In a scene that could have been plucked from a disaster movie, there is one home that appears to be standing alone, untouched, amidst a sea of smoldering ruins.
The $9 million Malibu mansion belongs to David Steiner, a retired waste-management mogul from Texas and a married father-of-three.
As the Los Angeles wildfires consumed everything in their path, leaving neighborhoods in ashes, incredibly Steiner’s three-story home remained, defiantly intact.
The gleaming white of the building appeared to stand out against the backdrop of destruction. But the survival of Steiner’s 4,200-square-foot, four-bedroom home is no accident, he believes.
The property was designed to withstand earthquakes and features ultra-sturdy construction, including stucco and stone walls, a fireproof roof, and pilings driven 50 feet into bedrock to withstand the pounding surf below.
‘To be totally honest with you, I never in a million years thought a wildfire would jump to the Pacific Coast Highway and start a fire,’ Steiner told The New York Post on Friday.
‘I thought, ‘If we ever have an earthquake, this would be the last thing to go.’ I honestly didn’t think that if we had a fire, this would be the last thing to go. The architecture is pretty nice. But the stucco and fireproof roof are real