How a ‘warrior’ brain surgeon saved his Malibu street from wildfires and looters
Chester Griffiths led his son and his neighbour in a marathon stand-off against the flames and criminals under a hail of burning debris
Susie Coen
The Telegraph
Chester Griffiths finished performing brain surgery, climbed into his car and drove across Los Angeles to save his beachfront Malibu home from the wildfires raging around the city.
It was a scenario the 62-year-old had been preparing for for years: he had done the training, sourced the fire hoses, and briefed his son and next-door neighbour about the course of action.
Now was the time to put it into practice.
What followed was a daring mission that saw the three men confront the worst inferno in the city’s history to successfully protect six homes in their picturesque cul-de-sac, while houses around them crumbled into a mess of ash and rubble.
As the Pacific Palisades fire worsened, swallowing up thousands of homes and leaving trails of smouldering ruins across thousands of acres, the men refused to back down.
Even as 80mph hurricane-level winds brought sheets of embers the size of footballs raining down, they continued to fight.
“At one point I started packing up my car and then I just decided I’m just not gonna let my house burn down, no matter what”, Clayton Colbert, Mr Griffiths’s neighbour, told The Telegraph.
Armed with N95 face masks, fire hoses and spades, the trio managed to keep the inferno at bay for four days and five nights.
“Without a doubt, if we weren’t here, none of our houses would be. There’s not even a 1 per cent chance”, Mr Colbert said on Friday as he poked his hose up against the smouldering remains of a neighbour’s home to stop it spreading.
The men’s diciest moment came on Wednesday night, when the fire barrelled towards them from the west, engulfing two of their neighbours’ wooden homes and sending them up in flames within 20 minutes.
