How a ‘warrior’ brain surgeon saved his Malibu street from wildfires and looters
Chester Griffiths, MD, led his son and his neighbor in a marathon stand-off against wildfire flames in Los Angeles under hail of burning debris.
Adapted from original article by Susie Coen, The Telegraph, US Correspondent, in Los Angeles
11 January 2025, 3:54pm GMT
January 11, 2025, Los Angeles, California — Chester Griffiths, MD, FACS, finished performing brain surgery at Pacific Neuroscience Institute and Providence Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica, 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 years: he had done the training, sourced the fire hoses, and briefed his son and next-door neighbour about the course of action.
A daring mission
Now was the time to put it into practice.
What followed was a daring mission that saw the three men confront the worst wildfire 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, Dr Griffiths’s neighbor, told The Telegraph.
Being on the scene
Armed with N95 face masks, fire hoses and spades, the trio managed to keep the wildfire 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 smoldering remains of a neighbor’s home to stop it spreading.
The men’s diciest moment came on Wednesday night, when the wildfire barreled towards them from the west, engulfing two of their neighbors’ wooden homes and sending them up in flames within 20 minutes.
First went the house two doors along from Dr Griffiths on Topanga Beach Drive, as the inferno made eucalyptus trees explode. Then the next one went up “like a Roman candle”.
Terrifying moments
“Everything was coming this way. The wildfire was coming this way, the smoke, the embers in the air, the wind was unbelievable”, he said.
“Softball-sized pieces on fire were landing around us, it was almost apocalyptic. It’s like, you see these things coming at you, and they land on the ground. Thank God, the majority will not go on the house, but the ones that do, you put out immediately. But if no one is here to do that, then they eventually burn the house down.
“We didn’t know when it was gonna end. That was probably the scariest thing.”
The trio responded by jumping on nearby roofs, spraying the flames and using dirt and sand to put out any fires on the ground. They got blown over several times, buckling under the power of the 80mph gusts.
Los Angeles firefighters help
In terrifying footage, Dr Griffiths can be heard breathing heavily while looking through the window at the deep, orange blaze roaring just meters away.
“We need a water drop,” he can be heard saying. A nearby fire crew came to help them fight the blaze, and Dr Griffiths begged the captain for a water drop
“He said, ‘They’re all grounded’. I said, ‘What about a plane, fixed wing?’ He goes, ‘Everybody’s grounded,’” Dr Griffiths recalled.
“I went back upstairs. I said, ‘We just got to do it ourselves.’”
With the help of a team of firemen, hoses and a water cannon, the group was able to put the fire out and stop it from coming down towards the other homes.
Training and preparedness
The father of two insists he wasn’t scared.
“I’m a surgeon,” Dr Griffiths said, his voice raspy from days of inhaling thick smoke which almost tastes tangy from the scent of burnt plastic.
“You train and you prepare, and then when you’re in the thick of it, you rely on your training and your preparedness.
“Our exit strategy was paddle boards out into the ocean. We knew that if it really came to s—… we could just take them out. There was no time to be scared.”
His 24-year-old student son, also called Chester Griffiths, added: “This has all been, honestly, under the leadership of my dad.
“He’s been preparing for this for so long. He’s a champion, he has a warrior mentality.”
Staving off disaster
Mr Colbert hasn’t slept in days. Speaking on Friday, he admits he doesn’t know what day it is. He does know he was meant to have kidney surgery on Jan 10, which he has just discovered was that day.
Soot, ash and smoke have stained his skin in every cavity and crevice, but he insists he is as clean as possible, having just had his fifteenth shower since the fires began.
For the first 10 hours, Mr Colbert was entirely alone, the fire swooping towards him from the east, engulfing nearby beloved neighborhood institutions such as The Reel Inn, a fish shack.
Then he saw a notice on his phone telling him to evacuate.
“It said ‘Get out, grab your pets, your loved ones, and leave now’,” he said. But he stayed put.
Luckily, his 93-year-old father, who lives downstairs in Mr Colbert’s home of 45 years, had been at a medical appointment and couldn’t get back.
At some point during the daring mission, Mr Colbert’s hair caught fire, but he is not entirely displeased with the outcome.
“I look like I have a full head of hair now, don’t I? It’s great. It’s all ash,” he jokes.
‘All this, and people are trying to steal too’
“Every bone in my body hurts,” he adds, limping across the sand in front of the ocean-front homes. He has never had a problem with his knee, but now it is strapped up in a brace.
His slower mobility was a challenge when he was forced to chase after looters who had come to raid the remaining homes.
It was Thursday evening when Mr Colbert saw two men walking down the hill.
“I started screaming at them, and then they ran. Then I went down to my car, and I turned on my car and the lights, and I set my alarm off so they know that we’re here,” he said.
“On top of all that, there’s these people trying to steal from you.”
Saving their community
On Friday afternoon, the trio were still working relentlessly to put out fires in the nearby homes, craning over walls to shoot water at the source, clouds of smoke radiating off, stinging eyeballs.
A few doors down from them is what has been described as the last standing house in Malibu.
The survival of the $9 million property, which belongs to David Steiner, a retired waste management tycoon originally from Texas, had been put down to its fire-resistant materials.
But Mr Colbert said he and the Griffithses had been keeping an eye on it, and doused it in water when the porch caught fire.
Dr Griffiths bought his property in 2005 and the family moved in in 2009. They tried to fireproof it at the time, building sprinklers in the roof and using cement tiles instead of wood.
Dr Griffiths, who is also a doctor to the LA Kings hockey team, said if one thing can come from the devastating tragedy, he wants people to get to know their neighbors.
“We were only able to do this because we’re a tight-knit community,” he said.
“This whole thing is a f—ing tragedy, beyond apocalyptic proportions. I’m so sad. I’m very sad for everyone that is so impacted, their families, their lives, their livelihoods, their history, all going… it’s cataclysmic for those people… I mean, I don’t know what to say.
“I’m happy that it turned out OK for us, but it may not have happened. I made a video on the first night of our home, recording memories in each room,” he added.
Neighbor’s precious memories of late son saved
Kathy Eldon, who runs Creative Visions Foundation, a non-profit enterprise, was among the handful of neighbours whose homes were saved by the three men.
When she evacuated, she didn’t have time to pick up the journals written by her late son, Dan Eldon, a British photojournalist who was killed in Somalia in 1993, and she feared they would be lost forever.
Ms Eldon said she felt “survivor’s guilt” because her home is still standing, but through her foundation, she is determined to “turn all the horror into something really good”.
For the others, what has taken place hasn’t quite sunk in yet.
“When I’ve got time I think I’ll be emotional,” Mr Colbert said.
For the rest of the weekend, Dr Griffiths will be “on duty” – wearing his fireman’s braces and protecting his and his neighbors’ homes.
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Last updated: January 24th, 2025