The wildfires in the Los Angeles area have caused and continue to cause truly horrifying levels of devastation to nearly 40,000 acres of land, leveling homes, apartment buildings, assisted living facilities, cars, and virtually everything else in their path. Thousands of structures have been destroyed, with estimated repair costs amounting to over 100 billion dollars. Firefighters from all over North America have been working tirelessly for over a week now and the largest fire, the Pacific Palisades fire, is estimated to be just 19 percent contained by the time this story is published. In a time of such widespread heartbreak and destruction, it’s important to find things to celebrate. An Associated Press photographer captured just that when they spotted a blue 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 bus that was left behind when residents were forced to evacuate. Everything around the VW bus was reduced to charred rubble, yet it remained miraculously untouched by the fire that leveled the rest of the van’s immediate surroundings. This is the story behind the harrowing photo.
The Associated Press photo made its way around the news cycle on television and online when the current owner and the previous owner of the blue bus saw it and contacted the photographer to share their story. 24-year-old Preston Martin was the previous owner of the ‘77 VW Type 2. He bought it in his junior year at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he was studying mechanical engineering, and he fixed it up so he could live in it for his senior year to save on rent in the astronomically expensive Santa Barbara region. Martin did just that despite his mother’s initial dissent, though his mother eventually came around to appreciate her son’s van enough to sew a set of curtains for it. Martin then sold the van to its current owner, his friend and surfboard-making business partner Megan Krystle Weinraub, who affectionately named it Azul.
The friends told the Associated Press that they took Azul out to Malibu on January 5 to go surfing, and Martin parked it on a flat spot up the hill behind Weinraub’s apartment near the Getty Villa Museum since Weinraub is still learning to drive stick. Weinraub received emergency evacuation orders two days after that, and she was forced to make the tough decision to leave Azul behind and take her primary car in her evacuation. The Pacific Palisades fire ravaged Weinraub’s region soon after her evacuation, and she assumed that Azul met a fiery fate like much of the area, but a neighbor sent her a photo of her van two days after she was forced to abandon it. The Associated Press reports,
“I freaked out,” she said. “I was in the bathroom, and I screamed.”
She called Martin, who also freaked out. He called his mom, who was ecstatic. “I’ve never cried for a car before,” Tracey Martin texted her son.
They were even more surprised when the AP photo aired on television and popped up online.
“We made the news,” Martin said in a reel on Instagram, and Weinraub contacted the photographer.
Weinraub, whose home survived, does not know when she’ll be allowed back to her apartment or to Azul. The two are thrilled that the van’s survival has touched so many people.
“It’s so cool that it’s become this, like, beacon of hope,” Martin said. “Everything around it was toasted, just destroyed. And then here’s this bright blue shiny van, sitting right there.”
You are likely inundated with this rhetoric on most websites that cover anything relatively newsy, but the devastation caused by the fires that are still raging in Southern California is truly unimaginable. I am a native Angeleno, and I’m actually genetically Indigenous to the region. I am Chumash, and my ancestors were Indigenous Peoples who lived peacefully on the land between Santa Barbara and LA for thousands of years before we were colonized. All that is to say that stories like this, stories that find little bright spots worth celebrating among this horrific tragedy in my hometown, are important to share. My love of cars started with classic Volkswagen Type 2 vans, so the first time I read this story it brought me so much joy, and I hope it brings you joy amid the heartache too. The love of cars is sometimes tough to explain, but moments like this help to contextualize the emotional attachment that forms between car and driver.