Hotels Offer Shelter From the Firestorm

When they arrived Tuesday night, their clothes smelled like smoke and there were dazed expressions on their faces. It was easy to spot the residents fleeing the raging fires of Malibu.

They came with bags of belongings instead of suitcases. In the parking lots, their sporty cars were jammed with possessions and barking dogs. During the last few days, you could see them in hotel lobbies in no-nonsense sweats and gym shoes. Many hunkered down over phones with long lists of names and numbers.

They traded bits of information on the disaster as they walked through lobbies, rode in elevators, and drank morning coffee.

“It’s kind of like camp,” said actress Lindsay Wagner, who on Thursday night wore jeans, a baseball cap, no makeup and a tired smile. “Fire camp.” Wagner’s Zuma-area house was fine, but getting back to it meant taking a tediously long back route so she and her family bedded down for several nights at the Miramar Sheraton on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. While there, she spent time comforting other Malibu residents staying on their floor.

“There’s a family that was burned out across the hall from us,” she said. “My dog was barking at their dog.”

All through the Westside, already busy hotels scrambled to put up fire evacuees seeking refuge. Staffers fielded hundreds of calls from anxious relatives of firestorm-shocked guests, provided forgotten necessities such as shaving cream and toothpaste, gave toys to children, and relaxed no-pet rules, welcoming dogs, cats, birds, and even a white rat. And when some guests checked out confidently only to be turned back at the numerous checkpoints on Pacific Coast Highway, the hotels welcomed them back.

At the Shangri-La, a few blocks south of the Miramar Sheraton, General Manager Dino Nanni recounted one telephone call he received from a desperate evacuee. “Our house is going to be on fire, we need a hotel . . . ,” the caller said. The hotel also received a call from actor Sean Penn’s assistant saying his boss’s house was in danger and he needed a room.

Meanwhile, Catherine Alford and Michael Woodward sneaked their two Dalmatian puppies and one pug up the service elevator to their suite. But the subterfuge wasn’t necessary. “We kind of closed our eyes to it and didn’t see any pets,” Nanni said.

It was much the same at Guest Quarters about a mile away, where Ron Sandvig, director of sales, pitched in to help his staff unload cars. At one point, he pulled a big box completely wrapped in newspaper from a woman’s car. “Is this your cat?” he asked. Recalling how fear spread across the owner’s face, Sandvig tried to reassure her: “Don’t worry, we’re taking cats.”

“Well, actually, that’s the litter box,” the woman replied. The cat was in another box.

Hotels handled the bills as generously as they did the pets. In most cases, room rates were slashed. At Guest Quarters in Santa Monica, for example, suites that normally go for $165 went for less than $100. One evacuee who was 7 1/2 months pregnant was allowed to stay free.

When most of their 26 evacuated hotel guests asked to stay at least through Wednesday night, Guest Quarters dislodged a tour group and sent them to another hotel, footing their bills for one night. “They seemed to want the security of staying at one place,” Denny Fitzpatrick, the general manager of Guest Quarters, said of the evacuees.

Malibu couple Carol Shuherk and Mark Zupan, both USC faculty members, stayed one night at a hotel near the airport before deciding to move to the Shangri-La. “I called and said, ‘I need to have a room with an oceanfront view,’ ” she recalled. “They said they didn’t have one. I said, ‘Really? I’m just evacuated from Malibu and I really think I need an ocean-view room, something that seems like home. If you don’t have it, I may have to call another place.’ They said, ‘Just a minute. . . .’ ”

By Wednesday night, the couple were ensconced in their ocean-view suite with toys for their 21-month-old son, Will, and a cot for their 22-year-old au pair, Kristine Pedersen. Their bichon frise dog, Valentine, scurried around the room as they sat and mused about their incredible fortune. While most of the houses on their block of Rambla Vista are gone, theirs remains. When they were finally allowed back into the fire zone, they walked into their house and found this message from firefighters scrawled in the dust on top of the baby grand piano: “Saved--E.Co. 57.”

“We will definitely find them so we can thank them,” Shuherk said.

Hotel staffers, who are no strangers to unusual requests, got orders for what Michael Dunne, food and beverage director for the Miramar Sheraton, called “comfort foods.” He couldn’t be sure all the orders were from fire victims, but suddenly he had “three or four requests for chicken noodle soup.”

Beyond that, staffers listened patiently as distraught evacuees told their stories. Sometimes, they just let them vent. One fire victim was complaining to a concierge at the Miramar Sheraton that other guests attending a trade show there seemed to have no clue what he was going through. She nodded sympathetically, powerless to do more than listen.

“The people here have been great,” the frazzled evacuee said of the hotel staff as he clutched a paper chock-full of phone numbers. “But there’s a travel convention here--all these people are chattering away. I’m on the phone and I have to make four consecutive calls. And this person with a badge that says, ‘Hi, I’m from God-knows-where’ asks, ‘How much longer are you going to be on?’ Well, I’m trying to find out if I have a house.”

The man, who said only that he lives near the Malibu Colony, adjusted his wire rim glasses and conceded he might be overreacting. “I know it’s because I’m on edge,” he said. “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

Sometimes, there was little the hotel staff could do. As one Malibu resident checked into Guest Quarters, she glanced at two kennels sitting in the lobby and burst into tears. “She said, ‘I just lost my cat,’ ” Sandvig said. “We went in the back and cried.”

On Friday morning, four friends giving a seminar on pain management at Serra Retreat in Malibu were reliving the saga. On Tuesday morning, they left their Malibu hotel rooms to sightsee, but the fire prevented them from returning for their possessions, plane tickets and pain medication. As they sat in the lobby, they could laugh a little at how they shared one room and spent all day Thursday getting back to Malibu. “Not only do we know the area, we know so much about fire now!” said Judy Gober, from the Wilkes-Barre, Pa., chapter of the American Chronic Pain Assn.