Fire at Malibu

From Hollywood, the CBS Radio Workshop, Damage and Calculable, 62 square miles of mountains and valleys of farms and pastures Reduced to black and ash, 85 homes burned to the ground, 4 injured, 1 dead. Fire at Malibu.

CBS Radio presents the CBS Radio Workshop dedicated to man's imagination, the theater of the mind. Now a story to challenge man's imagination, a story of disaster, and a man's capacity to meet and defeat it, a story of despair and hope.

Fire at Matherbo, starring Mr. William Conrad as narrator. The Eastern Pacific High. It's stretched from Baja, California to Hawaii and north to Anchorage, Alaska. And back south again passed Vancouver Island and Puget Sound past the Farallons and the Channel Islands.

Day after day, week after week, it squatted across half of the eastern Pacific. For eight weeks it remained immovable. You couldn't feel it or taste it, or see it accepting on the weatherman's map, but it was there.

That vast, high-pressure area, blocking off the rain from the green forests of the northwest and the brown hills of southern California. Weather moves from west to east, out of the bleak, black, cold of Siberia and Mongolia down across the sea of Japan and on east across the Pacific.

But now, stopped by the immovable high, the weather veered north across the icy mountains of Alaska, becoming a cold arctic front, pouring down into the great basin between the Sierra Navadas and the Rockies, and then spilling across the mountains to the west, becoming warmer and warmer by gravity and compression, until it roared down from the Mojave Desert in the

Southern California, a full-grown Santana, the wind of Satan, whipping up dust storms, clawing at palm fronds, whining through petals, and fouling swimming pools with a last of Autumn's brown leaves. For eight weeks it blew through the chaperone, drying up the greasewood and the wild buckwheat on the rolling hills, desiccating the live oaks and the sycamores and the canyons.