The Woolsey Fire: Malibu Burns, Again

The Woolsey Fire started on November eighth, twenty eighteen, near the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in Woolsey Canyon. Within hours it had leaped across the ten-lane Ventura Freeway and was moving southwest toward the coast. By the time it reached the Pacific Coast Highway and met the ocean, it had burned through the Santa Monica Mountains at a rate that surprised even experienced fire officials.

The final numbers: approximately ninety-seven thousand acres burned. Nearly five hundred Malibu homes destroyed. Three people killed. Roughly eighty-eight percent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area's federal parkland burned. Thirteen mountain lions wearing research radio collars were inside the burn zone when the fire came through; one was killed directly by the fire. In the weeks that followed, thousands of tons of ash washed from the burned hillsides into the Pacific, disrupting kelp forests that had been growing for decades.

Six years later, the chaparral is back. The mountains look, from the highway, largely as they looked before. The rebuilding in Malibu is incomplete; some lots remain vacant, some houses still show fire damage. The mountain lion population has recovered partially, and the radio-collared animals whose movements researchers tracked through the burn zone have provided some of the most detailed data on large-mammal fire survival ever collected.

The fire was not exceptional in the history of this coast. Malibu has burned repeatedly. The chaparral communities above you are fire-adapted ecosystems; they require periodic burning to maintain their biological diversity. What is exceptional is the scale of the human investment in the fire zone and the cost of its destruction. The mountains will burn again. That is not a prediction. It is a description of how this landscape works.