CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--In my previous CityWatch column, I discussed the lessons of the Woolsey Fire. For that analysis, I used the reports of the City Manager of Malibu, the former mayor of Malibu, and an official from Bell Canyon, all of whom spoke at a meeting of the Neighborhood Council Emergency Preparedness Alliance. The major lessons I took from those reports were the following:
1) The system was successful insofar as it kept the death toll to a minimum. Compared to the Camp Fire in northern California, which resulted in 86 deaths, within a few hours on the morning of November 8, 2018, the loss of 3 lives in the Woolsey Fire was relatively low.
2) The evacuation of more than a quarter of a million people in a 24-hour period, although a bit haphazard, was successful as part of the strategy of preserving lives.
3) Telephone lines, cell phone towers, and electric lines are vulnerable to fire and should be improved in terms of their fire resistance.
4) The need for educating the public about advance preparation is obvious.
A Different Side of the Story
Within hours of that story appearing, I heard from Malibu residents who had a different view. I became aware that a considerable number of Malibu residents feel greatly let down by the actions of their city government, by the fire department, and by law enforcement. They question the wisdom of the mandatory evacuation -- in fact many of them stayed to defend their homes -- and they bitterly resent the fact that those who stayed were prevented by law enforcement from receiving supplies during the period of the evacuation.
The most tenacious of the critics who contacted me was Sam Hall Kaplan, a long time Malibu resident who had previously served as the Night City Editor of the New York Post, and at other times was a writer for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. In conversation, Kaplan comes across as somebody with a critical eye who is willing to review the performance of his local government, much as the neighborhood councils look at the actions of our Los Angeles city government. Kaplan pointed me to the statements of other Malibu residents, as did a writer at LA Observed.
A Firestorm of Criticism
In reading the views of Malibu residents in the Malibu Times and on internet sites, a few observations become glaringly obvious. By and large, the residents who are commenting on these sites are untrusting -- contemptuous even -- of their elected and appointed authorities. They are particularly negative toward City Manager Reva Feldman, the same person whose comments I reported on after our Emergency Preparedness Alliance meeting. At that meeting, it was not obvious that Feldman and her fellow panelist Rick Mullen are controversial by the chorus of critics you can find within the Malibu community. I cannot tell you how widespread that attitude is, but at least for some it is at the stage where a recall petition is being prepared for members of the City Council and demands for Feldman to resign have been made public.
Some Folks Didn't Need to be Made Aware of the Danger
I've written quite a few CityWatch pieces about the need for Los Angeles residents to become earthquake aware. If we are to believe Sam Kaplan, Malibu residents were well aware of the fire danger. "Everybody knew it was coming." They saw the results of the Santa Barbara - Montecito fire of the year before. It was the fire season, and "We were very conscious of this."
A Different Lesson on Preparedness
In our conversation, Kaplan hit on an issue that neatly summarized the kind of criticism I have been making about Los Angeles earthquake preparedness. "It's one thing to prepare a plan, and another thing to execute it." Just as Los Angeles has prepared a book on resilience, Malibu had its own report on preparedness. It had a city employee specifically assigned to disaster preparedness and it had a place at the city hall that could have been used to coordinate the response to a disaster.
At least according to the critics, the disaster plan was not followed. Critics point out, among other things, that the city of Malibu took its emergency preparedness center off line for a period of 16 hours. It was closed the afternoon that the fire started and wasn't reopened until the next day after relocating to Santa Monica.
It wasn't just the city government officials. Malibu locals (at least those who have complained publicly) fault the Fire Department for its performance and are scathing in their criticism of law enforcement for refusing to allow friends and neighbors to bring in supplies to those who had chosen to stay and defend their homes.
Was it a Case of van Moltke or Just Ineptitude?
A well known observation paraphrased from 19th century Prussian general Helmut van Moltke is that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. In the case of the Woolsey Fire, the question is whether the disaster preparedness plan was simply inadequate to the speed and ferocity of the approaching fire, or whether the plan just wasn't executed. In one case, you have a situation in which the real world situation overwhelmed the plan that had seemed best when it was formulated. In the other case, you have a situation in which leaders trained essentially as bureaucrats were thrust into a role not unlike that of military commanders, what with a rapidly approaching fire front, the need to move hundreds of thousands of people, and the need to protect both lives and property.
There are going to be inquiries about what happened and whether anything (or lots of things) could have been done better. Until then, we are left with the question as to whether Malibu did pretty well to preserve lives, or whether things could have been a lot better if the authorities and the plan had been better.
Father Knows Best -- Or Does He?
In reading the accounts of Malibu residents, one issue stands out. There is a fundamental conflict between the desire of residents to stay home and fight the fire vs. the decision by authorities to impose a mandatory evacuation.
In one case, there is a top-down decision to preserve life by applying a uniform rule -- you have to leave -- and in opposition, there is the decision, "It's my home and my decision and I'm going to stay."
There is merit to each side. People are not always rational (we still have parents who refuse to have their children vaccinated) and we are not always in a position to know or understand the magnitude of some risk. The idea that a brush fire could move from the Ventura Freeway down to the coast in a matter of mere hours is not something we would have expected even a couple of decades ago. Fire commanders faced with the rapidly moving fire, fanned by high winds, had to consider the worst case scenario.
The death toll could have been much worse. And fire commanders were aware that earlier that same day, a rapidly moving fire had consumed the bulk of the town of Paradise with people trapped inside. This was relevant because northern California had already asked for help from other fire departments and this necessarily limited help that Los Angeles would have gotten otherwise.
Bluntly speaking, fire commanders understood on the afternoon of November 8 that they weren't going to get adequate support from other fire departments, while the magnitude of the blaze and its likely path through dry brush meant that it was going to burn, largely unhindered, until it got near to the coast.
At this level of analysis, it's hard to fault the fire commanders for ordering the evacuation. Had they not done so, there might have been hundreds more casualties.
The Other Side of the Argument is that some people chose to accept a small amount of risk in order to preserve their life savings and long-term domiciles. They observed that if they hosed down the roofs of their houses and stamped out embers that arrived by winds, they could keep their homes from igniting.
This apparently worked for many homeowners. Admittedly it is not a winning bet if the fire is large enough and gets close enough. The smoke and/or the heat can kill you. A cabin in the middle of the woods would not be the place to adopt such a strategy. On the other hand, a suburban neighborhood that is blocks away from the likely path of the fire might be amenable to the "stand your ground" approach.
In reading the reports of a meeting between the county fire chief and Malibu residents, it is clear that this was the fundamental conflict. The chief made clear that he had been willing to accept the loss of structures in order to save lives. The audience did not accept his argument.
Should We Accept Peoples' Right to Endanger Their Own Lives?
Should it be Father Knows Best? Had more people stayed home even though they were in the direct path of the fire, almost surely more people would have been killed. The commanders took a long-range statistical viewpoint, figuring that if they got everyone out, then nobody would get hurt. They put structure preservation beneath preservation of life as the priority.
To me, this makes a lot of sense, but the question becomes this: At what point does the risk to life become low enough to justify assumption of a little bit of risk in order to gain significant savings in structures (including homes)?
Who gets to make that decision?
The Corollary
If we are going to accept -- at any level -- the right of people to stay at home in order to fight the fire, then we also must accept that those stay-at-homers should be able to get supplies brought to them. Survivor accounts tell us that people who tried to supply their friends and families with food and gasoline (for their electric generators) were turned away by law enforcement.
The essence of this argument revolves around the Yoyo quandary. Yoyo (you're on your own) is the prediction for what will happen after a large earthquake and it was obviously the case for people who chose to remain at home to fight the fire.
In the minds of the professional fire fighters, people who chose to ignore the order to evacuate were a problem. They were more likely to become victims of smoke inhalation or burns, and the fire fighters would then be forced to find and treat them rather than continue to their assigned locations.
In the minds of many of the Malibu residents who wrote about the fire, the people who chose to stay and fight are heroes. They are credited with saving many homes, not just their own homes but those of their neighbors who had evacuated.
The Lessons As to Earthquake Preparedness
At one level, the plan for earthquake preparedness is exactly the opposite of preparing for a giant brush fire. There is no fire to flee from. We are told to duck, cover, and hold on during the shaking itself. We are told that we should be prepared to shelter in place after the quake. This comes down to staying at home and living through the loss of electricity and flowing water as best we can.
At the same time, there is a strong corollary in the Yoyo scenario. We are told that our petty broken bones and lacerations won't be treated by first responders because they wont' come. They will be overwhelmed with major incidents. They will be at schools, shopping malls, or large building collapses.
This isn't all that different from the situation faced by Malibu residents who stayed home during the period of the fire. They sheltered in place (also without electricity and running water) and did their best to survive and preserve their property.
What's missing is (to use Sam Kaplan's term) the social contract between the authorities and ourselves. As I have been arguing for the past year, we need a plan so that in the event of the big earthquake, we will be able to move our injured to hospitals and know that they will be taken care of. We residents are capable of creating a voluntary ambulance corps using SUVs and pickup trucks, but we need a conversation with the fire department and the hospitals to ensure that there will be a system in place to accept and deal with individual casualties.
And by the way, earthquakes result in randomly distributed fires, which can kill more people than the original shaking. We ought to figure out how to train ordinary people to deal with such fires.
The Attitude Gulf
It took a while for me to put my finger on it, but I find that Malibu residents complain of the same thing I have been worrying about for the past couple of years. In each case, we are dealing with authorities (the fire departments and the police departments) who feel that they know what's best. They feel that only they understand what risks there are and how to best deal with those risks. They pay lip service to developing a civilian volunteer service (they created the CERT system but underfund and hamstring the training program) but don't really take it seriously except as an adjunct to their own activities.
The word for this attitude is Patronizing. It's what I see in Resilient LA and in the professional first responders. I suspect that this is what Malibu residents have been reacting to.
One Last Word
Malibu residents complain that their government agencies and the fire department let them down. I'm not surprised, but I wonder whether any human institution (with limited funding) would likely have done better on what was, after all, the first try.
The overall lesson is that civilians -- you and me -- should expect that first responders and government agencies are going to be less than fully efficient and will often be ineffective. What those agencies and first responders might consider is that the public could become effective at defending themselves if only the agencies learn to nurture and respect that approach.
This is the surprising and possibly hopeful conclusion I draw from the Malibu story.
I suspect that we will be hearing a lot more in the aftermath and inquiries as to what happened in the Woolsey Fire and the Camp Fire. CityWatch will continue to follow those discussions.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected].)
