Mayor Bass Watered Down the Palisades Fire Report and Then Lied About It

I think a lot of us saw this coming. Last month the LAFD’s current chief admitted that an after-action report on the Palisades fire had been “watered down” in order to make the department look good.

While speaking at the LA Fire Commission meeting, Chief Jaimie Moore said the report was tweaked several times to thwart the blame on the LAFD leaders.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of the department leadership in that final report,” Moore admitted.

A week after admitting the report had been politicized, Chief Moore announced that he wanted to look forward and didn’t intend to expend any effort finding out who in particular had watered down the report.

“I don’t think there’s really any benefit to me” looking into who made the edits, Moore said in an interview with The Times. “I can see where the original report and the public report aim to fix the same thing.

At this point, if you know anything about how politics works in deep blue California, you probably had your suspicions about why the chief wasn’t eager to find out who was to blame. Did I mention that a copy of the early draft (the pre-watered down version) was sent to Mayor Bass’s office and that her office had asked for “refinements.” 

And that brings us to today. The LA Times, which has done a legitimately good job staying on top of this, has finally connected the dots.

For nearly two months, Mayor Karen Bass has repeatedly denied that she was involved in altering an after-action report on the Palisades fire to downplay failures by the city and the Los Angeles Fire Department in combating the catastrophic blaze.

But two sources with knowledge of Bass’ office said that after receiving an early draft, the mayor told then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva that the report could expose the city to legal liabilities for those failures. Bass wanted key findings about the LAFD’s actions removed or softened before the report was made public, the sources said — and that is what happened…

One Bass confidant told one of the sources that “the mayor didn’t tell the truth when she said she had nothing to do with changing the report.” The source said the confidant advised Bass that altering the report “was a bad idea” because it would hurt her politically…

“All the changes [The Times] reported on were the ones Karen wanted,” the second source said, referring primarily to the newspaper’s determination that the report was altered to deflect attention from the LAFD’s failure to pre-deploy crews to the Palisades before the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes and other structures, amid forecasts of catastrophically high winds.

Both of the sources are anonymous but both have said they will testify to what they were told if this winds up in court. The part of the report about pre-staging fire department equipment was revised from saying the department had failed to follow procedure to instead patting the department on the back for going “above and beyond.”

In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying 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.

Instead, the final report said that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”

Two final points about this. First, the real scandal here isn’t the watering down of the report. That’s a minor side issue. The real scandal is what the report left out, i.e. the fact that the entire Palisades fire was a rekindle of a fire set a week earlier which reportedly was not fully put out.

The Times found that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the Lachman burn area the day after the fire was supposedly extinguished, despite complaints by crew members that the ground still was smoldering. The Times reviewed text messages among firefighters and a third party, sent in the weeks and months after the fire, describing the crew’s concerns, and reported that at least one battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section knew about them for months.

In other words, this fire was likely preventable but someone screwed up badly That person is not being held accountable because the failure might have an impact on Bass and maybe even on Gov. Newsom. So, the Bass story is significant, but it’s really just the tip of the ass-covering taking place here. There should be more to come before anyone starts “looking forward.”

Second, this absolutely should be the end of Mayor Bass’s career in politics. Her current term is over at the end of this year but she’s running for reelection. She needs to lose badly. If a three-legged dog runs against her, elect the dog. I don’t have much faith in LA voters but even they should be able to clear this hurdle. The person who played politics with the deadly Palisades fire should be run out of town on a rail.

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