More than two and a half months after flames leveled much of Pacific Palisades, the Los Angeles Fire Department and Mayor Karen Bass’ office have maintained an extraordinary secrecy about the city’s preparations for and response to the inferno.
The Fire Department, the mayor and her representatives have yet to provide answers to basic questions from The Times about whether they approved or even reviewed the LAFD’s plan to protect the Palisades before the Jan. 7 blaze. Nor have they addressed The Times’ questions about which LAFD crews were the first to arrive at the scene.
At the same time, the LAFD has denied dozens of public records requests from journalists and others related to its handling of the fire, including 911 calls, dispatch logs and internal communications about preparations for the extreme winds.
Two former LAFD chief officers say those records should have been available for release since the early days of the fire.
Some victims of the Palisades conflagration have criticized the lack of transparency, while open government advocates say the city’s refusal to release public records runs afoul of disclosure laws.
“It’s absolutely frustrating,” said Sue Pascoe, who lost her home of 30 years in the fire and is the editor of the Palisades news website, Circling the News. “People do want answers and are getting no answers.”
Political careers could be on the line. With billions in damages, the fire is likely to be the costliest disaster in L.A. history. Nearly 7,000 homes and other buildings were destroyed, and 12 people died. Already, a nascent recall campaign has targeted Bass, who is up for reelection next year. The mayor has been fiercely criticized for traveling to Ghana three days before the fire, despite a forecast of dangerous winds that grew increasingly dire after she left.
The silence on these questions in the weeks since the fire has extended to the office of Traci Park, the City Council member who represents the Palisades. Like Bass’ office, Park and her staff have not responded to several emails from The Times requesting an interview and help in obtaining information, including on matters such as the arrival of water-dropping helicopters over the fire and reasons for delays in responding to the blaze.
On Feb. 21, Bass removed Kristin Crowley as fire chief, citing Crowley’s deployment decisions before the fire as a reason. Park was one of two council members, out of 15, who voted against Crowley’s firing, saying she could not support the dismissal before the completion of an inquiry into who was to blame for failures in the preparation for and response to the fire.
The Times reported in January that Crowley and her staff chose not to order 1,000 firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift the morning of the blaze, which would have doubled the number of personnel on hand. Crowley and her fire commanders said they didn’t hold over the shift because they didn’t have enough engines for that many firefighters.
They said certain reductions in the LAFD budget approved by Bass and the City Council prevented the department from hiring enough mechanics to keep engines in the field. As a result, they said, 40 regular engines — one in five of the LAFD’s fleet — were out of service the day of the fire.
“We did not have enough apparatus to put them on,” Crowley told the City Council earlier this month in her bid to get her job back. “Because of the budget cuts and lack of investments in our fleet maintenance, over 100 of our fire engines, firetrucks and ambulances sat broken down in our maintenance yards, unable to be used to help during one of the worst wildfire events in our history.”
But holding over a shift allows commanders to fill emergency staffing needs without having to rely on firefighters coming in voluntarily. Those who aren’t needed are sent home with their gear in case they’re needed back in a hurry, the ex-chiefs said.
The Times found that in preparing for the winds, the department staffed up only five of more than 40 engines available — a different set of rigs from the disabled ones — to supplement the regular firefighting force. That meant there were dozens of working engines that could have been pre-positioned in the Palisades and elsewhere, as had been done in the past during similar weather.
Known internally as 200 Series engines, they are identical to other engines and usually paired with hook-and-ladder trucks, which do not carry water. When needed for wildfires, they carry four firefighters. The department also could have reassigned to the Palisades and other high-risk areas several more engines, in addition to the 200 Series rigs, from stations not in the fire zone, former LAFD chief officers told The Times.
And if Crowley had kept the 1,000 firefighters on duty, they could have staffed support vehicles besides engines, such as trucks for brush patrols and “plug buggies,” which are utility pickups that could have carried supplies and relief firefighters — and performed other tasks, the former chiefs said.
As for mechanics, the number has fluctuated between 64 and 74 since 2020, according to records released by the Fire Department. As of this year, the agency had 71 mechanics.
Crowley for weeks did not respond to questions from The Times about the precise whereabouts of engines before the blaze and which engine or engines responded first, among other queries.
It took the LAFD and the city more than a month to provide The Times with routine maintenance and repair records for the disabled engines and the rest of the fleet. Those documents show that some of the engines had been out of service for many months and even years, and a few were labeled as “salvage.” The records provide no explanation for the long delays in repairing the engines, and the LAFD did not respond to specific questions about them.
The Times reviewed more than 150 requests for documents related to the city’s preparation for and response to the wildfire that were submitted to the LAFD under the California Public Records Act in the city’s online portal, which includes responses to the requests.
About 40 were flat out denied, with officials claiming they are precluded from disclosures because of an ongoing investigation into what caused the blaze. In some cases, they cited a catchall exemption that keeping the records private clearly outweighs the public interest, with no further explanation. Other requests were not fulfilled until well after the deadlines specified in the public records act.
The LAFD has also refused to turn over communications among commanders on deployment and staffing decisions, claiming the catchall exemption. With few exceptions, the public records act states that any written communication — including emails and text messages — related to the conduct of government is a public record.
In response to multiple requests for 911 recordings about the Palisades fire, the city said on its online portal that the investigation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into the cause of the blaze “prevents information related to the fire from being disclosed at this time.”
The same exemption was cited for a records request regarding a small blaze on New Year’s Day in the Palisades that might be linked the Jan. 7 fire. Among other potential causes, the ATF is investigating whether hidden embers from the earlier fire sparked the larger blaze when the winds kicked up.
David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said the city does not have “a blank check” to withhold records because of an investigation into the fire. He also said that records that were public before the fire remain public regardless of a subsequent investigation.
“The public does have an overwhelming interest in knowing how the Fire Department was responding to this crisis in real time,” he said. “What possible interest is served by withholding that information? I cannot fathom, other than they just don’t want people to know.”
The Times filed a public records request on Jan. 10 for all text messages sent or received by Bass on Jan. 7 and Jan. 8 that mention fire response or her travel plans, Her office said nearly two months later that it had “no responsive messages.”
An attorney for the city said that Bass’ phone auto-deletes text messages and argued that she was not required to retain her texts because they are “ephemeral types of electronic communication.” Bass and her attorneys later said they would search for the texts and turn over “responsive records.” Last Friday, they provided some of Bass’ text messages to The Times while stating that an unspecified number were “redacted and/or withheld” based on exemptions to the California Public Records Act.
The Times obtained an incident log from a source showing that after the first 911 call about the fire came in at 10:29 a.m., firefighting crews took more than 18 minutes to reach the scene.
Former department officials said the LAFD could have sent at least 10 additional engines to the Palisades before the fire — engines that could have been on patrol along the hillsides and canyons, where crews might have spotted the fire soon after it started, when it was still small enough to give them a chance to control it.
Only 18 firefighters are typically on duty at the two fire stations in the Palisades. Fourteen of them are routinely available to fight brush fires, while the other four are assigned to ambulances, although they might help with evacuations or rescues during fires.
Pascoe, the Palisades resident and journalist, said her requests for information about the early firefight have gone unanswered by the city.
“If you messed up, let us know,” she said. “Whatever the mistakes were, we need to know, so this never happens to anyone ever again.”
Pascoe said firefighting crews usually are pre-deployed in the Palisades on red flag days, and when a fire ignites, LAFD helicopters respond quickly. She said that didn’t happen this time.
“There seemed to be no support anywhere,” said Pascoe, who evacuated the afternoon of Jan. 7 when she saw the fire burning over the hills from her house. “We figured they’d be put out and we’d come back the next day, because we’ve done that before. … It just seems like this did not need to happen, and someone does need to be held accountable.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
