2 weeks ago
14
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
They had built their house on a rugged peak in the Santa Monica Mountains to maximize the views, and now Phillip and Claire Vogt went to their bedroom window and saw fires burning in the nearby canyons and black smoke rolling across the Pacific Ocean. The olive trees in their yard bent sideways in the wind. Helicopters flew over the ridgeline carrying loads of water. They could see one wildfire moving in from the north, barreling toward their children’s elementary school. Another encroached from the east, burning through an acre every few minutes.
“We’re in the middle of a disaster,” Claire said, last week. The fires had already killed at least two dozen people and destroyed thousands of homes, and forecasters expected another few days of dry weather and high winds.
“We prepared for this,” Phillip said. “We have a plan. Now we just stay calm and start getting everything ready.”
They had spent the last decade constructing one of the most fire-resistant homes in the country — a beautiful, Spanish-style estate that was also a fortress meant to withstand even the worst of California’s worsening natural disasters. Phillip and Claire had both grown up nearby amid the region’s annual wildfires, and Phillip, an architect, understood the precariousness of building a home in Malibu, on nature’s wild edge. Their house had heat-resistant windows, a fireproof clay roof, walls made of concrete instead of wood, and vents stuffed with steel wool to keep embers from flying into the house. The property ran entirely on off-the-grid power in case of an outage, and it was surrounded by about half a dozen private fire hydrants, high-power water pumps and tanks that stored more than 50,000 gallons of water.
Image
Image
The house had already survived one historic California wildfire in 2018, the Woolsey fire, which destroyed more than a thousand other nearby homes. Now more catastrophic fires were underway, and Phillip and Claire didn’t trust the local government’s ability to respond. They believed their house could withstand any worst-case scenario, but lately they had also begun to wonder about the toll that exacted on them.
