Volkswagen van that survived Palisades fire in Los Angeles is a ‘beacon of hope’
Share:
‘There is magic in that van,’ former owner Preston Martin tells AP. ‘It should have been toasted, but here we are’. Preston Martin figured the retro blue Volkswagen van he slept in for a year during college was a goner, given that he had parked it in a Malibu neighborhood just before the Palisades fire ripped through, reducing homes and cars to rubble and charred metal.
![[Woman with dog and van, giving peace sign and smiling]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e72e2e7ba10167a5019a7ab5edcda4cb6dbb2b42/0_0_2425_3000/master/2425.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
So the surfboard maker was stunned to find that the vehicle had survived. Not only that, a photo of the vibrant bus taken by an Associated Press photographer was circulating widely on television and online, giving viewers a measure of joy. “There is magic in that van,” Martin, 24, said Tuesday in an interview with AP. “It makes no sense why this happened. It should have been toasted, but here we are.”.
Martin purchased the 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 somewhat on a whim sometime around his junior year studying mechanical engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His mother, Tracey Martin, of Irvine, yelled at him for blowing his money, Martin said, but he told her he’d save on rent by fixing up the inside and living in it his senior year, which he did. She came to love the bus, and sewed curtains for the windows.
Last summer, he sold the van to his friend and business partner, Megan Krystle Weinraub, 29, who designs surf- and skateboards under the Vibrant Boards brand. Martin makes carbon fiber surfboards under Starlite. On 5 January, the friends went surfing with the van, which Weinraub calls Azul, Spanish for “blue”. Afterward, Martin parked it on a flat spot up the hill from her apartment by the Getty Villa, as she was still learning to drive the manual transmission.
