Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass demanded an investigation of the Palisades Fire on Friday, after text messages revealed that city firefighters abandoned the burn scar of a January 1 fire with smoldering roots that later re-ignited.
As Breitbart News reported, based on investigative reporting by the Los Angeles Times, the local Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) battalion chief in charge of monitoring the January 1 fire, known as the Lachman Fire, told firefighters to roll up their hoses after they had searched for hotspots on January 2. But there were smoldering roots, which authorities now believe reignited in high winds on January 7 as the Palisades Fire.
Bass, who was on a junket to Africa with the outgoing Biden administration on January 7, despite being warned for days about the impending extreme wind event, demanded an investigation from the LAFD.
Bass did not call for an independent investigation. She did not seem to consider that the LAFD might not be willing or able to do a credible investigation of its own alleged negligence or poor judgment about the fire.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Friday requested a full investigation into revelations that firefighters were ordered to leave a smoldering burn site days before it reignited into the Palisades fire, calling the news “tremendously alarming.”
In a letter to interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, Bass asked that he “thoroughly investigate” a report by The Times about the Los Angeles Fire Department’s missteps in putting out a small brush fire that federal authorities say was intentionally set on New Year’s Day. The previously undisclosed details have prompted fresh outrage among those who lost homes in the worst fire in city history.
“A full understanding of the Lachman fire response is essential to an accurate accounting of what occurred during the January wildfires,” Bass wrote.
Bass fired LAFD Chief Kristen Crowley earlier this year. Crowley chose not to pre-deploy firefighters in the area of the Lachman Fire ahead of the January 7 event. But she was also hamstrung by budget cuts that the mayor had demanded from the City Council, which limited the LAFD’s ability to pay firefighters overtime.
L.A. spends more on homeless services than on firefighting — and homeless people start one-third of fires.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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