Malibu mansions face the same statistical certainty of burning as inner-city tenements, yet receive vastly different levels of protection and support. As the late Mike Davis argued in his 2018 analysis of LA's fire ecology, this disparity reveals uncomfortable truths about how we manage fire risk in California.
"Stand at the mouth of Malibu Canyon or sleep in the Hotel St. George for any length of time and you eventually will face the flames. It is a statistical certainty," wrote Davis. While Malibu experiences a major fire every 2.5 years on average, the tenements of the Westlake district suffer the nation's highest urban fire incidence — with one fire station handling 20,000 emergency calls in a single year.
The irony is that Malibu's fires are largely inevitable given its fire-dependent ecosystem. The area's native chaparral must burn periodically, and decades of fire suppression only leads to more catastrophic blazes. Yet wealthy homeowners there benefit from massive firefighting responses, insurance support, and disaster relief. Meanwhile, most inner-city fire deaths could be prevented with basic building safety enforcement.
"If enormous resources have been allocated, quixotically, to fight irresistible forces of nature on the Malibu coast, then scandalously little attention has been paid to the man-made and remediable fire crisis of the inner city," Davis wrote.
The pattern continues today. After each Malibu disaster, regulations focus on making homes more fire-resistant rather than questioning whether they should be rebuilt at all. As Davis wrote, "Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire: those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can't afford to live anywhere else."
Previously:
• Signs directing public access to Malibu beach only last eight days
• Smartphone app gives public access to Malibu's illegal 'private' beaches
• Malibu elitists who impede public access now face fines
• Famed Malibu beach is disappearing under rising sea eroding
