In the hills 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 City Council member and his wife then received an alert about the wind-driven fire that would soon roar across the Malibu hills, spurring widespread evacuations.
The sky at the top of their driveway grew a brighter and brighter shade of red.
By 11:20 p.m., flames from the Franklin fire were licking the hillside, and the couple had packed their bags to flee. They had driven five miles on Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica when the mandatory evacuation alert was issued. The couple pressed on.
From a hotel room in Santa Monica, Silverstein toggled between watching TV news and the Ring cameras stationed around his home as the fire gradually encircled his property through the night.
“This is surreal,” Silverstein said in an early morning interview. “My wife just said there was a water drop on our house.”
The lawn and trees around the home were “just burning wild,” he said.
“We see real flames,” Silverstein said. Earlier in the night, bushes and fence at the top of the property burned, a sight vividly rendered in video, but fire crews showed up and doused the area.
“We thought it was completely under control,” Silverstein said. “For a while it looked like we were in the clear. Then we could see the fire burning in the distance, and then a bunch of embers came flying into the yard.”
After three hours of remote viewing, one camera was fried. Silverstein said he was recording the conflagration as it unfolded, watching it with his children, and talking to them via Zoom. One of his children described the remote viewing as brave.
“Brave,” Silverstein sighed. “What choice do I have?”
He said the moment was accompanied with a sense of helplessness about his family’s home as well as about his neighbors and their community.
“I think I’m in shock right now,” Silverstein said.
He didn’t know what the night would bring. And although he’s a City Council member, he said he had little to no power in emergencies like this, adding, “It’s completely in the hands of the professionals.”
If they were lucky, he said, he and his wife would have to deal with major smoke damage.
“I just hope my house survives, and I hope everyone else’s does too,” he said. “We’ll see what tomorrow brings.”
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