A key ‘weakness’ in LA’s wildfire strategy went unaddressed for years, Washington Post probe shows

The burned-out remains of Football Ferns captain Ali Riley's home in Los Angeles after out-of-control wildfires swept through parts of Los Angeles. Photo / Ali RIley

Two years before wildfires incinerated swaths of Los Angeles, the city’s fire chief Kristin M. Crowley identified “one significant area of weakness” in her department’s ability to contain wildfires. LA had no specialised wildland unit to respond to daily brush fires and scrape vegetation, dig ditches and do the other labour to ensure blazes did not spread or rekindle, she wrote on January 5, 2023, asking for US$7 million to assemble its own squad.

In a memo that has not been previously reported, she told city fire commissioners LA relied almost entirely on overburdened “hand crews” from other jurisdictions to bring such muscle to its brush fire emergencies. Hand crews, the most elite of which are sometimes called “hotshots”, fight wildfires with chainsaws, axes and shovels, setting containment lines and then sticking around to meticulously monitor smouldering fires, feeling by hand for heat and digging out live spots to make sure fires don’t relight.

The city staffed its own team – made up of unpaid, mostly teenage volunteers – only on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. Crowley warned the commission there would inevitably come a day when LA would need the important grunt work of a “hand crew” and one would not be available, which could “mean the difference in containment or out-of-control spread”.

Yet as fire swept down from the Santa Monica mountains last week, LA still had no professional unit ready to aid in the initial attack, according to a Washington Post review of dozens of city and county records, hours of radio transmissions and LA fire commission transcripts, as well as interviews with more than a dozen firefighters and city officials. More than three years after the fire department’s first request, the city had only recently advertised openings for at least two dozen openings on a team whose launch was delayed because of bureaucracy and competing budget priorities.

Santa Monica Pier with a backdrop of smoke from the wildfires sweeping through Los Angeles. Image / Kimberley Crossman

This gap in LA’s firefighting arsenal provides a new window into how the metropolis failed to reckon with the threat posed by wildfires intensified by climate change. It is unclear whether those additional units would have altered the course of the conflagrations, or have better put out a small blaze now under investigation for possibly reigniting and sparking the Palisades Fire. But had the proposed plans come to fruition, the city would have had two fulltime hand crews with more than 50 additional firefighters trained to battle wildfires by now.

“It’s shocking, surprising, that LA ... does not have any type of wildland fire programme,” said Steve Gutierrez, who has battled blazes in the area as a former Angeles National Forest firefighter and is now a union representative for the National Federation of Federal Employees.

The Post found with LA still having only a volunteer, part-time team, hand crews from Los Angeles County and the state of California were the first to reach the Palisades Fire that erupted January 7. Over the ensuing hours, dozens of additional such teams responded to calls for help and raced in from surrounding counties, across the state and from US Forest Service stations. Still, radio communications from the first night of the blaze show firefighters were still desperate for more, calling for additional resources at spots where homes were in danger or already burning.

Matt Ahearn, the assistant director of operations for the US Forest Service in Southern California, said with increasing speed and intensity of wildfire spread year-round in the state, the federal government in the past two years has shifted away from seasonally hired hand crews to permanent staffing. The Forest Service’s “first alarm” response to any wildfire, he said, sends at least five engines and one, if not two, hand crews, plus aircraft when conditions allow. “It takes a multi-layered attack, and there’s no substitute for boots on the ground,” he said.

Firefighters and experts interviewed by the Post cautioned that no single crew – or possibly even hundreds of additional firefighters – could have stopped blazes driven by hurricane-force winds from destroying some pockets of LA. And the city’s fire department is facing criticism on other fronts, including how it deployed available firefighters and failed to anticipate water shortages.

LA fire captain Adam VanGerpen, a department spokesman, said budget requests make clear that Crowley saw the units as essential, one of several initiatives she has said in the wake of the fires were underfunded by city leaders. “The chief has been clear since day one of these fires that we’re a department that has been under-budgeted, under-funded and under-resourced,” VanGerpen said.

Bass’ spokesman, Zach Seidl, pushed back on criticism in a statement to the Post on Friday, saying “fully resourcing our LAFD has always been a priority for this administration, and with climate change getting worse every year, we’re accelerating these efforts to protect Angelenos.”

Los Angeles Fire Commission president Genethia Hudley-Hayes defended the work of the city’s firefighters in an interview on Thursday. Still, she acknowledged the city’s struggle over establishing the unit reflects the systemic problems LA will have to fix to contend with the next wildfire, and said her commission “will ask for a reckoning” over past decisions once the emergency is over and the fires are extinguished.

“We will want to know what the plan is moving forward so that [if], God forbid, this happens again, we might have a different staffing or deployment model,” she added.

‘An infuriatingly slow process’

LA fire officials’ first attempt to form a hand crew began in August 2021, marking an inflection point for a department first established in 1886. California had faced prolonged drought conditions before, but the state seemed newly vulnerable.

In 2020, California had experienced one of the worst fire seasons on record, with more than 8660 fires torching more than four million acres (1.62m ha). In the preceding months, governor Gavin Newsom had declared a drought emergency for 41 counties.

In August 2021, LA City Council members directed the fire department to take stock of its readiness to fight an outbreak of wildfires, documents show. Meanwhile, the department was looking at how the numbers of hand crews staffed at regional and state firefighting agencies it relied on had fallen by almost half.

The LA Fire Department had, over the previous century, morphed from a bucket and ladder corps to what its members proudly called an “all-hazard” force of first responders, handling not only urban fires and medical emergencies but also seasonal floods, swift-water rescues in mudslides and earthquake-related crises.

However, increasingly, there was no escaping the city’s mounting brush fires. Santa Ana winds and residential growth in high-risk fire areas of the city’s canyons and mountaintops, coupled with climate change, were making them a daily threat.

According to Crowley’s 2023 memo, the fire department was responding to roughly 800 brush fires each year, which, if staffed according to federal practices, typically require at least 25 firefighters and a crew chief. That’s equal to about seven of the city’s engine battalions, according to a former assistant chief.

But the city, also grappling with a massive deficit from the pandemic, whittled the US$3m request needed to kick-start the unit to just over US$500,000 in its 2022-2023 budget, documents show. Because it fell far short of what the fire department said it needed, documents show, officials told the commission they planned to wait until there was enough to hire the full staff.

In January 2023, Crowley, then 10 months into her job as chief, made a push for an even bigger investment.

She and her chief in charge of disaster relief, Craig White, told the fire commissioners the force needed not one but two hand crews. The price tag with new engines and other equipment would be US$7m initially, ramping up to US$11m over the following two years.

“The city of Los Angeles is now in a fulltime, year-round fire season,” White said in presenting to the commission, which oversees the department, adding, “The wildland hand crew is the make-or-break resource in making sure fire lines are strong and secure.”

If all went well, he said, the first paid, professional crew could be hired and ready to go by the spring of 2024. A second one could be hired after, and even a third, volunteer unit for recruiting could keep operating, he said.

The commission voted unanimously to support the full budget request. But commissioner Roy Harvey, a retired firefighter, said the department should start hiring the volunteers it had with the initial US$500,000 allocated the year before, given the danger.

White said it couldn’t, because it was still responding to the city’s personnel office about how to classify the new US$60,000-a-year jobs.

Soon, the plan would run into more trouble at the city hall. The budget approved in May 2023 included only US$519,000 for the new unit, about 7% of the department’s request.

City Council member Monica Rodriguez said she had advocated for the creation of the unit that year but Bass’ office had competing priorities. “Sadly, the bureaucracy and the budget slowed the process,” she said.

Seidl, the mayor’s spokesman, countered that the money set aside for creation of the unit has significantly increased since Bass took office in December 2022.

Even with almost US$1m now approved for the unit over two years, fire officials were not able to start hiring. The money sat unspent until last summer, when the city’s personnel and fire department officials completed the new job classification – “Wildland Hand Crew Technician”.

“I have a hard time understanding it, but it’s an infuriatingly slow process,” Rodriguez said of the city’s job classification system.

By last summer, the city had approved an additional US$1.2m for the unit. But Rodriguez said another snag emerged: The mayor’s office paused hiring for the new wildland hand crew unit because of budget concerns.

She said she called Bass in the fall, when she found out, and hiring got back on track.

In October, the fire department announced it was accepting applications for the new hand crew and said it planned to start interviewing candidates in December. The department is still interviewing some of the 300-plus applicants, Rodriguez said, and the crew is not yet operational.

Shorthanded

Neighbouring LA County ended up providing the first wave of support inside the city limits on the morning of January 7.

Like the city, the state and US Forest Service, the county had begun pre-positioning firefighting assets ahead of the forecasted red-flag windstorm. County officials told the Post they had put five engines, a dozer team and an additional wildland hand crew at their camp in the hills above central Malibu, near where a fire had ravaged homes in 2018.

But the county had not staged any crews in Pacific Palisades. Hudley-Hayes, the fire commission president, noted it is hard to know where to deploy because you can’t predict where a fire will start. “What if you put all your resources in the wrong place and then they have to be redeployed quickly?” she asked.

As 911 calls about fire in the hills over the Pacific Palisades starting coming in around 10.30am, LA and LA County combined forces to dispatch and attack the blaze. It did not happen quickly. Although LA’s goal is to reach brush fires within about five to 10 minutes, it accomplishes that only about half the time, according to department records presented to the fire commission late last year.

The county’s first hand crew arrived around 11am, according to radio transmissions, about 30 minutes after the Palisades Fire was detected. “Eight Three on scene. How can we help?” a voice chimed over the radio.

Over the course of the day, at least 14 hand crews ultimately responded to the Palisades, according to the Post’s review of radio transmissions and incident records from LAIT911, a Los Angeles disaster response non-profit. The Post was not able to determine the total number of units that responded that day because of the incomplete nature of the LAIT911 records and radio transmissions. Eleven of the crews were from the Los Angeles County fire department, and Orange and Ventura County sent at least one each.

The city’s volunteer unit, known as Crew 3, arrived later in the afternoon, according to LAIT911 records, as fire was ravaging homes throughout the Palisades neighbourhood.

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Then, around 6.17pm, instructions came over the radio to firefighters in the Palisades to release their hand crews in the next hour. Fire officials were retreating further, sending them home for the night and to regroup and fight the next day.

“We’d like to get them off by 19:00 if we can, unless they are actively engaged, " said a voice over the radio communication from the operations team.

It’s unclear which ones stayed. But by 7.53pm, the Los Angeles city volunteer unit had retreated from their location. “We just pulled crew Three A off that hill … unable to hold that area,” a firefighter said. “Significant ember cast with wind topping 50-plus.”

By 11pm, firefighters said they had to abandon homes “where we have no water supply”, a fire official from command said. “We lost the anchor.”

Battalion chief Adam Knabe, who succeeded White as the department’s head of disaster relief, said the city also did not want the volunteers in the line of fire during the initial attack.

“It’s a liability in having them initially respond,” Knabe said. Plus, “they’re only available certain days of the week because they are volunteer. They were not in service when the fire broke”.

Another firefighter involved in the hiring process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to comment, said interviews were continuing this week, even as the fires rage. “We’re interviewing in the morning and then going out and firefighting at night.”

Davis, Boburg and Lee reported from Washington. Sacks and Hennesy-Fiske reported from Los Angeles. Aaron Schaffer, Alice Crites and Chris Dehghanpoor contributed to this report from Washington. Samuel Oakford contributed from New York.