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On the hill above Malibu City Hall, Bruce Silverstein was at home Monday night when he smelled smoke in the air.
It was around 11 p.m., and the councilman and his wife then received an alert that a wind-driven fire would soon be roaring through Malibu’s foothills, causing widespread evacuations.
The sky above the driveway took on an increasingly bright shade of red.
By 11:20 p.m., flames from the Franklin Fire were licking the hillside and the couple packed up to escape. They were driving five miles toward Santa Monica on the Pacific Coast Highway when a mandatory evacuation warning was issued. The couple kept pushing.
Silberstein sat in his Santa Monica hotel room, switching between watching TV news and watching Ring cameras installed around his home as the fire slowly encircled his property overnight.
“This is surreal,” Silverstein said in an early morning interview. “My wife just told me that there was a drop of water in the house.”
The lawn and trees around the house “were just on fire,” he said.
“We’re seeing real flames,” Silverstein said. Early in the evening, bushes and a fence at the top of the property caught fire, a scene clearly seen on video, before firefighters appeared and extinguished the area.
“We thought we had it completely under control,” Silverstein said. “For a while it looked like we were clear, then we saw a fire burning in the distance, and a bunch of embers flew into the garden.”
After 3 hours of remote viewing, one camera failed. Silverstein said she videotaped the fire as it spread and watched it with her children and talked about it on Zoom. One of his children said remote viewing was brave.
“Brave,” Silverstein sighs. “What choice do I have?”
He said that moment was accompanied by a sense of helplessness, not just for his family, but for his neighbors and their community.
“I think people are in shock right now,” Silverstein said.
He didn’t know what the night would bring. He added that although he is a city councilor, he has little authority in such emergencies, adding that it is “completely in the hands of experts.”
With any luck, he said, he and his wife will suffer major smoke damage.
“I just hope my house survives, and I hope everyone else’s too,” he said. “Let’s see what tomorrow holds.”
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