On X, two days ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass posted her accomplishments since the Palisades Fire.
“It’s been one month since wildfires devastated our city. I’m speaking now about the progress we’ve made and the work ahead” she wrote.
“We will rebuild Los Angeles and we will not stop until we are done.”
Okay, let us review the Mayor’s accomplishments:
On January 6, this editor posted this story “Red flag warnings of critical fire danger will take effect at 4 a.m. Tuesday and remain in place through 6 p.m. Thursday, for the Malibu coast, the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area and other southland areas. By 4 p.m. on Tuesday, the warning will extend to Los Angeles County beaches.
“The forecast calls for a life-threatening, destructive, widespread windstorm. Residents are warned that there is a high risk for downed trees and power lines, as well as power outages. Residents that live in a very high fire severity zone are advised to review their “Ready, Set, Go!” fire evacuation plan.”
How did the Mayor prepare for this wind event, which was widely predicted? She was in Ghana.
How did L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley prepare? Were there strike forces set up in strategic locations, such as the Palisades, which is in a very high fire severity zone? No.
She sent 1,000 firefighters home, rather than keeping them for an additional shift. There were more than 100 firetrucks in a yard that needed maintenance. Crowley in an interview with CNN, said that having these apparatuses might have helped. The LAFD has a total of 183 trucks, meaning that more than half of the city’s fire trucks were out of commission.
An LAFD helicopter flew over the fire site around 10:50 a.m., but no further aerial support came until the scoopers started dropping water around 12:30 p.m.
There was confusion about the evacuation route for residents. It appears the City never had plans for an emergency, which is why people had to jump out of cars and run for their lives.
Others called 911 repeatedly to have elderly neighbors rescued, but the police never came and those residents were loaded in cars. And as one resident wrote, “We stayed too late, waiting. We evacuated at 7:30 p.m. and as we drove down Temescal Canyon, there was fire on both sides of the road. When we reached PCH, police cars were lined up. There were no fire trucks.”
Although much of the Palisades burned on January 7, many people lost homes on the 8th and 9th, because there was no water to put out the fire. The winds had mostly passed by then, so why were homes and building allowed to burn?
The Chase Bank building burned the day after the Palisades Fire, but there was no water to put any fires out.
Well, it appears there hasn’t been any City oversight of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. No water, why? A reservoir and additional tanks were empty.
Whoops. Makes it hard to fight a fire when there’s no water.
Why wasn’t fire retardant dropped on remaining properties? Maybe the City felt the few homes left standing were lost causes. We’re just guessing, they aren’t saying.
Residents with hoses saved many homes. They used the water in swimming pools.
There were swimming pools in many yards and the water could have been used to put out fires, but were not used by the City.
After the disaster, Bass tried to open up the area to looters before the utilities were fixed, which meant wires were still on the ground. The houses standing had no looter protection. She reversed herself the following day.
She tapped Steven Soboroff to be her chief recovery officer: his pay $500,000 for three months. After an uproar, he announced he would work for free.
Then Bass announced that a consulting firm, Hagerty Consulting, an Illinois-based firm that specializes in disaster response had been hired to provide with infrastructure restoration and environmental mitigation.” How much are they being paid? And for how long? Bass declined to answer.
It seems that the City might need help receiving the federal funds it feels it is owed.
Why does the City deserve federal funding? How have they prepared for a disaster?
People have known for decades that utilities should be underground in High Fire Hazard areas.
Today, my neighbor on Radcliffe, as he sorted through the ashes, asked, “If they take care of the utilities, will they finally take care of the sidewalks?”
The city doesn’t trim trees, clean or fix streets, repair sidewalks or replace ADA-non compliant buildings,
The library, park fields and a gymnasium in Pacific Palisades were not built with City money, but rather with fundraisers and donations.
Why should Los Angeles receive federal funding? Give that money to the victims, whose lives have been changed forever, as they struggle financially in an area where insurance for replacement was not an option. Can they rebuild? Not unless there’s massive assistance.
On X, Bass lists the following accomplishments
- We inspected all 15K+ structures in the Palisades
- Opened a recovery center that’s helped 6K + families
- Launched an online tool to make assistance accessible
- Adjusted tax deadlines for impacted businesses
- Helped relocate schools and childcare centers.
Here’s what she needs to do:
- Give residents money to rebuild and then money to replace furniture that was destroyed.
- The affordable housing that was in Pacific Palisades needs to be replaced as well as all the apartment buildings along Sunset that offered reasonable rent.
- The schools need to be up and running by the fall of 2025 – not 2028
- The City needs realize there are only three ways in and out of Pacific Palisades and adding density means adding more people who will not be able to get out if another evacuation is ever needed.
- The people who are still living in centers a month after the fires need a place to stay.
Legend has it that while a fire destroyed the city of Rome, the emperor Nero played his violin, thus revealing his total lack of concern for his people and his empire. Now Bass can join Nero and go down in history as the Palisades burned.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass all smiles on January 31, 2025.
(Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)
Perhaps Los Angekes is simply too large a city to govern.
A capable Mayor of a 26 square mile city might have been better able to:
1. Ensure proper brush removal in ALL government owned areas.
2. Make sure hillsides are patrolled daily for illegal encampments and the fires they create
3. Intervene when years of complaints about youth setting off fireworks and explosives .. make appearances at schools to educate and caution
4. Prepare the town’s reservoirs for fighting fires. There are photos of our reservoirs being empty since 2021.
5. Bring in a dozen mechanics to fix equipment
6. Realize that this town’s beauty and fire vulnerability went hand in hand and made it a priority to keep citizens safe.
None of these are difficult tasks. A capable executive could have managed to set goals for these to be done … in a month or so.
Is LA too big to govern by ideology driven committees and inexperienced executives? Did Pacific Palisades pay the price for the neglect of the tasks listed in the article and above? You be the judge.
When I was deciding who to vote for, I looked at Rick’s platform and her platforms. Rick’s platform made sense. Her platform said nothing. This is coming from someone whose family has been heavily involved in politics his entire life.
An excellent summary. Let us not forget that both reservoirs in the Palisades were left empty during this extended dry season. One alone has the thirty times the capacity of what was available via gravity-fed storage (no electricity needed for pumping) in the Palisades. I also only saw one fire truck drive through my neighborhood, without stopping, until I left at nearly midnight on January 7.
Wow, what a great, level headed article you have written. I could not believe the low number of firetrucks as compared to the percentage of trucks needing maintenance in that lot.
But to be fair, the city council decides how money is spent in the city of LA, not the Mayor. But an absent Mayor and no plans for a huge fire storm easily fits the pattern lack of governmental commitment to the citizen’s first priority of having a Village, stores, grocery stores and protected homes.
Could not have said it better!
Unfortunately Karen Bass actually believes that they have accomplishments. That is part of the problem. But she keeps smiling!