Covering up the cover-up: L.A.’s shameful response to the Palisades Fire continues

The political class’s singular obsession with self-preservation is denying Angelenos answers to critical questions about failures before, during and after the January Palisades Fire

Flames consume Matthew’s Garden Cafe on La Cruz Drive in Pacific Palisades on the evening of January 7, 2025. Photograph by Christopher LeGras.

Next time you hear the likes of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass or California Governor Gavin Newsom caterwaul about how Donald Trump and the Republican Party represent threats to democracy, remember their shameful, thoroughly undemocratic and non-transparent response to the Palisades Fire. Remember the California Democratic Party’s collective shrug in the aftermath of the January 2025 L.A. wildfires that destroyed some 12,000 homes and more than 300 local businesses, killed at least 35 people and rendered 125,000 people homeless. Remember how few damns they gave about the hundreds of thousands of lives that were inexorably altered during a hellish two week series of firestorms. Remember how they failed completely to prepare and failed to respond, even when they had days and even weeks of warning that something terrifying was on the horizon.

Remember too how they spent the ensuing year working far harder to obfuscate and cover up their dereliction of duty than they did to prepare the city and county for conflagrations that even the squirrels in my front yard knew were coming.

It cannot be repeated too loudly or too often: California is hopelessly broken. I want to scream it from a mountaintop: The state’s political class, and the political class in the city and county of Los Angeles, are more concerned with covering their collective asses than reckoning with their unbroken string of failures in January. Here, as always, it’s equally important to single out L.A. city councilwoman Traci Park as virtually the sole exception. She has worked tirelessly and fearlessly to fight for the victims of the Palisades Fire. Still, like everyone else in this disaster zone of a state she is trapped in a system that has been consciously constructed over decades toward a singular purpose, evading any scintilla of accountability. It’s the same collective incompetence and cowardice that has allowed unknown tens of thousands of people to die homeless on the streets. The same that has seen some 75,000 people in California perish due to drug overdoses.

The latest chapter in this sorry story comes courtesy of a story in today’s Los Angeles Times. While the reporters did yeoman’s work, the editors waited until the Sunday before Christmas to report that the Los Angeles Fire Department consciously watered down its own Palisades Fire after action report. The story is disgraceful even by the standards of the petty tyrants who are running the most beautiful place in the world into a drainage ditch.

It turns out that officials at LAFD went through at least seven drafts of the after action report. Reporters at the L.A. Times, which normally carries the political class’s water, actually committed some journalism this time. They reviewed those drafts and discovered multiple instances of officials altering language to cover the department’s myriad failures (here I refer to senior LAFD leadership, not the rank and file who performed heroically under impossible circumstances).

A storm of flames and embers barrels through Pacific Palisades on the evening of January 7. Photograph by Christopher LeGras.

The Times’s investigation reveals that some of the changes that made their way into the final version of the report amounted to outright lies. For example, according to the Times, an early draft concluded that, “that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast ‘did not align’ with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days.”

This would help explain why it took the first firefighters some 20 minutes to reach the ignition site, even though LAFD Station 23 is five or six minutes away. It would explain the shocking dearth of fire engines and fire crews deployed to the Palisades in the first 12 hours, when a majority of houses were still standing. I know they were, because I was there.

In stark contrast, the final, official after action report concluded, “the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire ‘went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.’”

It should go without saying that those are two diametrically opposed, and irreconcilable, conclusions. Either the predeployment decisions went against LAFD policy or they went above and beyond department policy.

The final report contains other examples of misdirection and lack of transparency. According to the Times, a section initially titled “failures” was changed to “primary challenges.” Language noting that department leadership “violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.” 

The final report also adds new obfuscation to the department’s handling of the aftermath of the January 1 Lachman Fire, allegedly set by suspected arsonist Jonathan Rinderknecht. While the report acknowledges that the Palisades Fire, which erupted on the morning of January 7, was a re-ignition of that previous fire, the report shades decisions made on the ground in the intervening days. According to recent news reports, the battalion commander responsible for the area ordered crews to roll up their hoses even though there were indications that the ground was still hot and the fire was smoldering.

It will surprise precisely no one that neither the LAFD Public Information Office, Chief Jaime Moore, nor Interim Chief Ronnie Villanueva — who was in charge when the report was written — responded to questions from the L.A. Times reporters. Why respond to essential questions regarding the worst natural disaster in recent L.A. history? For his part, Moore is already proving himself to be every bit the political hack his predecessor, Kristin Crowley, was. 

Other officials have given equally contradictory statements. A week before the final report was released, L.A. Fire Commission President Genethia Hudley Hayes — another political hack with precisely zero experience in emergency response — “raised concerns with Villanueva and the city attorney’s office over the possibility that ‘material findings’ were or would be changed,” and consulted her personal attorney about her own obligations.

The faces of failure. Clockwise from top left: Genethia Hudley Hayes, Jaime Moore, Ronnie Villaneuva, Kristin Crowley and Karen Bass. Stock photos.

However, she told the Times, “I was completely OK with [the final version]. All the things I read in the final report did not in any way obfuscate anything, as far as I’m concerned.”

Well, then.

What else to call changing “failures” to “primary challenges,” if not obfuscatory? Incomprehensibly, Hudley Hayes also told the Times that “an examination of missteps during the Lachman fire did not belong in the after-action report.”

In a rational world, that statement alone would warrant her immediate removal from her position. Of course, this is Los Angeles in 2025, which is the opposite of a rational place. It’s a place where elected and appointed — oh, let’s call them “leaders” — are singularly obsessed with self-preservation. Doesn’t matter if dozens of people died horrific deaths and scores more were injured in fires that very likely could have been prevented. Doesn’t matter that 125,000 were displaced. Doesn’t matter that innumerable, irreplaceable family possessions, heirlooms and photographs went up in flames. Doesn’t matter that the Santa Monica Bay was poisoned by toxic runoff in subsequent rains, killing unknown hundreds of sea mammals.

Never mind that if we don’t answer the hardest questions we will never know what truly happened, making it all but certain those mistakes will be repeated in the future.

None of that matters in a state in which the prime directive is self preservation. What’s paramount is protecting power, careers, paychecks and reputations. What’s most important is to preserve the complete lack of accountability that is endemic to a one-party city and state.

To return where we began: Remember all of this the next time one of California’s myriad political hacks brays about threats to democracy. Their hypocrisy is nauseating — not to mention deadly.