBUU-FM news director Hans Laetz telling a local TV station that it had jumped across the freeway and was heading towards Malibu – so Michela, my son and his girlfriend left at 9:00 after throwing things in the car and rushing out.”
Richard says that, as the fire approached, “I did my best to prepare: I placed ladders in three different places around the house, then ran three garden hoses up on the roof along with a trash can I filled with 50 gallons of water. I spent another 90 minutes pulling flammables away from the house, and that turned out to be a really good idea – about the only effective idea I had all day.
“I had always intended to stay if there was a fire,” Richard continued. “At the time, I thought ‘Oh, I know how to deal with this.’ We’d been through the Pacific Fire in 2003, but that was a January fire with green grass on the hills and there was moisture. This time, it was after a horrible drought and the fire had a completely different quality to it.
“This was unlike any other fire I’d been through. It was pure malevolence, out to destroy anything and everything – and there was no way to stop it. The fire risk continued for hours, long after the fire front had passed through. There was chaos for 24 to 36 hours, and the danger never let up. There were spot fires and things burning for no apparent reason.
“It was creepy how pervasive the fire effects were. The initial fire front coming down the hill towards the ocean was the easy part, even though it was completely terrifying for a short period of time. But then the fire went down the canyon and things started to calm down. Being above the fire, I could actually see bizarre smoke and heat effects which I had never experienced before.
“Then the mulch spread out across our property started to catch fire. Everything plastic caught fire, and even woody soil inside plastic pots caught fire. We had dozens of potted plants that simply burned until there was nothing left 24 hours later. I’d put them out half-a-dozen times, and they’d just re-ignite.
“The most extreme example: at the time, I could only call it a snake – but a more scientific term might be a plume. It was an invisible tornado, swirling, laid flat against the hillside and snaking its way up the ridge. I could only see it because it had a kind of shimmer to it and it was whirling leaves and sticks, and burst into flames occasionally. You could see the commotion it would create as it moved up the ridge towards me, then corkscrewed and slithered up to the house.
“It was 20 feet in diameter and about 100 feet long and bumped into some trees, did a 180-degree turn and swept across the terrace horizontally – roaring and growling as it went by. It bumped into a pine tree and instantly turned the 40 foot tall tree brown, singing all the needles at once. Thank God the tree didn’t catch fire. The snake then roared on around the ridge. Fortunately, it didn’t hit me directly, but came within 10 feet – this snarling tornado on its side. It was creepy, and that unnerved me a lot.
“At one point, a fire bomb came zipping in and landed on the dry grass. The grass had been cut all the way down, but within 20 seconds there was this huge burn area. Even the cut grass was burning. Everything was so dry, it just burned – brush clearance really didn’t do any good. In fact, the only thing on the ground that didn’t burn was the gravel surrounding the house.
“There was fire everywhere. Nothing was free of the fire. I literally put out 400 to 500 spot fires in the six hours after the main fire front came through. Embers came from all directions. Everything was so dry and so flammable.
“The storage trailer in back of the house turned into a full-on conflagration with a roaring red glow. I had no way to protect that structure at all. There was nothing I could do: I was just barely managing to protect the house. The aluminum siding on the trailer liquefied and flowed across the ground.
“We had a rustic stairway outside built with railroad ties that caught fire, and I was trying to put it out in furious winds of 40-60 miles-per-hour gusting in every direction. Then I saw smoke on the other side of the house and went rushing over there. John Rainone [who owns a water delivery truck service to fill water storage tanks throughout the neighborhood] happened to be next door and could see the smoke as well. It looked like he was coming to help, so I went back up on the roof.
“That’s when I saw the fire was now inside one of the beams and inside the peak of the house and the chimney – too hot to put out with a garden hose. It was a huge 6-inch by 14-inch wooden beam burning incredibly hot, and a full-pressure garden hose was not effective. Our neighbor, Dick Martin, showed up to help. I was literally using a pick axe to pull up the roof shingles and spray water under the shingles, because that’s where the flames were – but we weren’t being very effective.
“Then Rainone showed up. His water truck was already empty, so he connected it to our water tank for a partial refill. While that was happening, he got out the 100-foot fire hose he keeps on his truck and dragged it to the rooftop. Three-foot tall flames were right in front of me on the roof, but John hit them with his fire hose and they were out in 15 seconds.
“Had it not been for that, the fire would’ve been unstoppable. It was literally just about to get out of control. Another 30 second later, we would have lost our entire home.
“Until late afternoon, it was a pretty lonely experience. The fire trucks never came – which is why it was so amazing to have Rainone, Martin, and then another neighbor (Phil Ramey) show up. We looked like World War I trench warfare guys: blackened and weary. It was a nasty looking group of men that was surviving up there.
“By then, I thought we were out of danger. It was almost nightfall. I sat down and tried to eat some dinner because I hadn’t eaten all day. The house and the outside were smokier than hell – but after about 20 minutes, I could tell there was something different about the way the smoke smelled, like burning pine. It just didn’t smell right, so I started poking around and found that embers had fallen down our chimney and landed on a plywood platform inside the fireplace unit. In addition, the plywood subfloor had caught fire and burned to a post that ran all the way to a ceiling beam inside the house.
“I spent hours inside the house with the hoses. I had to break through walls in two different places and cut a smoldering section out of a post that was nine feet up – then carry it outside. Power was out, so all I had was a tiny camping headlamp for light. I was doing all of this in pitch darkness.
“By midnight, I felt I’d secured that area of the house as much as I could tell. I spent the night sleeping with an N95 protective mask on because I was quite aware of how woozy I felt. I think I was exposed to an awful lot of carbon monoxide from the smoke, and I was feeling dingy and slow – not very sharp. I thought I was going to be able to get out after eating dinner, but spent most of the night just to make sure there wasn’t something else burning in the house. That was a pretty miserable night.
“Saturday morning was better because there were only a few spot fires. I finally left the house and drove down the hill around 9:00, only to find the smoke density was so thick down at Pacific Coast Highway that it was almost unbreathable. It was like three times denser and thicker than it had been at the house and was so acrid it was burning my throat. I was really anxious to get out of the whole area, so I drove up to meet my wife and son staying in Oxnard.”
Unfortunately, the story didn’t end there. “By Sunday morning, I was in the emergency room at UCLA Hospital in Santa Monica. My sense at the time was that I was just about to slip away, and I’ve never had that feeling in my entire life – even with lots of extreme events I’ve experienced while hiking and mountain climbing.
“On the gurney in the ER, they brought me back. Carbon monoxide played a big role in debilitating me. I’d had so much smoke inhalation, I literally felt like I was spinning down the drain. I told them, ‘I’m losing it.’ They gave me half a dozen different treatments; within a few hours, I was still exhausted but finally starting to feel better. I was coughing up smoke particles for two weeks afterwards, but I don’t think there was any permanent lung damage.”
Regrettably, the storage trailer lost during the fire held much of Richard’s decades of work in the television and movie industries. “My whole work history was lost – hundreds and hundreds of paper drawings. I had a collection of over 400 beautiful architectural books, photos from high school onward, and all of my computer equipment. The only things I was able to save were some portable back-up hard drives; so at least I was able to save the last eight years of my digital work.”
Reflecting back on the experience, Richard said he,“Found it disconcerting to have lost that much of my personal history. It’s just things – but at my age, those things were of great comfort to me. It was so much of my adult life history. I’ve found that emotionally unsettling, really hard to deal with.
“I’m emotionally much more vulnerable since the fire and much less secure. I feel foolishly cavalier about my awareness of that wildfire danger. I should’ve known better: it had been exactly 40 years since the last bad wildfire there.
“This was not a fire you could fight with garden hoses: they were only effective for about eight minutes, and after that, everything melted – the hoses and the PVC pipes - and water was just spilling on the ground.
“I learned a very harsh lesson: how ill-prepared I was. I now know I need more water tanks, fireproof fire outlets, fire hoses, personal protective equipment, gas powered pumps – all of that.”
