Report on CA's Response to Devastating LA Fires Is In, and It's Even Worse Than You Thought
Gavin Newsom ordered a study of the governmental response to the devastating fires that destroyed entire neighborhoods in Pacific Palisades and Altadena in January 2005, and that report has now landed. (See: A RedState Photo Odyssey: The Devastation of the Pacific Palisades Is America's Wake-Up Call.)
It reveals an epic record of communications failures, incompetence, and a leadership vacuum of monumental proportions.
A damning new Palisades Fire report stops short of blaming any one person or agency, but found Los Angeles sent firefighters home despite dangerous winds, while some residents didn’t get an evacuation alert until 40 to 90 minutes after homes began burning.
The bombshell 724-page fire incident analysis was released Friday, nearly 21 months after the January 2025 fire tore through Pacific Palisades, a coastal LA neighborhood, and killed 12 people.
It says the destruction “was the result of multiple interconnected factors rather than any single decision, event, or system failure.” Still, the Los Angeles Fire Department takes the hardest hits.
The report was delivered by UL Research Institute’s Fire Safety Research Institute.
RedState alum Kira Davis noted at the time that all she really wanted was information:
Responders were simply slow to get the information out:
The delay in warning residents is one of the report’s starkest findings.
Some residents closest to where the fire started didn’t get an evacuation alert until roughly 40 to 90 minutes after homes had already begun burning, investigators found.
At 10:46 a.m., 16 minutes after the fire was reported, a fire helicopter radioed that flames would hit homes “within minutes.” By the time an LAFD assistant chief radioed for an “evacuation all the way down to PCH” ,Pacific Coast Highway, at 11:29 a.m., spot fires were already burning on both sides of a main road out of the neighborhood, according to the report.
The city’s first evacuation order didn’t go out until 12:09 p.m.
Meanwhile, Mayor Karen Bass was famously attending a presidential inauguration in Ghana when the fires broke out, despite having been extensively warned about the dangerous conditions (extremely high winds combined with a heat wave):
🔥 When questioned about the Palisades Fire, @KarenBassLA said 2 interesting things:
1. Likened being in Ghana 🇬🇠to being out of town when a relative gets sick. In this case, a dozen people DIED & 2 cities got nuked. Not the same.
2. Blamed Palisades Fire on “climate change,” failing to acknowledge the arsonist.
Also made excuses about brush clearance, blaming the state. Conveniently did NOT mention the fact that her firefighting water reservoir was (and REMAINS) EMPTY!!!!!!
Not only that, but she deflected accountability and threw her fire chief under the bus:
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who ousted then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley weeks after the fire, said the report “confirms much of what we already knew.”
“That is why I put in place new leadership at the Los Angeles Fire Department,” Bass said in a statement to The Post.
The report reveals a massive system that hadn’t planned for a conflagration of this size and was ill-prepared for it, even though wildfires and weather anomalies have been features of California for thousands of years. The frustrating part? Since it was such a systemwide failure, it’s extremely difficult to assign blame:
No single failure explains the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires that burned through Los Angeles County in January 2025, a new report concludes. Instead, the blazes exposed weaknesses across a system never designed to combat a wind-driven conflagration that spread from structure to structure at sweeping scale…
As a result, the report, which completes an analysis of some of the most deadly, destructive and costly fires in state history, raises a harder question: If responsibility is spread across an entire system, who is responsible for fixing it?
That being said, RedState has reported extensively on some of the unacceptable mistakes made by state and local leadership: a key reservoir above the Palisades was left empty, fire hydrants didn’t work, the LAFD was as focused on DEI and LGBTQ issues as they were on fighting fires, the State Parks Department was accused of prioritizing an endangered plant over putting out the Lachman fire — the blaze that later rekindled into the Palisades Fire — the LAFD pre-deployed only limited extra crews to avoid overtime payments, and many observers have long contended that the state’s environmentalist-pushed brush control policies are unsafe.
In short, one can only conclude that this is not a well-run, efficient city, county or state. Nobody is coming out looking good. The best we can hope for is that officials have learned their lesson and are preparing a whole lot harder for the next incident, which isn’t a question of if — it’s a question of when.
It's today's California, though, so don't hold your breath. Remember, this and so much more is the "progressive experiment" that Newsom, Harris, Pelosi et al. want to roll out nationwide. If we let it happen, we're doomed.
