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)
It survived because the Island wanted it to. That’s one of the Dharma Initiative vans from the show Lost
https://static2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070503163924/lostpedia/images/3/37/3x10_DHARMA_Van.jpg
I don’t know how it survived in such condition, but I’m sure the Internet will not fail to come up with an appropriate and totally plausible conspiracy theory.
I am sorry to report it already has. Directed energy weapons, a/k/a space lasers.
Jewish space lasers can destroy anything….. except the color blue. Look at all the trash cans! /s
It’s infuriating. I had to just shake my head and walk away at Lowe’s yesterday when some rando started talking to me about how darpa started the fires as a land grab because he heard Mel Gibson say it
That’s a survivor.
This is how Transformers get outed. This one is named BeetleJuice.
The LA Basin isn’t desert actually. It has more of a Mediterranean climate that had oak woodlands, grassy prairies, wetlands, as well as scrub. Here are two articles (and a good podcast episode) about what LA was like before it was paved over:
The Lost Wetlands of Los Angeles | Lost LA | Food & Discovery | PBS SoCal
A River Runs Through Los Angeles – 99% Invisible
But the fires are caused by the people in flyover states not buying electric cars /s
More like made much worse by American cities outside, say, NYC, DC, and Boston abandoning transit in the 50’s and 60’s.
I think Chicago has pretty decent public transport, especially by ‘murican standards
Thank you for this! I was just having the “LA is not a desert” discussion with somebody yesterday. The funny part is that the guy I was talking with is from San Francisco so he should’ve known better. To sum up: when you get on the east side of the San Gabriel Mountains – THAT’S the desert.
It’s the Libyans!
I had a girlfriend who was a Libyan once. Then she joined the other team, eventually.
I blame Ellen Degenerate…YMMV
Great Scott!
I bet there’s a whole Tacoma under that bus body because there’s no way anything but a Toyota could pull that off.
What a cool, thoughtful essay. It certainly made me feel better, and what more could you ask of a piece of writing? On the other hand, I’m hoping that the rest of the media keeps portraying LA as a crime-ridden hellscape because my only problem with this city (aside from somewhat regularly occurring natural disasters) is that people keep coming and making it more crowded.
The brave little toaster. Old hippies can handle some smoke.
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.
We live in the flammable foothils of California and I have a hand-pumped backpack sprayer, fire retardant, and water handy. I’ve told my neighbors where it is too. When we get an evacuation -warning- we plan on spraying things down, gathering the dogs and marked stuff and getting into our slide-in camper that already contains our go-bags and bug out. We’re not waiting for the evac -order- to get out.
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.
I think the can-do attitude should be celebrated if it doesn’t endanger anyone else. What if help never came. In the case of the surgeon dude, maybe he had a way to protect hisself. It surely worked out.
Yeah, this is exactly the spirit and initiative that built the country in the first place, the same sort of spirit that almost totally rebuilt Chicago within 24 months after their great fire. I have to expect it will take vastly, vastly longer to get Los Angeles County even to the 50% mark in their reconstruction, hell, its taken over 23 years to rebuild a couple office buildings in New York, and they’re still not done, everything is just so damn slow and cautious now, we just can’t get out of our own way to get things done
“Doesn’t endanger anyone else” is such myopic thinking. If that person gets injured or needs a rescue, emergency personnel now need to put themselves in danger to assist. Meanwhile, they are also being pulled away from others who truly need help, not due to a dumb decision of their own.
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.
They’ve been called the canaries in the coal mine. OTOH they have no business doing stock buybacks or paying anyone in the C-suite more than six figures until they’ve figured some way out other than hot-potatoing entire states.
That’s pretty much every large corporation. They don’t really care about people, they just pretend to.
The wild part is that people believe the marketing. While many individuals within a large company may care deeply about you, the company itself does not.
It’s job is to continue as a going concern. I choose those words carefully, as unlike most other businesses, an insurance company’s primary mission is to stay solvent. There are countless laws and regulations saying that they are legally obligated to essentially be profitable. I fully agree that corporate pay is insane, but that is not nearly just an insurance industry problem.
So back to my point. These companies have little choice. They are basically legally compelled to make profit and remain future solvent, but figuratively crucified if they are proactive and successful at it. It’s a fucked-up no-win situation.
Finally, insurance companies, unlike most other businesses and especially other purely fiscal entities, generally don’t merge or sell when they are under financial distress, because who would want them? They either do what must be done or fail and screw any policyholders they may still have.
You can bitch and moan (not you personally) all you want, but no one has yet come up with a better solution. Until someone does, insurance companies gonna do what they do best and are legally obligated to do; Remain Solvent.
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
Just as the fire was realllly getting going, the bus was like… “roll another joint, maaaaaan”
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….
It’s very easy to get that effect in-camera without heavy editing – even unintentionally. Keep in mind that the burned out landscape is inherently desaturated, so something even moderately saturated is going to stand out. Adding to that, given what you’re going to have to set your white balance at to make the rest of the landscape look normal, it’s going to further bump the blues. Add to that the angle of the sunlight – it’s directly hitting the can – and it’s a recipe for that kind of photo.
Is this what the guy did? No idea, I’m not him. But what I am saying is that it is extremely easy to get that effect with minimal editing in that environment.
I’m not making accusations. I’m asking questions. I will state, however, that “photographic dishonesty” _is_ an issue in journalism. An example: Altered images prompt photographer’s firing
My iphone can remove people and power lines that I don’t want in my photo with the swipe of a finger. I have a whole host of filters that make my vacation photos look cooler (color temperature), more vivid, more dramatic or more… more. What is “real” is on shaky grounds these days.
I know enough about photography (digital and film) to make me suspect the photographer made the decision to go for drama. Comparing the color of the van in the NBC film clip side by side to that of the van in the AP photo seems to support this. The amount of soot and ash that is visible in the NBC video on the van that dulls the color does, too. Did the photographer manipulate the photo? I don’t know. But it looks like it to me.
Right, but I’m just saying that there’s not really anything to say he did – or didn’t – edit, since we don’t have his metadata. But given settings, white balance – which is likely what is making this pop – light direction and general contrast, this is easy to get in camera.
Up close, like in the NBC footage, it’s going to be harder to get the same effect without some heavier color manipulation because the van is the main subject of the photo – your white balance is going to be adjusted for the blue of the van, not the desaturated yellow scene. It is actually pretty bright street-side in the NBC footage, but it doesn’t have the same contrast because it’s the entirety of the image, instead of a small portion of it. The NBC footage is also “flatter,” and that appears to just be a function of the lighting at the time.
“Just asking questions” is often making an accusations with plausible deniability. The tone you set wasn’t curiosity, especially since you are framing this as being about dishonesty. Even edited, this isn’t a dishonest photo, because it’s not adding or removing elements, and the van is a notable contrast to the scene overall.
IF the image was edited to make the van appear more dramatic by the AP photographer… it would absolutely be a dishonest photo.
Given the widespread prevalence of edited images that are presented as “fact,” I will in no way apologize for being suspicious of this one. I find your theory regarding white balance unconvincing. I also know enough about optics and photography to find it highly unlikely this wasn’t edited. Here’s why:
Not only did this van have visible soot on it in the NBC piece, this image was captured from a great distance. Atmospheric haze tends to dull colors in the distance under the best of conditions. I suspect the air quality in this region is not great right now. Suspended particulate matter would more than likely make this photo impossible as presented.
Is it an amazing photo? Certainly. The van _did_ come out (relatively) unscathed.
Decreased exposure length is intrinsically tied to increased shutter speeds, no?
It’s the exact same thing, and sometimes you change your mind about how to describe it mid-sentence.
Yes, that’s why I was questioning why you said underexposing reduced shutter speeds.
The picture of the front of the VW shows some other, newer, cars parked on the other side of the road. As they’re all in dreary modern colours they just don’t stand out in the same way. Could be that it’s not the only survivor, but instead it’s more proof that we used to get better colours in the old days? (Though I appreciate they could have parked after the event).
They could have been driven their by the photographer of that shot.
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?
You have confidently crafted the catalyst for the joke through your understanding of thermodynamics. Thank you for preparing us for the pun
So it’s a Burns and Allen situation here?
Haha! Checked this out and wow, looks like they inspired the setting for the Flintstones
COTD
Air-cooled VW bus? Yes
Also not a lot of exposed plastics on that bus to burn. metal rear view mirror etc.
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.
At which point you pop open the frunk and exclaim why yes it DID go bad! It musta fallen off with everything else!
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.
Another COTD