Will Climate Concerns Complicate Rebuild in Malibu?

The 300 families who lost their homes in east Malibu to the Palisades firestorm have one more challenge to rebuild their houses: rising seas.

Homeowners must not only gird their new homes with new fireproofing measures. They must also rebuild their homes to guard against rising seas and stronger storms from the south and west, the Los Angeles Times reported.

And that means raising the homes and constructing sturdier seawalls to protect properties and their septic systems from ocean encroachment brought about by climate change — with some projections putting sea level rise at up to 9 feet by the end of this century.

Those that lost their homes simply want a chance to rebuild their houses and put their lives back together. Many families had inherited the aging properties built along the Pacific Coast Highway, with most of their wealth tied to the beach.

Others, including academics and climate policy analysts, suggest what local and state politicians will not: removing homes along the beach to accommodate the advancing ocean.

“Right now it would be political suicide for anyone in public office to talk about not rebuilding everything and anything, after the fires,” one longtime observer of coastal development, who asked not to be named to avoid alienating Malibu homeowners, told the Times.

“This is not a time that invites the most thoughtful policy discussion.”

For the swath of homes along PCH from Topanga Canyon Boulevard to Carbon Canyon torched in the January firestorm, the damage appears to be getting worse. With little dry sand or protective shore, tides and waves continue to wash charred debris from burned homes into Santa Monica Bay, according to the Times.

With homes and their seawalls now heavily damaged, the already vulnerable Highway 1 could be more exposed to erosion. In addition, hundreds of septic systems for human waste at each of the houses remain buried under blackened debris.

Many homeowners will be required to install bigger tanks and better protective devices, which could drive up costs $250,000 or more. For Malibu, incorporated 34 years ago to keep L.A. County from installing sewers and a flood of development, installing sewers is a nonstarter.

“We want to get people back in their houses, and with the sewer system there are major hurdles,” Malibu Mayor Doug Stewart told the Times. “Let’s not kid ourselves and think we can wait three or four or five years to get a sewer system and then start rebuilding homes.”

Most of the fire victims face insurance payouts not expected, in most cases, to cover all their costs, with an estimated price tag for reconstruction at $1,000 a square foot or more.

While Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a waiver of the California Environmental Quality Act and the state Coastal Act to speed rebuilding, scientists predict challenges along the coast will grow with time.

“I think we suffer from what I call a short disaster memory. We want to get in there and build and rebuild as fast as we can,” Gary Griggs, a UC Santa Cruz oceanographer and coastal geologist, told the Times. But the impermanence of coastal construction ”is not something most people are interested in hearing about.”

The author of “California Catastrophes: The Natural Disaster History of the Golden State,” said extreme extreme weather — with bigger and more energetic waves connected to the warming climate — could be the biggest threat to coastal homes.

Many lots along the east Malibu shore reach over the mean tide line — the boundary between private property and land that belongs to the public, according to the newspaper. Environmental advocates have called for a “managed retreat” for especially vulnerable properties.

“The public has a portfolio with the public land along this stretch,“ Wade Graham, a historian who taught urban and environmental policy at Pepperdine University in Malibu, told the Times. “I think it’s really problematic to allow those houses to be rebuilt on that stretch of highway, where they probably shouldn’t be in the 21st century.”

— Dana Bartholomew