35 years ago, Walter and Carolyn started to build their dream home in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Malibu. During construction, a wildfire burned down the garage where the couple was living until the house was finished – and they lost everything. With the Woolsey Fire, they’ve just lost everything for the second time.
At 7:00 am on the morning of the Woolsey Fire, Carolyn evacuated to Zuma Beach with the family cat. Walter stayed behind to defend the property, located near Encinal Canyon Road and Charmlee Park (up in the hills west of Malibu). “We hoped firefighters or a DC-10 dropping Phos-Chek would show up,” he said. “We watched the fire and thought it would bypass us.
“We live just below Fire Station #72, which is located at the top of our canyon. At the very top, all of a sudden, a little spot fire started and then very slowly burned down the hill towards the fire station. The open land there was full of tall brush and chaparral that hadn’t burned since 1985. Once the fire got to that and then caught the wind, it really started moving.
“The fire was coming from two directions – and when one side crossed Encinal Canyon, all hell broke loose: everything went up all at once. Whooosh! The whole canyon there went up at the same time, and it was like a fire tornado.
“We had five acres of brush clearance going downhill towards the fire, and it didn’t do a bit of good. On one hillside next to Encinal, the fire was swirling around and picked up all the embers; then we had a five or six-foot thick layer of burning embers coming up the hill towards us. Rick Mullen (Fire Department Captain and Malibu City Councilmember) was down there with the Fire Department, and it was like a blowtorch.
“By the way, so much for the Fire Department coming around and telling us to get rid of trees: the trees didn’t burn at all. They were all scorched up to five or six feet from the ground, but the tops were fine. All the pine and eucalyptus trees survived – not one of them burned. And they’re 50-60 feet tall.”
Walter was prepared to fight a fire and had his own pump, two water tanks holding about 8,000 gallons of water, and three lengths of hose totaling 75 feet. Suddenly, everything started to go wrong. As Walter tells it, “When these embers started coming towards me, and I was spraying them with the hose, the water was spraying back at me as hot water because the wind was so strong. I decided I was in the wrong spot and backed up the hill. As I got to the top of the hill, my pump quit – maybe it got too hot. The air cleaner cover melted. The hose kinked and wouldn’t spray.
“When the fire started licking through the corner of the carport, I noticed the front bumper of my truck was starting to melt, and I tried to back it out and hit the motorhome. Then I backed up the motorhome so I could get the truck out, and I looked back and the whole truck was on fire. It was like a funnel in the eight-foot-wide opening between the house and the garage, and it got really hot right there. I finally got my car out just as the garage caught fire.
Carolyn returned to the property the next morning after sleeping in the car overnight at Zuma Beach. “Returning to the property was hard,” she said. “The power lines were down over Encinal Canyon Road and I didn’t want to drive over them. Then I tried Decker Canyon Road. There were no cops around yet; Decker also had wires on the ground, but I finally figured the power was out and I could drive over them. Farther down the road, downed phone lines were hanging above the ground making it impossible to drive through, so I parked and walked the last half-mile to the house. “
Conditions were tough living on the burned-out property immediately after the fire. “All the insulation in the walls of the motorhome had melted, but we lived in it for five weeks until my son bought a travel trailer and brought it up here for us,” Carolyn said. “Immediately after the fire, we had to borrow food from the neighbors who were not burned out. We got soup, beans, rice and water.”
“For a while, the Sheriffs wouldn’t let water trucks in to fill up our water tanks, and we didn’t have electricity to pump water from the water well, so there was no real running water. There was food at the fire station, and they invited us for dinner a couple times. They had dinner brought in from Oxnard: some company was contracted to deliver to all the fire stations in Malibu. They brought way too much: the fire station only had five guys there, and there was enough food for 20 people.”
“A guy from the Red Cross came up twice with Subway sandwiches for us. Some people were bringing stuff into Malibu by boat to Paradise Cove, and they brought some of that stuff up here and set up a table with supplies outside the fire station. That’s how we finally managed to get shoes, socks, jackets, candy bars and protein bars.
“When I evacuated, I had only packed a week’s worth of clothes, meds and toiletries for both of us,” Carolyn said. “We had a nice big safe, but it turned out it wasn’t safe, because everything inside it turned to ash. They tell you the safe is good for 90 minutes at 1,350 degrees, but the fire was clearly hotter than that. We had a couple of dumbbells that actually melted.
“It was really hard once the Sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t let us back in if we left Malibu. We couldn’t leave to go to the grocery store, much less meet up with FEMA to file our disaster claim. All you had was your phone and no cell service. What the hell? It was like we were being punished, like the fire was our fault. But we didn’t have any place to go because the insurance doesn’t pay for that, and if you’re gone you can’t connect the utilities when the utility guys come out.
“We had no power until the week before Christmas (almost six weeks after the fire). AT&T hooked up satellite service for the cell phones by the fire station. There is still no internet after two and a half months. Frontier Communications is working hard running new lines, but we’re so dependent on internet service that I have to drive all the way over to the library in Agoura Hills almost every day for the internet and printer.
Once the couple finally did have a chance to meet with FEMA, government representatives told the couple they weren’t eligible for any assistance. “I’m really disappointed in FEMA,” Carolyn said. “To process some of my paperwork, FEMA told me to fax something. I told them, ‘I don’t have a fax; I’m living in a travel trailer. I don’t have a computer or anything.’ Then they said if I wrote it out by hand, we could bring it to them and they would fax it in for me.
“I did that, waited in line, and then they decided they had to review my file. That took an hour and a half. Finally, the representative we were meeting with decided our form was okay to fax – only first, he had to ask his supervisor how to use the fax. Now, I really understand the Louisiana hurricane victims. I don’t really want to hassle with FEMA anymore – I’m tired.
“I applied for housing assistance twice through our insurance, California FAIR Plan [the government-run insurance exchange]. They finally agreed to give us $2,700 a month, but what can you rent for that amount?” [Editor’s note: despite laws against price-gouging after a disaster, local rent prices doubled almost immediately after the fire. Even existing renters had to pay up or they were thrown out as soon as their leases ran out – resulting in even more families being displaced by the Woolsey Fire.
