• The Publisher’s Notebook •

In Malibu, It’s All about the Wind

BY ANNE SOBLE

Firefighters know that the wind rules. The courageous and skilled men and women who fly the aircraft and walk the fire lines know that nature decides the destiny of the infernos that ever more frequently remind us of our fragile hold on the environment in which we dwell. The Malibu autumn mantra has always been a variant of “If it’s October, the Santa Ana winds will blow; if the Santa Anas blow, sparks will fly; if sparks fly, wildfire will follow.” This is now a year-round litany, as climate change spurs the state’s drought conditions and intensive development in the wildland interface makes fire control increasingly problematic.
However, even the most negligible incidents can illustrate the wind’s power. In what is now second nature during Santa Anas, I was out Sunday night and pre-dawn on Monday clocking winds that ranged from 25 to 60 mph. When I arrived at the newspaper offices early Monday morning, my trusty pocket weather tracker and wind meter registered gusts in back of the building at 70 mph. The wind was strong, but I’ve held my ground in comparable conditions before. I have clocked gale force blasts of 84 mph in the mountains from the safety of my car.
But I was caught off guard when I turned the corner of the building. As I reached for the door knob, a gale force blast of at least 78 to 80 mph knocked me to the ground. The wind meter landed at my side, and only swift reflexes kept it from being blown away. The two sacks of market supplies I was bringing to the office had been snatched from my left hand, and the bags and their contents were scattered across the parking lot. Some of them were never recovered. The assumption is they were carried over adjacent fences, never to be seen again.
Still sitting on the ground, I turned my back to the wind and tried to stand. The wind was just too strong. I would start to get up, only to be buffeted again. Fortunately, at that point, a colleague rounded the corner and got help. They provided a wind shield and assistance. After determining that the worst of the damage was a sore shoulder, a scraped knee, and an aubergine bruise the size of a soccer ball, the realization sunk in that the removal of a huge old tree and shoulder-high hedges to facilitate construction below the building had transformed the terminus of the Kanan Dume Road wind tunnel into a vortex. When one of the fire officials said this week, “Wind is king,” I humbly concurred.