Fire in the Wind

To the millions who surged westward to Los Angeles County after World War II, and to the millions who grew up and proliferated there, the California Way of Life was based on two prime elements: a house of their own and a car (or two). To keep pace with the dream, the new houses spread tract by tract, town by new town across the once-shunned dry riverbeds, up the hillsides, into the canyons and even along the fringes of the forbidding brown mountains. One of the farthest reaches of the commuter turned out to be the little colony of Malibu, built some 30 traffic-tangled miles from the heart of Los Angeles, at a point along Highway 101A where the brush-covered Santa Monica Mountains drop down to the Pacific. One reason for Malibu's attractiveness: when other parts of Los Angeles County are stifling with smog (partly abetted by the exhaust fumes from the county's 2,500,000 cars), Malibu, a jutting beach area, is swept clean by freakish, cold, dry desert winds.

Greener Mansions. Late one night last week the winds, whipping across the tinder-dry, drought-grey brush and scrubland of the foothills, picked up a flicker of fire on the slope called Zuma Ridge. Instantly, a mass of blood-red flames burst forth like an explosion. Soon, the winds pushed the flames down the ridge toward the highway and the sea, then fanned the flames north and east, chewing up everything that lay in their path.

The word spread from house to house, almost as fast as the wind. Families piled into cars and evacuated. Fire trucks screamed in from all points. In one surge the fire burned ten homes, including that of TV Star Ralph (This Is Your Life) Edwards (damage: $100,000), who was already in residence at his other home in Beverly Hills. (Movie pressagents, sniffing some profitable headlines for their clients, quickly got into the act with a string of announcements describing the tribulations of various movie folk, e.g., Kim Novak, Jane Russell, Alan Ladd and Glenn Ford. Even Hedda Hopper's hats got a mention when the ranch owned by her male milliners was burned.)

A New Worry. By noon on the day after Christmas, 1,000 firefighters vainly were trying to hold back the flames' onrush; they built backfires, slashed wide firebreaks around homes with shovels and bulldozers. More families were evacuated as a second, then a third blaze ignited, joining in a savage and flaming pincer-like attack of destruction.

At week's end the brush fires, burning low, had killed one man, injured 75 (mostly firefighters), blackened 40,000 acres, leveled 67 homes and other structures. Estimated cost of the damage to buildings and land: $100 million.

Now the residents who escaped the fire will face a new kind of worry: the burned-off watershed has left nothing to absorb the inevitable heavy winter rains. As certain as there are wild winds in Malibu, there will soon be floods.

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