A new report in the Los Angeles Times indicates that firefighters were ordered to abandon the smoldering underground fire that later became the devastating Palisades Fire, something the crews on the ground thought was a “bad idea.”
According to text messages reviewed by the Times, firefighters told their battalion chief that “the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch” at the site of the Lachman Fire, which burned on New Year’s Day before being contained.
Despite that warning, “their battalion chief ordered them to roll up their hoses and pull out of the area on Jan. 2 — the day after the 8-acre blaze was declared contained — rather than stay and make sure there were no hidden embers that could spark a new fire,” the Times reports.
That first fire, which prosecutors say was started by an Uber driver, remained burning underground until the strong winds of Jan. 7 rekindled it.
That blaze grew into the Palisades Fire, which killed 12 people and devastated the Pacific Palisades.
Mayor Karen Bass and current and former Los Angeles Fire Department officials declined or did not return the Times requests for comment, but officials have said that they thought the Lachman Fire had been extinguished.
Plenty of rank-and-file firefighters, however, disagreed with that assessment and made their displeasure known in the texts reviewed by the Times.
“In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene on Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a ‘bad idea’ to leave the burn scar unprotected because of the visible signs of smoldering terrain,” the Times reports. “’And the rest is history,’” the firefighter wrote in recent weeks.”
