This firestorm pushed by winds gusting near 50 miles per hour scorched over 16,000 acres and destroyed 355 homes and killed three civilians, including Hollywood director Duncan Gibbins.
Gibbins directed such movies as "Fire With Fire" and "Eve of Destruction" and wrote the screenplay for the made-for-television movie "Third Degree Burn".
Needless to say, there is plenty of irony in the titles of those works.
This disaster was heavily-covered live by numerous LA media market stations to which CNN which at that time had little competition in the 24 hour cable news business often carried the live coverage by the local stations, to wit, KTLA-TV, KCAL-TV, and KTTV-TV.
KTLA-TV's Jennifer York working from KTLA's Skycam-5 news chopper won an Emmy for her incredible work reporting this fire.
I hasten to mention she earned the award having to babysit the late Hal Fischmann.
Hal was having a conniption which manifested itself by his regularly calling various weather observation stations around the Southland to get the latest wind speeds and directions and suggest the Santa Anas were abaiting even as the live video feed on the television showed a firestorm underway or bossily ordering York around as to where to go and what to look at and what was happening to which she handled the entire situation with grace and professionalism.
On Day Two of this fire the winds reversed and came in off the ocean but were still warm and dry as the air mass that had moved offshore the previous day had pooled up and simply turned back around the next day and moved back over the LA Basin having picked up little moisture from the ocean and having lost less heat then might be imagined.
This reverse Santa Ana Wind caused a lot of problems in Tuna Canyon where homes were lost.
The person responsible for starting this fire has yet to be caught but given this is a murder case there is no statute of limitations.
Some years later a couple of young men were falsely accused of being responsible for causing it as they were photographed near the origin early on in the incident using a firehose plugged into a hydrant.
One was currently then a firefighter and the other was trying to become one.
Given they had no alibi and given how often such cases turn out to be caused by firefighters trying to be seen as heroes these two young men were crucified in the public arena by the investigators and prosecutors alike.
The two friends claimed they just happened to be in the area and tried to help out and another man also happened by the scene who loaned them the hose to fight the fire.
That story seemed too implausible to investigators, but it was indeed confirmed when the workman who loaned them the hose heard about the controversy from where he was in Canada and corroborated their story.
During the Winter of 1995, particularly in January and March, there were serious floods and slides in the Malibu area as El Nino-fueled storms dumped epic rains on the Santa Monica Mountains which drained off the areas burned in this fire.
There would be another serious fire in this area on October 21, 1996, known as the Las Virgines Fire that would begin along US101 due to a downed powerline and driven by Santa Ana Winds would burn to the ocean but due to partly burning in the Old Topanga Burn Area and partly due to burning in a generally less-heavily vegetated area combined with better preparation by homeowners and firefighters alike would burn less than 14,000 acres and only six homes.
I helplessly watched both of these Malibu fires from my home in Atascadero back at a time when my local cable television provider actually provided KTLA-TV, KCAL-TV, and KTTV-TV 24/7 without block-out hours to protect local programmers up here or in the case of KTTV-TV, when I could still get it at all. Unfortunately, now a sucky local Fox affiliate has come into being this decade and I get none of the KTTV-TV coverage and KTLA-TV and KCAL-TV are often blocked out much of the day so I miss out when something in the LA Area is being given live wall-to-wall coverage like during the firestorms of 2003 and 2007 or even just last month.
A pretty cool time lapse of the Old Topanga Fire can be viewed here.
A really good video of this fire was done by Alan Simmons and can purchased here.
Kimmer
No comments:
Post a Comment