In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you everyone has been sending me the amazing picture you see above. People have sent it to me because they know my obsession with air-cooled Volkswagens, and of course it’s just a powerful image no matter what. Amidst a sea of charred remains from the Palisades Fire, the gray and blackened detritus of people’s lives sits an impossibly bright and cheery icon: a 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 bus, somehow unscathed by the conflagration, sitting there vivid and defiant, a shockingly apt mascot for what will be Southern California’s inevitable rebirth.
The whole thing is so wildly improbable and perfect that I’ll admit the jaded and cynical bits of my mind wondered if it was somehow staged. How could this bus have managed to survive so incredibly intact when literally every single thing around it is burned to cinders? And the fact that it’s not just any classic car, it’s a VW Microbus, arguably the vehicle most associated with at least one very well-known concept of Malibu, it all just seemed too on-the-nose.
But, the story seems to check out! The Bus’ owner, Megan Weinraub (who is, in an also wildly on-the-nose way, a surfboard designer) parked the bus on a flat part of the street by her apartment, because she’s still new to driving stick, and wanted to avoid starting on a hill, it seems. When the evacuation order came, she left in her more modern, daily-driver car with her dog, leaving the bus parked on the street.
(screencap: NBC 4)
While Weinraub, along with all the other residents who had to evacuate, has not been permitted back in the area, various media has been allowed back, and footage of the side of the bus facing the fires has been recorded, a still from which you can see above. The bus didn’t exactly escape unscathed, with damage to paint and glass and some melted turn indicator and side marker lamp lenses. Other reports showed that the heat did blow out the rear window, and the interior is pretty full of ash. I suspect that a lot of the plastic and other non-metal parts of the engine – battery, distributor cap, heater hoses, and so on – are likely ruined, but all that stuff is pretty easily replaced.
Overall, though, it fared incredibly well!
I don’t really understand how it escaped with such light damage, but I’m not a fire, and I don’t really understand their motives or how they work. Perhaps the fact that it was parked on asphalt without much in the way of fuel around it contributed? I’m not sure anyone really can say for sure.
(screencap: Inside Edition)
It hardly matters, though. This old Bus’ stubborn refusal to become a charred cinder is something that Los Angeles needs right now. It defiantly held onto its color (I’m pretty sure it started life as a Reef Blue/Pastel White Bus, which VW referred to as a “Station Wagon”) when every force around it sought to desaturate it into gray misery like everything around it.
It’s not going to put anyone back in their home or re-constitute their old family pictures or keep landlords from rent-gouging or insurance companies from jacking up premiums to absurd levels, but this bus’s survival does do some good for the soul of Los Angeles, and that has value, too.
I lived in LA almost 20 years, and while we absolutely had so many wildfires that you just expected them every year – including at least one I could see from my old neighborhood – I’ve never seen or heard of anything like the scale of these fires before. This is something new and terrible and has the potential to change LA irrevocably.
But Los Angeles is, and will always be, Los Angeles. That means that the grim truths of reality don’t ever entirely affect it. Was it a good idea to build a city of that scale in the desert in the first place? To have to carefully cultivate every living non-desert-scrubby plant, to have to get water from the Colorado River, to deal with all the earthquakes and invading aliens and self-important assholes that are everywhere?
Of course not! But does Los Angeles do it anyway, and somehow manage to be a city of fascinating and wonderful people, places, and things, the whole spectrum of nouns? Of course it does. LA will be back, as fantastic and improbable as ever, and this lightly-toasted little Bus is a fantastic and improbable reminder of that.
(top image: AP Photo, Mark J. Terrill)
Lots of old cars on the streets survived. It’s because they were far away from what would burn hot and for a long time due to lack of localized fuel. It did not get hot enough to ignite anything on the car. A lot of old cars burned up in garages because they were subjected to high heat for an extended period.
There is nothing surprising here.
Blasphemy! All hail the Magic Bus!
What is being under reported is all the folks who saved their houses with basically a garden hose or a harbor freight pump, pool water and a hose. In this case the below guy bought actual fire fighting gear and saved his house.
https://www.live955.com/hero-brain-surgeon-saves-5-malibu-homes-with-his-own-equipment/
I dunno how I feel about that. On the one hand, I would want to save my home. On the other hand, is it worth potentially dying for if things go wrong? Officials might want to downplay these stories for that reason.
Yeah, championing these folks is really dumb. Not smart move. During Hurricane Beryl, a neighbor decided to do the neighborhood a favor and clear off downed trees from lines just to the south of our neighborhood so power could be restored faster. Risked killing himself and was championed by other not smart people nearby. I didn’t need an idiot with a chainsaw risking death to get my power back. I needed professional line workers. Don’t do this.
The fun icing on the cake….our power feeds in from the north of our neighborhood. The lines he cleared? Yeah, didn’t have anything to do with our outage.
On that day midst flames and dust (Too much, Magic Bus)
The fire skipped the lady’s Magic Bus (Too much, Magic Bus)
Go easy on the insurance companies. They are trapped. Either they charge enough to continue as going concerns or they go bankrupt and everyone wants their heads for financial mismanagement. The problem is the climate aggravated fires/disasters, not their cruelty or profiteering. Yes, insurance is a messy as hell thing, but unfortunately it’s a unavoidable reality.
The stoner van has been around so much smoke over the years it became immune.
Spicoli was also unscathed when he emerged from the smoky van
Like bruh its literally blue they gotta paint the roofs blue too next time
No word on the red truck at the bottom of the wider image also surviving “unscathed”?
Lots of old cars on the streets survived. It’s because they were far away from what would burn hot and for a long time due to lack of fuel. It did not get hot enough to ignite anything on the car. A lot of old cars burned up in garages because they were subjected to high heat for an extended period.
VW needs to go back to building busses like this.
Minus the char, of course.
Living in San Diego in an area prone to wildfires I already had the thought that if I ever had to evacuate I would move my most prized car onto the street with the hope that there’s a small chance it could survive a fire if not parked next to a building. Glad it actually worked for this VW.
Call me cynical… I strongly suspect the AP photo has been selectively edited to make the van appear brighter against the burned out surroundings. The colors simply look off in the photo. At the very least, it was deliberately underexposed. The NBC image looks more plausible.
Still cool… but…
I used to deliberately underexpose when I was in the news game. Not for any nefarious purpose, it just looked better – and was handy to reduce shutter speeds too.
Keep in mind it also has a different color profile from the rest of the scene too, the white balance is going to push it a bit.
All photography is editing. That was true in the analog days too.
There’s a fine line. What’s ok for an “art” photographer often isn’t for a photojournalist. Back in the analog days, “dodging” or “burning” to emphasize something misrepresented what happened. The picture has lost objectivity. Likewise… pumping the saturation of a bus and desaturating the context in a fire (or otherwise making things more dramatic) isn’t appropriate for a news photo. It makes for dramatic picture, but….
Convection airflow is a funny thing. All that hot air rising over the fires has to be replaced with some cooler air from somewhere not on fire. In this case, I would guess the VW was parked in a source of the cooler air replacing the rising hot air.
So air-cooled VW, then?
How did I leave that joke on the table?
possibly a fire truck was parked upwind next to the bus and shielded much of the heat
When VW made durable cars like the Toyota Tacoma that survived too.
Neither vehicle can credit their survival to their build quality.
I bet the radiator burst open and doused the flames. That’s gotta be it.
That reminds me of a friend of mine who suggested I carry extra radiator hoses and clamps, because “those go bad” on old cars – in a Corvair
I re-watched the movie Duel over Christmas and it occurred to me that based on the odometer shots, his radiator hose needed replacing after only 5000 miles.
Amazing story. I would like to suggest to Megan that she “register for her wedding” at a VW parts store so we can all buy one part to help her rebuild.
I don’t really understand how it escaped with such light damage, but I’m not a fire
So all those years we’ve been calling you Torch, that was a lie? FOR SHAME!
Dammit, you magnificent bastard!
I mean technically, a Torch is just a method of making fire mobile. Not the actual fire itself.