As an inferno raged in the Pacific Palisades, Derek Mabra went surfing.
The winds were generating “insanely good” waves closer to his home in Topanga Canyon, a mountain town about three miles up the coast. From his vantage point bobbing on the ocean, he could see spot fires cropping up all over lower Topanga — no firefighters in sight.
Less than two days later, Heat Hawks was in full swing. The band of locals, some of whom have stayed put despite an evacuation order, describe their mission as “house triage.” They scout their streets for fires, putting out the small ones and calling in the professionals if the flames grow beyond what they can handle with hoses and buckets of pool water.
Mabra wears a lot of hats — none of which, he readily admits, have prepped him for battling flames that could take down a house and his neighborhood along with it.
“F— no, I’m a carpenter and musician and surfer,” said Mabra, 43, grinning. “Not a firefighter by any means.”
But with first responders busy battling one of the worst wildfires in the state’s history — it doesn’t matter. Everyone just seems grateful for a little help ensuring the fire-prone mountain town is not the next one wiped off the map. He said officials have been waving volunteers through the cordoned-off road at the bottom of the mountain.
“We even have a password at the roadblock,” he said.
With the Palisades fire eerily close and firefighters stretched thin, residents of the tight-knit mountain community have taken it upon themselves to stomp out embers, turn off gas tanks and safeguard homes.
On Thursday morning, Jim Wiley, the town plumber and unofficial canyon caretaker, is checking on the fate of a few houses he heard might have burned overnight. He stops at a vacant, half-renovated home — one of the few whose owners he does not know personally.
“These are little bombs” he said, surveying cans of paint remover scattered next to garbage bags in the driveway. “Right next to the flammable stuff.”
He defuses them, crushing the cans and dragging them into the driveway.
As he winds his way up the mountain, most of what he sees is good news that gets delivered to evacuated friends and clients as soon as he gets a patch of service.
“You all have a house,” he tells one.
“Amazingly enough, your house is still standing,” he tells another. “You’ll have your own bed to go get snuggly-ugly.”
A few residents are less fortunate.
“My place is toast,” a driver informs Wiley as he passes on the road. “But my scuba tanks are still there!”
A blackened brick home on Swenson Drive houses nothing recognizable except for three melted cars in a collapsing garage. Another home on Saddle Peak Road has been reduced to charred rubble, the only things still standing are a stove and what looks like a gun safe.
“My wife and I, when we first got together, we used to live downstairs in a little apartment here,” said Wiley, standing in the debris where his front door circa 1988 used to be. “Jesus Christ.”
Wiley is a fourth-generation Topanga Canyon resident. His great-grandfather homesteaded in the canyon in the late 1800s and his grandfather helped build Topanga Canyon Boulevard, the main road through the community. He said he’s seen his home transform from a “backwater” — so remote the local weatherman used to forget to give a forecast for it — to a pricey enclave for artists that he can’t afford to buy a house in.
But some things haven’t changed. Residents new and old say they feel overlooked by their government — during normal times and natural disasters.
“You fill the gap, right?” said Wiley, lugging a fallen tree from the road just in time for a Cybertruck to pass. “We’re unincorporated — we just get overlooked.”
Some residents told The Times they felt forgotten in the first few days of the fire as the emergency response prioritized flames raging in Altadena and the Palisades before turning to the canyon community of roughly 8,000. Sculptor Chad Hagerman said he watched nervously as the fires encroached deeper into the canyon unchecked.
“There was not one plane in the air yesterday,” said Hagerman, who stayed behind to guard his home of eight years. “That’s the truth.”
On Thursday, it was a different story as L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents the mountain community, vowed that Topanga would be the “No. 1 priority” for the county fire department. Helicopters flew through the canyon all morning dumping water on spot fires.
“Those pilots are damn heroes,” said Otto Martin, 56, as he watched drop after drop from his perch near his friend’s decor shop.
Even with the focus on Topanga, it was hard to know how long it would last. Every half hour, Wiley’s “Sweet Home Alabama” ringtone would go off with a resident asking if it was safe to come back.
“If you’re in a comfortable spot with the family, stay there,” he said to one, looking out on a canyon still billowing black plumes of smoke.
So far, he said, the community had gotten lucky with the wind pushing the smoke southwest. But you never know which way it will blow.
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