After the Palisades failures, is LAFD prepared for the next major wildfire?

As the fire raged in the Palisades, then-Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley went on television and called out city leadership for systematically underfunding her agency.

The LAFD, she said, did not have enough firefighters, stationed in enough firehouses, to extinguish the wind-driven flames that swept through the hills.

“We need more. This is no longer sustainable,” she said in a Jan. 10 interview.

Nearly a year after the fire destroyed much of the Palisades, LAFD officials continue to highlight financial concerns, with Crowley’s successor asking for a 15% budget increase and the firefighters’ union proposing a sales tax that could raise an additional $300 million a year.

But the LAFD’s hyperfocus on money masks its leaders’ failure to manage the resources they had, starting with a decision to leave the scene of a New Year’s fire despite signs that it had not yet been fully extinguished.

Days later, that fire flared up again into the Palisades Fire, killing twelve people and destroying thousands of homes. Despite predictions of catastrophically high winds, LAFD officials did not pre-deploy engines to the area or increase manpower by ordering an earlier crew of firefighters to stay on duty.

As the flames spread, firefighting was disorganized and chaotic, much like that of the LAFD after action report detailing major failures by high-ranking commanders in communications, staffing, and fundamental knowledge of forest firefighting.

City leaders have highlighted the changes they have made since the fire, including appointing 30-year LAFD veteran Jaime Moore as chief and establishing new staffing protocols on high-risk days.

But the question remains: Is Los Angeles prepared for the next major wildfire? Some city officials and fire experts don’t think so, pointing to an LAFD that hasn’t evolved with the times and an incomplete account of how the Palisades fire started.

Moore, who was named chief last month, declined to comment.

Mayor Karen Bass said in an interview earlier this month that the city is “on track to being fully prepared” for a major wildfire, with the LAFD now taking a more proactive approach to weather warnings.

“The fire department has been much more aggressive, has pre-deployed, been very visible, called early and tried to be very, very aggressive,” she said.

But Genethia Hudley Hayes, chair of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said the LAFD remains unprepared and there hasn’t been enough time to make the necessary changes. She cited the LAFD’s technology, which she said is about 20 years behind.

“I have no confidence that there would be a different outcome” if a similar disaster were to occur, she said.

City Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes Pacific Palisades and who has advocated for more fire department funding, agreed with Hudley Hayes.

Some key changes have been made, such as requiring firefighters to continue working an extra shift during red flag warnings, Park said. But she said there are too many fire trucks out of service, not enough technicians, and most importantly, questions about the origins of the Palisades fire remain unanswered.

In October, after federal prosecutors charged a former Palisades resident with deliberately setting the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to coil their hoses and leave the fire area on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and the rocks remained hot to the touch. The Times reviewed text messages from firefighters and a third party, sent in the weeks and months after the fire, detailing crew concerns.

The LAFD’s after-action report, released in October, only briefly mentioned the Lachman fire. Critics have identified this as a critical flaw in the report, preventing the department from figuring out what went wrong and avoiding the same mistakes.

After the Times report, Bass ordered an investigation into the LAFD’s handling of the Lachman fire.

Bass had ousted Crowley less than two months after the Palisades fire, citing the LAFD’s inability to properly deploy resources downwind and potentially have a chance to extinguish the fire before it got out of control, a problem exposed by a series of reports in The Times.

Bass also refuted Crowley’s financial complaints, saying the budget had no impact on the department’s ability to fight the fire. In fact, the 2024-2025 LAFD budget was up 7% over the previous year, thanks in part to generous pay increases for firefighters.

More money won’t solve poor decision-making by top officials, said Marc Eckstein, an emergency physician who served as the LAFD’s medical director and commander of the emergency medical services bureau until his retirement in 2021.

He said that without transparency and accountability, “the decline will always be what it has been: we need more of everything – more people, more money, more fire trucks, more fire stations.”

A modern fire organization needs the flexibility to deploy its personnel during a disaster, he said, while meeting daily needs. Most 911 calls are for medical issues, he said, yet the LAFD functions much the same as it did decades ago, when building fires became more common.

He said a panel of outside experts should have been given access to the LAFD’s data to provide an unbiased look at how the department performed leading up to and during the Palisades fire.

“And it’s a playbook. OK, how do we prevent this from happening again?” he said. “And the fact that that didn’t happen is a shame.”

How much the department will transform after the Palisades disaster will depend largely on the new chief. Moore, who joined the LAFD in 1995 and most recently served as deputy chief of the Operations Valley Bureau, was chosen by Bass to lead the department over a fire chief from a major city outside California.

At stations in LA, firefighters told Bass they wanted an insider for the job, which she said played a role in her decision.

“Given that the fire department was under such close scrutiny, during such a difficult time, morale is in the toilet and there is an infighting going on. The last thing they needed, in my opinion, was someone from the outside,” Bass told The Times.

Before his appointment was confirmed last month, Moore had indicated that he was troubled by the LAFD’s missteps in the Lachman fire and that he would bring in an outside organization to investigate.

But the following week he appeared to change course, claiming the media was trying to “smear” firefighters while saying he still planned to investigate the Lachman fire.

Moore will be responsible for implementing the 42 recommendations in the after-action report, which range from establishing better communication channels to defending homes where hidden embers could ignite.

The report concluded that top LAFD commanders had surprisingly little knowledge about fighting wildfires, including “basic suppression techniques.” It suggested that all LAFD members receive training on important skills such as structure defense and how to remove water from swimming pools when fire hydrants are not working.

In an interview with ABC7Moore said the LAFD has adopted about three-quarters of the recommendations and is considering creating a department that specializes in wildfires.

Since the Palisades fire, the LAFD has hired a 26-person wildlife hand crew that uses chainsaws and other tools to cut paths through brush to prevent a fire from spreading. When they’re not fighting fires, they’re doing cleanups throughout the city.

Earlier this month, as hand crew members practiced cutting fire lines through brush in Sunland, the crew’s leader, Supt. Travis Humpherys declined to say whether they would have changed the outcome of the Palisades fire.

But they have already “made a dramatic impact” clearing brush and fighting wildfires, including a 50-acre blaze in Burbank in June, Humpherys said.

Moore’s requested budget of more than $1 billion for the coming year – a 15% increase over this year’s budget – includes money for a second wildland crew, as well as nearly 200 additional firefighters and helicopter services to fight fires from the air. That amount could be reduced during the months-long city budget process as the City Council and mayor find ways to balance the overall budget amid financial headwinds.

Meanwhile, United Firefighters of Los Angeles City Local 112 is charting an ambitious course to reduce the department’s dependence on the city budget, pushing for a ballot measure that, if approved by voters in November 2026, would raise nearly $10 billion by 2050 through a half-cent sales tax. But after the LAFD’s failures in the Palisades fire, some voters may be reluctant to entrust its leaders with more money.

“It is hard to believe that we are fully prepared for the next major emergency,” Doug Coates, the union’s acting president, said in a statement. “We urgently need more firefighters and paramedics, more trucks, engines and ambulances and more wildfire fighting equipment and community fire stations.”

E. Randol Schoenberg, whose family lost four homes in the fireincluding his in Malibu – along with documents belonging to his grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg – said he would happily pay more taxes for more services.

But Schoenberg, an attorney representing the victims of the Palisades fire in a lawsuit against the city and state, said he expects the LAFD to investigate its mistakes fairly.

“If they don’t really grapple with how this happened, then no matter how much money we throw at it, it’s going to happen again,” he said.

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.