Hero in Scrubs: A Surgeon's Courageous Stand Against Malibu's Inferno
How Dr. GriffithsTransformed into a Warrior When Everything Was at Stake
As I made the point in Yes… You Need One More Hero!, we don’t always have to meet our heroes, IRL — we just need to admire them from afar!
Dr. Chester Griffiths fits that bill, perfectly!
I like highlighting the virtues of masculinity in my bear-ish bulletins here. I advocate for learning and employing self-reliant skills, and for men to take more action in their lives. And I honor ‘courage under fire’ (literally, in this case).
Below, I am passing along an inspiring story of taking the bull by the horns, so to speak.
This gent saved his house in Malibu because he suspected, well in advance, that government wouldn't. He took firefighting classes, bought pumps, fire hoses and turnout gear, and used pool water to save his house and the neighboring houses.
By…
Susie Coen
US Correspondent, in Los Angeles
11 January 2025
Chester Griffiths finished performing brain surgery, 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 for years: he had done the training, sourced the fire hoses, and briefed his son and next-door neighbor about the course of action.
Now was the time to put it into practice.
What followed was a daring mission that saw the three men confront the worst 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 smoldering 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, Mr Griffiths’s neighbor, told The Telegraph.
Armed with N95 face masks, fire hoses and spades, the trio managed to keep the 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 fire barrelled 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 Mr Griffiths on Topanga Beach Drive, as the inferno made eucalyptus trees explode. Then the next one went up “like a Roman candle”.
“Everything was coming this way. The fire 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.”