In Southern California, Citizen Firefighters Battle to Save Their Homes from the Blaze

Fire and smoke create an orange glow over California hills.
As of Thursday morning, with fires still burning on either side, the Malibu neighborhood of Point Dume remained under evacuation orders.Photograph by Kevin Cooley for The New Yorker

When the Woolsey Fire crested the Santa Monica Mountains early Friday morning, the flame front extended fourteen miles across the range. In the days since, urged forward by winds of up to seventy miles an hour, the fire has burned a hundred and fifty square miles, destroying more than five hundred structures and causing—so far—three deaths. Some two hundred and fifty thousand people fled the region, many of them by way of the Pacific Coast Highway, where gridlock in both directions, and no traffic lights—no power—caused hours-long delays. (One mother posted on Instagram that, fearful of getting trapped on the road if the fire came, she had evacuated her three young children by driving on the sand as far as she could go.) Untold numbers ignored the evacuation order, intent on defending their homes with hoses, handheld extinguishers, shovels, buckets filled with water from their pools.

One of those who stayed back was the Malibu city-council member and mayor pro tem Jefferson Wagner, better known as Zuma Jay, whose surf shop is a fixture on the P.C.H. (The office of mayor rotates among city-council members; the current mayor, Rick Mullen, an L.A. County firefighter, was on the fire line.) At a meeting for evacuees, held in an auditorium at Santa Monica High School on Tuesday night, Jefferson’s daughter, Ava, told the audience that her father, a former Marlboro man and a stunt performer, had been exposed to toxic levels of carbon monoxide in an effort—doomed, as it turned out—to save his home. “His lungs, kidneys, airways, and eyes were severely damaged,” she said, adding that he had recently been released from the I.C.U. “They are all reversible conditions that will heal as our community heals.”

The purpose of the meeting was for government representatives to insist to an agitated public that the ongoing emergency response was unstinting: they had deployed nearly four thousand firefighters, six hundred deputies, so many fire engines, dozers, and electrical crews. (“Where were the firefighters on Friday? Where were they? Where were they? Please tell us, where were they!” people shouted at the stage.) But underneath the official message hummed a coded counter-message, on the locals-only frequency. It was in the words that Ava Wagner relayed from her dad, celebrating “our brave neighbors coming together to fight the fire and support each other.” It was in a thank-you that Skylar Peak, a thirty-four-year-old city-council member, extended to the Point Dume “bomberos,” a group of his friends who, days into an ordeal that had destroyed some fifty houses in the close-knit Malibu neighborhood of Point Dume, were still fire-spotting and extinguishing, and refusing to leave. Outside the auditorium, a young woman told me that even as the state representatives were giving speeches about official fire-containment strategies, she was watching a different narrative unfold on her phone: “It’s kind of rude, but I was watching current live videos of our boys there on Point Dume fighting fires, putting out hot spots with a hose.” If things were getting under control, she implied, it was due to an underground effort.

After the meeting, Peak climbed into a hulking white truck with a license plate reading PEAK POWER. His childhood friend, Remington Franklin, put on a pair of leather work gloves and got in the driver’s seat. Peak, a gas mask dangling around his neck, turned on K-Day, the only radio station that didn’t have static in Malibu. We headed north on the P.C.H., past police checkpoints and road closures. (Some neighborhoods had started to be repopulated. But, as of Thursday morning, with fires still burning on either side, Point Dume remained under evacuation orders.) Franklin said that, when he first heard about the fire, he tried to get in to help but was turned back at the checkpoints. “Finally, I came up with the brilliant plan of getting in via boats,” he said. “We got in on a boat, brought in food, water, gasoline, a bunch of stuff that the boys needed. We only had one dinghy and a bunch of paddleboards, so we took turns paddling in.” He had run supplies like that for three days in a row, and at night patrolled for fires with his friends.

I asked him if the effort was coördinated with the fire department. “Nope,” he said. “They were there. But here’s the thing: they do them and we do us. It is a ‘Lord of the Flies’ situation up there right now. There’s downed power lines everywhere. There’s not a lot of comms. There’s houses that are burnt down. There’s people wandering around—you don’t know if it’s a looter. There’s a group of guys that’s going to go back in there and defend the homes.” Earlier that day, the singer Pink’s husband, Carey Hart, had posted a warning to looters on Instagram. “It’s unfortunate that some people take advantage of others in a crisis,” he wrote. “While the malibu fires have been burning, some locals have been fighting off and defending their property against the fires. There have been sightings of looters breaking in to homes. Well, if you are a looter, think twice if you are heading back into malibu. #DefendYourLand #2ndamendment.” The accompanying picture, in black-and-white, showed a group of men in gas masks with handguns and rifles, in front of a barricade spray-painted “Looters will be shot on site! PDC Posse.” (I’m guessing that P.D.C. stands for Point Dume Club, an upscale trailer park on Point Dume.) The call for vigilante justice was childish and churlish, but also chilling. At the meeting in Santa Monica, Peak had urged, “Please do not resort to any violence in our city.”

Over the weekend, the bomberos had moved their headquarters from a house—they worried that, with embers still airborne, the gasoline that they had stockpiled for their cars might cause a conflagration—to the parking lot of the vacant Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School. Splashed with harsh generator light, it had the feeling of a rebel base (minus the guns) inside an exploded Costco. Thirtysomethings with walkie-talkies roamed around piles of single-serving chip bags and walls of bottled water. Five hundred gallons of fuel and a supply of inflatable solar-powered lights had just come in by way of a caravan of S.U.V.s; some deputies, clearly, were friendly to the cause. Near an askew sign reserving parking for the P.T.A. president, I saw Richard Dean Anderson, the sixty-eight-year-old actor who played MacGyver on TV. He had on a headlamp and, around his neck, a lanyard for his keys and eyeglasses. When the fire hit the point, he said, “It was like that scene in ‘Wizard of Oz’ where Dorothy’s caught in this whirlwind. I had zero visibility, and it was hot, dark brown smoke, and ash. I was starting to feel some little burning stings.” He stayed up for the next several nights, going after sparks with an extinguisher. “We’re without electricity, for a while there was no water pressure, and there’s no communication whatsoever.” Someone offered him a solar light to take home, which he accepted genially. I asked him if he’d had to rig anything from gum foil during the ordeal. “I’m hanging flashlights from a chandelier, putting them on broad beam,” he said. “There are numerous times when you just don’t have something, and you have to make it work. A couple of times, I have made myself chuckle.” A moment later, he couldn’t find his glasses. When I pointed out that they were around his neck, he smiled and said, “MacGyver, eh?”

In the Point Dume elementary-school parking lot, at the meeting in Santa Monica, and on Saturday, when I was in Malibu watching houses burn, I heard fury and bafflement from residents about the firefighters’ seeming lack of interest in putting out blazes in densely settled neighborhoods. Whether or not the fire department’s strategy was justified—given the taxed fire resources, the unusually fast-moving fire, and the commitment to protect life over property—people were dismayed. It may be that, in an age of increasing suburbanization in sensitive rural environments and aggressive climate change (what Governor Jerry Brown aptly called “the new abnormal”), these expectations are misplaced. If the rules of nature are changing, don’t we need to recalibrate?

The wealthiest—i.e., the Kardashian-Wests, not usually whom I’d think of as canaries in the coal mine—have already adjusted, and, it was widely reported this week, are utilizing private firefighting teams to save their homes. But what about everyone else? In much of Malibu, the gap between what people expected and what they got has been filled by citizen-led efforts. Among those in the parking lot, there was a desire to professionalize their homemade operation, and, it seems, avoid gas-mask vigilantism. Dane Skophammer, a local chef, sat at a folding table covered with inventories, tacked down with duct tape, listing who had taken how much gasoline and when. He said that the neighborhoods in western Malibu were hoping to establish, with support from the city, an official community-response organization. “What that’s going to mean is a well-prepped, trained group of people with caches of equipment and supplies and training and detailed knowledge of the terrain and the sorts of threats that we face. We need to establish a strategic-command area. The reality is, as much as we hope to work with the city, we’re going to do it either way.” In one day on GoFundMe, the bomberos raised more than thirty thousand dollars for “fire hoses, pool pumps, generators, proper work attire, tools, respirators, and other supplies for other natural disasters such as sand bags and headlamps.”

Malibu’s next crisis will come with rain, which is in the forecast for next week. A year ago, the devastating Thomas Fire in Ventura County set the conditions for mudslides that killed twenty-one people in Montecito. “If we’re foolish enough not to learn from Montecito or any of these other areas that were devastated by fire and then floods and mudslides and death, then we didn’t learn anything from recent history,” Skophammer said. “We’re not going to sit and trust that people will help us. We’re going to do it on our own if we have to—but we don’t want to.”