MALIBU, Calif.
The Bryson Fire did the dangerous part of its work on Thursday afternoon and overnight. Friday’s job, for the several hundred firefighters assigned to it in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Malibu, was making sure the wind did not undo all of it. In a Friday morning update, the Los Angeles County Fire Department put the fire at nearly 147 acres and 17 percent contained, according to USA TODAY, a modest-sounding percentage that, in country this steep and fuel this dry, represents a night of genuinely hard work.
The fire ignited late Thursday afternoon in the Santa Monica Mountains, and firefighters who arrived found a wind-driven blaze moving rapidly through medium to heavy fuels, Los Angeles County Fire Chief Anthony Marrone said at a Friday morning press conference, according to USA TODAY. The Ventura County Star, tracing the fire’s first hours, reported that it was reported around 4:30 p.m. Thursday in the Encinal Canyon Road area, that early estimates ran higher overnight, and that by early Friday morning officials had it mapped at 147 acres with 17 percent containment as a second day of gusty Santa Ana winds began. Two timelines, one fire, and the same Friday morning picture: smaller on the map than the worst early guesses, and nowhere near finished.
One Firefighter Hurt, No Homes Lost So Far
One firefighter suffered minor injuries and was taken to a local hospital, USA TODAY reported from the county update, with Chief Marrone declining to go into further detail. No structure loss or damage had been reported as of the Friday updates. Those two facts together are the definition of a fire going as well as a fire can go, and everyone involved in the Friday briefing seemed aware of how conditional that sentence is. Containment lines in the Santa Monica Mountains are only ever one wind shift away from being tested again, and Friday’s forecast was offering exactly that test.
About Those Two Structure Numbers
Readers following this fire across outlets today will run into two very different figures for structures threatened, and both of them come from official sources, so let us be careful with them rather than picking the scarier one. At Friday morning’s press conference, Chief Marrone said more than a hundred structures in the general area are threatened, while cautioning that if winds pick up and crews lose containment, a larger area could be affected, according to USA TODAY. A Friday incident update, meanwhile, put the threatened count at over 7,000 structures. Those numbers are not necessarily contradicting each other so much as measuring different things: the structures in the fire’s immediate neighborhood today, versus the much wider footprint that could come into play if the fire makes a run under the forecast winds. Either way, the practical instruction for people in the canyons is identical, and it has not changed since Thursday: be ready to leave, and leave when the order comes.
Evacuation orders tied to the fire extend south toward the Pacific Coast Highway, according to USA TODAY, with surrounding areas under warnings. Several hundred personnel have been assigned, and crews spent Thursday afternoon and the overnight hours pairing the ground fight with an aggressive air attack that helped pull the fire up to its Friday containment figure. We covered the fire’s first wave of orders, closures and shutoffs in our earlier report on the Bryson Fire and Malibu-area power shutoffs, and the weather setup behind all of it in our story on the red flag warning for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Getty Villa Goes Dark for the Day
The most visible Friday closure belonged to the Getty Villa, the museum above the Pacific Coast Highway, which was closed on Friday out of an abundance of caution, according to USA TODAY’s account of county officials’ statements. It is a telling detail. The Villa is not in the fire’s path in any update officials gave Friday, but closing it keeps visitor traffic off the coast roads that evacuees and fire crews may need, and it signals how seriously the county is treating a fire that, on paper, is only 147 acres. In the Santa Monica Mountains, acreage is the least informative number on the page. Location and wind are the story.
The same caution showed up in the region’s power grid. Nearly 35,000 Southern California Edison customers in Los Angeles County had their power shut off because of the heightened wildfire risk, according to an outage map cited by USA TODAY, and the utility was considering shutoffs for tens of thousands more. These public safety shutoffs are the region’s grim bargain: dark homes and dead refrigerators in exchange for removing one major ignition source while the winds are up. Malibu residents, who have lived some version of this drill repeatedly in recent years, spent another Friday doing it with a fire burning in the hills above them.
A Red Flag Weekend, and a Second Fire to the South
The Malibu Coast remains under a red flag warning through the evening of Saturday, October 17, according to the National Weather Service in Los Angeles via USA TODAY, and crews on the Bryson Fire were facing wind gusts of 40 to 65 miles per hour as Santa Ana winds worked the region through Saturday. That is the window that matters. If the lines built Thursday night and Friday hold through the worst of the gusts, the containment number should climb and the evacuation map should shrink. If they do not, the 7,000-structure version of this story is the one nobody wants to write.
The Bryson Fire is also only half of Southern California’s Friday. In Orange County, the Norte Fire grew to 250 acres and impacted four homes near San Juan Capistrano in the space of a single afternoon, a reminder that this wind event is a regional emergency wearing two different county names. The cause of the Bryson Fire remains unknown, officials said, and determining it will wait, as it should, until the fire itself is no longer the urgent problem. For now the work is simpler and harder: hold the line, protect the canyons, and get through Saturday’s wind with the map still reading 147 acres. Follow the latest developments in our news coverage as officials update containment and evacuations.
