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Around 11 p.m. Monday, a red light illuminated the canyon behind the Brunels’ home in Malibu. Santa Ana’s fierce winds, which blow dry desert air over the mountains and into the ocean, were already causing public safety power outages.
A family whose previous home was destroyed in the 2018 Woolsey Fire knew it was a bad sign. They started packing up and turned on the water sprinkler.
By 1 a.m., they drove to Pepperdine University as flames burned along Malibu Canyon toward their home. While some students evacuated and others took shelter in the school library, Pepperdine was buzzing with activity.
The fire quickly tore through the Brunels’ neighborhood and reached the campus.
Two hours later, everything had passed.
Fires have always been a part of life in the Santa Monica Mountains, but in recent decades they have exploded in frequency and ferocity. Humans have introduced fire-loving non-native species (which happen to make for beautiful landscapes) and built roads and houses that jut out into the wilderness, creating ample opportunities for man-made fires.
Now, experts say Malibu’s foothills are trapped in a dangerous feedback loop. More frequent fires destroy native vegetation, leaving more land open and allowing exotic tinder-like grasses to grow and provide fuel for further fires.
For conservationists, the raging Franklin fire and other recent blazes raise burning questions. Is it possible to break this feedback loop and turn back the clock on increasingly flammable ecosystems?
“Nowhere is the grass fire cycle more pronounced than in Malibu Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains,” says Alexandra Shipherd, principal investigator at the Conservation Biology Institute.
California State Parks and the National Park Service, which manages more than half of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, including the Malibu area and much of the mountain wilderness, believes there is a potential solution. Because of its ability to prevent fires and extinguish embers.
Luke Benson is looking for a place to plant acorns at Topanga State Park. This is part of a multi-agency effort to replace fire-prone invasive grasses with fire-resistant live oak trees.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
The Santa Monica Mountains Resource Conservation District, a community nonprofit organization dedicated to managing the land and creating harmony between the ecosystem and its people, has been monitoring mountain oaks for decades.
Currently, the District is working with the State Park Service to identify strategic areas where oak trees can be maintained in a fire-prone, warming, drought-prone climate, and hundreds of new planting trees.
The nonprofit organization aims to rejuvenate struggling existing oak populations by helping new trees create a natural buffer and repel invasive grasses that displace native chaparral ecosystems. The hope is that they can slow the fire.
But that’s no easy task, given the more than 80,000 acres of fire-prone wilderness under the management of national and state parks.
“I applaud the effort. I think it’s very difficult,” Seiferd said. “Chaparral is very species-rich. It provides many ecosystem services, including carbon storage, soil erosion reduction, and water quality. But once it’s gone, it’s very difficult to get it back.”
Long before Europeans settled Los Angeles, and long before the Chumash people lived here and engaged in controlled burning, the Santa Monica Mountains and its landscape of chaparral, oak forests, and coastal sage scrub were , I wasn’t used to burning in the open.
Lightning from rare coastal thunderstorms struck the rugged, inhospitable terrain, striking mountain peaks and sometimes starting fires. Many were small, but when thunderstorms combine with Santa Ana winds, gusts can blow embers into canyons and cause fires to spread quickly.
Santa Monica Mountains Resource Conservation District biologists Isaac Yelchin (left) and Luke Benson plant acorns from coastal oak trees in Topanga State Park.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
Decades or even a century could pass before the same land caught fire again. During these quiet periods, native chaparral and vegetation slowly recover over the years.
Then the Spaniards arrived, then the Mexicans, then the Americans. The exotic species they introduced (such as black mustard, tobacco mushrooms, and castor beans) slowly invaded the ecosystem.
As humans filled canyons and mountain ridges with homes and roads, occasional sparks and fires caused by things like chains dragged behind cars, engine backfires, faulty power lines, or uncontrolled campfires. has occurred.
Fire ignition rates began to rise. Fires began destroying parts of the mountain before native species could adapt to recovery, but invasive plants were able to regrow within a year.
“Many of the fire-adapted species in Southern California take 10 to 30 years to become established after a fire,” Seiferd said. “If a fire occurs within that time, the species will not be able to recover.”
In Malibu Canyon, fire frequency increased from once every 30 to 130 years to approximately once every eight years. Lightning causes virtually 100% of wildfires to less than 5%.
Is it possible to turn back the clock on the proliferation of invasive species and fires like the ferocious Franklin Fire? Conservationists are trying.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
Coastal oaks, one of the most effective lines of natural fire protection in the mountains, also began to struggle. Fires have scorched the bark, droughts have forced water rationing, and invasive beetles (some brought to Southern California via firewood) have invaded.
The result is an ecosystem that burns frequently and at breakneck speeds. On Monday, that scenario played out again with the Franklin fire.
“It was an explosive increase,” said Jonathan Torres, an engineer and public information officer for the Los Angeles County Fire Department, noting that the fire was “contained in a fraction of a second.” Not for hours. ”
Within minutes, an attack team stationed nearby was swung into action due to the high likelihood of a fire. The exact cause of the fire is still under investigation, but the canyon’s deep vegetation and difficult terrain didn’t help matters.
“That canyon was just so vegetated, with everything from small, tall grasses to lush trees,” Torres said. “It’s fuel. Without it, it won’t burn.”
By Wednesday, the canyon had changed again.
This time, the Brunel family’s home was spared catastrophic damage. High school senior Pacome Brunel spent her evenings riding her bike down a corridor of valleys lined with bronze dirt and towering mountains of black and gray ash. He watched as fire helicopters and planes circled over thick red streaks of fire retardant sprayed on the mountainside.
The next morning, just a few miles away, Isaac Yelchin and Luke Benson climbed a fire road in Topanga State Park in a resource conservation district pickup.
Isaac Yelchin fills a bucket with water for newly planted acorns at Topanga State Park.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
The couple, from Topanga, parked in a grove of trees with more than a dozen buckets of water from the hardware store, wire mesh and a plastic bag containing coastal oak seeds that had begun to germinate in their boss’s refrigerator. Ta.
Oak trees have waxy, cup-shaped leaves that not only rarely catch fire, but can catch embers from the sky and put them out, Yelchin said.
“My house in Topanga is surrounded by oak trees, and I used to be very worried about them,” he said. However, “when we looked at the research, we found that they actually slowed down the firing rate. It’s great to have them. … They kind of act as a shield.”
Trees can also communicate with each other through fungal networks, sharing resources and competing with invasive species for sunlight, water, and nutrients.
Acorns that were recently strategically planted at Topanga State Park were already starting to sprout.
(Myung Jae-chun/Los Angeles Times)
In two hours, they planted 17 oak trees, fenced them with wire mesh to keep out the hungry animals, and tagged each one. The day’s efforts will conserve resources by planting nearly 350 healthy new oak trees in Topanga and Leo Carrillo State Parks over the next two years, in addition to the more than 450 trees already growing on the mountain. This will be a new initiative toward the district’s goals.
The National Park Service is also planting oaks and native grasses, and the nonprofit Tree People has its own oak tree program, but conservationists say this coordinated effort is still in its early stages. It states that there is.
And with a daunting number of acres to manage, park officials and conservation organizations are looking for ways to improve ecosystems, serve as fuel buffers, and create public areas such as along busy roads. The focus is on strategic locations that can prevent the growth of flammable bushes at potential ignition sites.
“Most people really hate hearing that they can’t do anything. That’s why people want to go out and do something about things,” Seiferd says. “But when you have vast expanses of unbroken chaparral vegetation, one of the things you can do is deter human activity in that area.”
Such efforts, such as cutting off electricity, closing roads and trails, and blocking new housing construction along the wilderness-urban interface, could limit the opportunities for humans to generate sparks. .
Without wildland suppression, residents’ last line of defense is to be prepared for wildfires by keeping flammable materials out of their homes and making sure there are no holes for embers to enter their homes. The Resource Conservation District runs a free program that inspects local residents’ homes and provides advice (with the promise not to report problems to insurance companies).
But despite the hard work, Benson continues to work and spends nearly every other Saturday helping locals give back to their backyard ecosystems by collecting acorns, planting them, and caring for oak seedlings. I also help run a volunteer program to help.
“Conservation is an uphill battle in some ways, but we take it one step at a time, one project at a time,” he said. “You’re working against some pretty huge forces, and that’s why I think it’s so important, in this job, or even just as a human being, to try not to carry over pessimism.”
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