As a former volunteer rural firefighter, I well recall the preparations that were routinely made ahead of known high-fire danger days. Even at a brigade level, we’d organise whoever was available to stand by for ‘Strike Team’ duties. With a bad fire day looming, if you put your hand up, you had to make sure you’d be home, with a bag packed, ready to jump on a truck and be gone for a week or more.
With the chorus of condemnation of California officials’ preparation growing, a new and astonishing failure is coming to light. Despite what they knew were days of impending catastrophic fire risk, the Los Angeles Fire 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”.
Crucial early opportunities to attack the worst fire were also missed.
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.
Where, on really bad days, Strike Team crews in our rural fire brigades would be on readiness at the station itself, LAFD sent a thousand firefighters home.
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 diversity hires are already on the defence.
“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” […]
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.
Even then, firefighters arriving in residential areas found fire hydrants dry. Meanwhile, Crowley’s excuses are already falling apart.
After some digging into documents and records, the LA Times found that there were discrepancies 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.
Crowley is not the only city leader with hard questions to answer.
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 [Donald 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’s a familiar story to Australians. For over a century, inquiry after inquiry following catastrophic bushfires have made the same recommendations, most notably more prescribed burning and hazard reduction. Time after time, governments have failed to act. To make things worse, meddling environmental groups have pushed policies that lead to environmental catastrophe. In a classic example, a handful of Boomer activists in Gippsland stopped winter fuel reduction burns, ‘because of the birds’. A few months later, the birds were wiped out in calamitous summer fires.
Chuck Devore, a former member of the California State Assembly and the chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told FOX Business in an interview that federal and state rules have hampered wildfire mitigation efforts, resulting in larger fuel loads that drive more intense wildfires […]
Joe Reddan, a registered professional forester in California and retired forester in the US Forest Service, told FOX Business that both federal and state policies can create “roadblocks” to property owners […]
“Southern California gets the Santa Ana winds, and that’s just an atmospheric phenomenon – you can’t prevent that, so what you have to do is mitigate the hell out of everything else to protect your population and your assets: your homes, your businesses from these fires… If it was a wind-driven fire with a low amount of fuel, there would still be losses of homes and so forth, but it would be a lot easier to manage than having overgrown vegetation that’s releasing a lot of energy,” Reddan explained.
But it’s far easier to just blame it all on ‘climate change’.
