Recent wildfires have primed Malibu, Santa Monica Mountains for more

A red glow illuminated the valley behind the Brunel family’s Malibu home around 11 p.m. Monday. The fierce Santa Ana winds blowing dry desert air over the mountains and out to sea had already triggered public safety power shutoffs.

The family, whose previous home was destroyed by the 2018 Woolsey fire, knew it was a bad sign. They started packing and turned on their water sprinklers.

By 1 a.m. they were driving to Pepperdine University as flames raced along Malibu Canyon and up toward their home. Pepperdine buzzed with life as some students evacuated and others hunkered down in the school’s library.

The fire quickly blew through the Brunels’ neighborhood and reached campus.

Two hours later, it had all passed.

Fires have always been part of life in the Santa Monica Mountains, but in recent decades, they’ve exploded in frequency and ferocity. Humans introduced fire-loving invasive species (that happen to make for pretty landscaping) and built roads and homes protruding into the wildlands, creating ample opportunities for human-sparked fires.

Today, the hills above Malibu are locked in a dangerous feedback loop, experts say. More-frequent fires choke out native vegetation and open more land for invasive, tinder-like grasses that provide ready fuel for more blazes.

For conservationists, the ferocious Franklin fire and other recent blazes raise a burning question: Is it possible to break this feedback loop and turn the clock back on an increasingly flammable ecosystem?

“The grass-fire cycle is probably nowhere more apparent than it is in the Malibu Canyon of the Santa Monica Mountains,” said Alexandra Syphard, senior research scientist at the Conservation Biology Institute.

California State Parks and the National Park Service — which manage over half of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area that encompasses areas of Malibu and much of the mountainous wilderness — believe they have a potential solution: the coast live oak, a native keystone species known for its ability to impede fire and quash embers.

Luke Benson searches for spots at Topanga State Park to plant acorns, part of a multi-agency effort to replace fire-prone invasive grass with fire-resilient live oak trees.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains — a community nonprofit dedicated to stewarding the land and creating harmony between the ecosystem and the people living in it — has been monitoring oaks in the mountains for decades.

Now, the district is working with the state parks agency to identify strategic areas that are both prone to fire and able to sustain the oaks in a warming and increasingly drought-stricken climate, and to plant hundreds of new trees.

The nonprofit hopes the new trees can rejuvenate the struggling population of existing oaks and slow fires by creating a natural buffer and fending off the invasive grasses that have replaced the native chaparral ecosystem.

But with more than 80,000 fire-prone acres of wildland under the national and state parks’ purview, it’s no small challenge.

“I applaud those efforts — I think it’s going to be extraordinarily hard,” Syphard said. “Chaparral is extraordinarily species-rich. It provides many ecosystem services like carbon storage, reduction of soil erosion, water quality. But once it’s gone, it’s really hard to get back.”

Long before Europeans settled in Los Angeles — and even before the Chumash tribes inhabited the land and engaged in controlled burning — the Santa Monica Mountains and its landscapes of chaparral, oak woodlands and coastal sage scrub were no strangers to fire.

Lightning from rare coastal thunderstorms that rolled over the rugged, unsettled land would strike mountaintops, sometimes igniting a fire. Many were small, but if the thunderstorm coincided with Santa Ana winds, the gusts could blow embers into the canyons, spreading the conflagration rapidly.

Isaac Yelchin, left, and Luke Benson, biologists with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains, plant acorns from coast live oaks at Topanga State Park.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Decades — sometimes a century — would pass before fire struck the same land again. During these quieter times, the native chaparral and vegetation would slowly recover over the course of years.

Then the Spanish arrived — then the Mexicans and the Americans. The invasive species they brought — like black mustard, tree tobacco and castor bean — slowly crept into the ecosystem.

As humans filled the canyons and mountain ridges with homes and roads, they occasionally created sparks and fire, whether by a chain dragging behind a car, an engine backfire, a faulty power line or an uncontrolled campfire.

The rate of fire ignition began to rise. Fires started tearing through parts of the mountains faster than native species had adapted to recover, while the invasive plants could regrow within a single year.

“Many of the fire-adapted species in Southern California require 10 to 30 years to be able to establish after a fire,” Syphard said. “If a fire comes through within that window of time, the species can’t recover.”

The frequency of fires rose from once every 30 to 130 years to roughly once every eight years in Malibu Canyon. Lightning went from causing virtually 100% of wildfires to fewer than 5%.

Is it possible to turn the clock back on the cycle of invasive species growth and blazes like the ferocious Franklin fire? Conservationists are trying.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The coast live oaks, one of the most effective lines of natural fire defense in the mountains, started struggling too. Fires charred their bark, droughts forced them to ration water, and invasive beetles — some brought to Southern California via firewood — bored into them.

The result is an ecosystem that frequently burns at breakneck speed. On Monday, that scenario played out again in the Franklin fire.

“It was exponential growth,” said Jonathan Torres, an engineer and public information officer with the Los Angeles County Fire Department, noting that the blaze had caught hold in “a matter of moments. Not hours.”

Within minutes, a strike team that was stationed nearby due to the high potential for fire sprang into action. While the exact cause of the fire remains under investigation, the canyon’s thick vegetation and difficult topography didn’t help matters.

“That canyon was just rich and full of vegetation — everything from small and taller grasses to full-on trees,” Torres said. “It’s fuel. If it’s not there, it doesn’t burn.”

By Wednesday, the canyon was yet again transformed.

The Brunels’ home avoided devastation this time. Pacome Brunel, in his senior year of high school, spent the evening biking down the canyon corridor, which was lined with towering mountains of bronzed dirt and black and gray ash. He watched firefighting helicopters and airplanes make laps past thick red streaks of fire retardant splattered on mountainsides.

The next morning, just a few miles away, Isaac Yelchin and Luke Benson drove up a Topanga State Park fire road in a Resource Conservation District pickup.

Isaac Yelchin fills buckets with water for newly planted acorns at Topanga State Park.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The two Topanga natives pulled up to a grove with over a dozen Home Depot buckets of water, chicken wire, and a plastic bag of coast live oak seeds that had impatiently begun sprouting in their supervisor’s fridge.

The oaks have waxy, cup-shaped leaves — not only do they rarely go up in flame, but they can catch embers out of the sky and extinguish them, Yelchin said.

“My home in Topanga, we’re surrounded by oak trees, and I used to be really worried,” he said. But “looking into the research, they really slow fire down. It’s great to have them. … They kind of act as a shield.”

The trees can also communicate with one another through networks of fungi and share resources, while outcompeting invasive species for sunlight, water and nutrients.

Acorns planted strategically at Topanga State Park recently had already begun to germinate.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

In two hours, the duo planted seeds for 17 oak trees, enclosed them in mesh chicken wire to deter hungry fauna and tagged each one. The day’s efforts are another drop in the bucket toward the Resource Conservation District’s goal of establishing nearly 350 healthy new oaks in Topanga and Leo Carrillo state parks over the next two years — on top of their more than 450 trees already growing in the mountains.

The National Park Service is also planting oaks and native grasses, and the nonprofit TreePeople has its own oak tree program, but conservationists say the coordinated effort is still in its infancy.

And with a daunting number of acres to manage, the park agencies and conservation groups are focusing on strategic locations that provide ecosystem benefits and can act as a fuel buffer or prevent flammable brush from growing in common ignition areas, like along busy roadways.

“Most people really don’t like to hear there’s nothing you can do — which is why people want to go out and manage things,” Syphard said. “But one thing you could do is prevent human activities in those areas, if you have a large expanse of uninterrupted chaparral vegetation.”

Whether it’s done by shutting off electricity, closing roads and trails or preventing new home construction along the wildland-urban interface, such efforts can limit opportunities for humans to generate a spark.

Without suppression in the wildlands, residents’ last line of defense is to harden against wildfires by ensuring that flammable materials don’t collect on their houses and that there are no holes where embers can enter the home. The Resource Conservation District runs a free program to inspect community member’s homes and offer advice (with the promise that they won’t report any issues to insurance companies).

Yet, despite the formidable task, Benson continues to put in the work and even helps run a volunteer program almost every other Saturday that helps locals give back to the ecosystem in their backyard by collecting acorns, planting them and caring for the oak saplings.

“Conservation, in some ways, is an uphill battle, but it’s one step at a time, one project at a time,” he said. “You’re working against a pretty massive force, but I think that’s why it’s really important in this line of work — or even just as a human being existing now — to try to not let the pessimism take over.”