.jpg)
It’s 6:30 a.m. at Zuma Beach, along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, and the sun is just starting to rise over the Santa Monica Mountains. Situated across the street from my old high school, this is, for me, familiar territory—but it’s in an all new context now, serving as the “Incident Command Post” for responders to the Palisades Fire. In what is usually an empty parking lot this time of day and year, a makeshift city has appeared, equipped with housing, kitchens, showers, command centers, and supply tents, hosting firefighters and first responders from all over. Amongst the sea of thousands of people gathered for the morning briefing, I see a familiar face: Keegan Gibbs.
A few years my senior when we were in school, Gibbs has always been an incredibly warm and welcoming energy, and through the years he’s proved to be a consistent and caring presence to everyone in Malibu. It makes perfect sense that he has found himself in this position now, as the director of operations for our newly founded Community Brigade. Wearing tall leather boots and navy blue wildland firefighting clothes, he blends in perfectly with the rest of the massive crowd. He’s here at sunrise, for the 10th morning in a row, to get the latest updates on the fire and to assign his crew tasks for the day.
When the Woolsey Fire tore through our hometown in 2019, it devastated our community and claimed over 1,500 homes. At times when everything falls apart, you often find some profoundly beautiful acts of care and resilience by the people affected. Woolsey was no exception.
In Malibu, we witnessed a ragtag group of beach friends become the pillars of community response during that time. Armed with shovels and walkie-talkies, pool water and mutual aid supplies that were smuggled into the evacuation zone via boat and surfboards, they put out spot fires and they saved homes. They hugged their neighbors who lost everything, they offered emergency drinking water and goods to those in need, they cooked hot meals and they held people together. Out of grit and bravery, an allegiance to the land and a love for each other, they gave it their all to simply do everything that they could. As Gibbs puts it, “The Woolsey Fire ignited a primal and ineffable sense of purpose within us. It summoned the resilience of generations before us—those who always took care of their own.”
In the aftermath of Woolsey, there was a period of mourning, rebuilding, and for some, an awakening. Things were becoming clear. Despite the natural cycles of fire in Southern California—despite the intensity of extremely dry drought spells, the wind, the lack of controlled burns, the overgrowth and build up of invasive plant species, the stacks of homes built with no fire-hardening in mind—the devastation still somehow came as a shock to us all. After Woolsey, many found themselves far more in tune with an obvious truth: Events like these would continue to occur and continue to intensify. So how would we, as a community, reframe our relationship with the inevitable presence of wildfire?
The concept of the Brigade was simple: the members of our community needed to be better prepared for the future. This cowboy collective of friends, neighbors, artists, and parents, with the right training and equipment, could all truly be of service in the art of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disaster. After years of effort from Gibbs and others, the Community Brigade was formed in partnership with the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation and Los Angeles County Fire Department. The program is the first of its kind in the nation.
No one in the group is a stranger—a handful of them are the surfer and skater boys that so many of us had crushes on in middle school. The others are the people you know from the grocery store, from the beach, from memorial paddle-outs and graduations. These are people who have grown up together, loved and lost together, and, most importantly, people who carry a deep devotion to this land and those who occupy it.
Just four months ago, in mid-September, the Brigade’s first 50 members, ranging in age from their mid-20s to mid-70s, were formally taught, equipped, and deployed as official volunteers. In the few short months since then, Malibu has already seen three major fires: the Broad fire, the Franklin fire, and now, the historic Palisades fire.
The level of devastation Los Angeles has just experienced is hard for any of us to comprehend. It still feels impossible to put into words something that we’ve barely been able to process. But what I do know is this: To our town, the Community Brigade was invaluable. While the losses that have mounted these past two weeks are tremendous, for each and every person and family in our community whose home was spared because of the efforts of the Brigade—and there are many—their acts of service were beyond meaningful; they were everything.
Now that the active fire has passed, the Brigade is hard at work with community recovery. I follow along for the day as they do some “tactical patrol.” While some volunteers are involved with “mop-up” work, looking for hot spots and dampening out areas still smoldering within the rubble, others are assisting LA County Fire with brush removal and mitigation in areas still considered high risk. More still are doing damage assessments, or bringing in essential items like medications and supplies to people in evacuation zones, while another group gets started on the first wave of repopulation—escorting people back into their neighborhoods and making sure their pathways are safe.
I’m in the car with Gabriel Frolick as he goes to collect some firehose left behind in the Palisades. We’re soon standing on a street that Frolick and others had fought to save for seven hours straight before finally giving up. The street had been engulfed in 40-foot tall flames supported by 70-plus-mph winds; one of the homes in front of us, now just rubble and ash, belonged to another member of the Brigade, Tyler Hauptman. “Even if we had every engine and water tender west of the Mississippi, we would likely still have had the same result,” Gibbs says. Under certain circumstances, all that you can reasonably do is get out of the way.
The recent fires have, for lack of a better term, created trauma bonds. There is a hope that we’ve all come away with an even deeper understanding of what it means to live here, and an acceptance of the fact that we cannot continue to offload our responsibility onto overstretched responders once we’re in the height of a crisis. Our own education, awareness, and efforts can indeed make a significant difference, and I find that piece of information to be a beacon of light.
The mission of the Brigade is to empower people to become their own heroes—starting at home. It begins with mitigating structural vulnerabilities, preparing diligently, and fostering resilience among neighbors. Block by block, we can build fire-adapted communities that withstand embers, reduce fear, and eliminate dependence on others to fix avoidable risks. Together, the members of the Brigade hope to provide an example for our town, and for all fire-prone regions across the west, of what a truly wildfire prepared and adapted community can look like.
The Community Brigade program is run on volunteers, and funded by donations. Please consider donating here.
