By Libby Emmons – The Post Millennial
Los Angeles Fire Department records reviewed by the LA Times shows that the department’s “top commanders decided not to assign for emergency deployment roughly 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines in advance of the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades and continues to burn.”
One couple said they called in to 911 to report the beginning of a blaze in the Palisades and that it was 45 minutes before any response came. By then, the smoke had only increased as the fire picked up fuel and grew in size.
The department could have required firefighters to stay on for a second shift on Tuesday, January 7, as the fire, sparked in the hills of the Pacific Palisades, began to burn out of control. That fire is still not contained one week later. Keeping those firefighters on for a second shift “would have doubled the personnel on hand,” yet the commanders let them go home and “staffed just five of the more than 40 engines” that were available to battle the blaze.
“The plan that they put together, I stand behind, because we have to manage everybody in the city,” said LA Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. Her confidence in the department’s actions were not shared by former fire chiefs, who say that the engines should have been “pre-deployed to fire zones.”
“The plan you’re using now for the fire you should have used before the fire,” former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford said. “It’s a known staffing tactic—a deployment model.” After some digging into documents and records, the LA Times found that there were discrepencies in the number of engines available. At first, it looked like the department refused to deploy additional “ready reserve” engines to the Palisades. Then Crowley said those engines weren’t in service before someone from her office said four of those nine were inoperable or not available. “A third official then produced a document that said seven were put into service at one point or another — most of them after the fire ignited.” A straight story on what went wrong and why has not been easy to gather.
“It’s very easy to Monday-morning quarterback,” said Deputy Fire Chief Richard Fields, whose job it was to make staffing decisions and allocate equipment, “and sit on the couch and tell us what we should have done now that the thing has happened. What we did was based on many years of experience and also trying to be responsible for the rest of the city at any given time of that day.” The problem, of course, is that many of those who are seeking answers no longer have a couch to sit on.
Others say that there was never going to be a way to stop it. The morning of January 7 saw an internal memo from LAFD officials saying “There is high confidence in a life-threatening and destructive windstorm this afternoon through Wednesday morning.”
Criticism has been leveled at the city’s leadership for the fires that have swept through tens of thousands of acres since they began. LA Mayor Karen Bass was out of town in Ghana celebrating the new president there when the fires sparked, after leaving LA the day the National Weather Service intensified wind warning and conditions were ripe for a blaze. There were also issues raised about the water supply as it was revealed that the Palisades Reservoir was empty at the time.
Governor Gavin Newsom, who just pushed through a $50,000 slush fund in the legislature to “fight Trump,” blamed Trump and Elon Musk for “misinformation” regarding the fires. He put up a website to combat that misinformation. He has balked at the notion that California’s forest and water management policies could be at fault for facilitating the destruction.
It was only after the fire was officially out of control that more firefighters were called back into work and those remaining engines were pressed into service. The department “pre-positioned nine engines to the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood that were already on duty, expecting that fires might break out there” on January 7. More engines were moved “first thing in the morning” to cover the northeast part of the city.
As firefighters arrived in residential areas, they found fire hydrants dry. This has been attributed to problems in water pressure, but Crowley has also blamed cuts made by the Bass administration to the fire department and said that the city had “failed” the LAFD.
Crowley, the LA Times reports, “defended her agency’s decisions, saying that commanders had to be strategic with limited resources while continuing to handle regular 911 calls. She said the number of calls doubled Tuesday from a typical day, to 3,000 at the LAFD’s 106 fire stations, as the high winds downed trees and power lines.”