It was just after noon on Friday, four days into the deadly conflagration in the Palisades, when Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley suddenly seemed to crack.

“Three years I’ve been in this seat, I’ve sounded the alarm — we need more,” Crowley told Fox LA’s Gigi Graciette during an extended live spot. “We are screaming to be properly funded so our firefighters can do our jobs. My job as chief is to make sure my voice is heard.”

“Did the City of Los Angeles fail you?” Graciette pressed her until almost 13 minutes into the interview, when Crowley drew a deep breath, flashed a bemused smile to the camera and finally said it: “Yes.”

It was a narrative she had just relayed to Robert Kovacik of NBC, and that she would go on to repeat to Jake Tapper of CNN and then Nora O’Donnell of CBS, right up until she was summoned to City Hall late Friday, reportedly sure she was about to be axed.

To some, the self-immolating media blitz recast Crowley as willing to speak truth to power and stand up for her troops amid one of the worst urban firestorms in California history.

To others, it was the desperate act of an embattled chief, whose barrier-breaking ascent — the first woman and first openly LGBTQ+ firefighter to lead the department — now undermined her authority, with critics tarring her as an incompetent “DEI hire” in an increasingly politicized disaster.

On Monday, Crowley received an unsigned letter, purportedly from her own current and former chief officers, echoing claims that had filtered from right-wing commentators and social media as her interviews made the rounds through the national news over the weekend. The letter excoriated her for taking TV interviews while the city burned.

“I do believe she should have been concentrating solely on managing the emergency,” Board of Fire Commissioners President Genethia Hudley Hayes, who read the letter, told The Times. “I agree with that.”

Some have also criticized Crowley’s handling of the Palisades disaster, telling The Times she could have deployed available engines more strategically and kept 1,000 firefighters for a second shift as winds picked up early on Jan 7.

Yet to the firefighters with boots on the ground in the Palisades, her “outburst” cemented Crowley as a folk hero.

“In the LAFD it went viral,” said Freddy Escobar, president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, the union representing the department’s rank and file. “Everyone was very shocked, but very happy and excited. They support her 110%.”

“This is the only fire chief that has spoken up against the people who appointed her,” said Capt. Chuong Ho, another union leader. “If that doesn’t show courage, I don’t know what does.”

Crowley declined an interview request for this story, but her peers noted she is one of the few women in a department that remains overwhelmingly male. She is also one of few top brass to have worked nearly every role she now commands, from paramedic to engineer to fire inspector.

“Unlike a lot of her male colleagues, she has promoted through the ranks,” Ho said.

Crowley’s wife, Hollyn Bullock, is a retired firefighter and was the first woman in the department to hold the job of apparatus operator, widely considered the hardest in the service.

Crowley got her start at the city’s storied Station 11, one of the busiest ladders in the country and a required stop for firefighters on the rise in Los Angeles.

“She’s a firefighter’s leader,” said Orange County Fire Authority Captain Lauren Andrade, president of Equity on Fire. “She’s always going to be advocating for her people.”

A few of Crowley’s specific claims about LAFD funding are hotly disputed, and the department’s tactics on the morning of the Palisades fire are sure to face further scrutiny in the coming weeks.

But many female firefighters say the chief has been scapegoated for circumstances outside the department’s control, from grounded air tankers to a dry reservoir.

“There were 100-mph winds and there was a huge compromise in the water supply, critical infrastructure that she did not have access to — yet it’s because she’s a lesbian?” Andrade said. “Her strategy and tactics are completely congruent with how other departments have tackled these events.”

By Thursday, the department had closed ranks around Crowley, with both UFLAC and the Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Officers Assn. penning public letters of support.

Still, in the midst of the worst disaster to strike L.A. in a generation, many see a reflection of the crisis that landed Crowley in the department’s top spot in the first place.

‘You’re not gonna break me’

Few wanted the job of L.A. city fire chief when Crowley was appointed to it in early 2022.

Backlash from vaccine mandates still roiled the department. Many top officials had retired or resigned. A group of Black firefighters sued, alleging a “good ol’ white boys club.” Meanwhile, a 2021 study commissioned internally showed a crisis of trust, with fewer than 30% of sworn members saying they had confidence in senior leadership.

The same survey showed that more than half of sworn women felt bullying and harassment were their biggest problems in the department.

“I don’t take that lightly,” Crowley said in a 2022 interview with Giselle Fernandez of Spectrum News. “Thirty years of talking about this is 30 years of talking about this — now it’s about action.”

Fewer than 5% of career firefighters in the U.S. are female. In Los Angeles, the fraction is even smaller: There are currently about 120 sworn women in the LAFD, which has around 3,500 total personnel. That’s compared with more than 250 female firefighters in San Francisco, a department less than half the size.

“There is such a misogynistic, sexist slant to the fire service, and some people absolutely thrive in that — it gets very toxic” said retired Sacramento Fire Capt. Erika Enslin, founder of Golden State Women in the Fire Service. “She was trying to do something to not foster that culture anymore.”

At the heart of that sexism is the belief that women simply aren’t strong enough to do a firefighter’s job.

“It feels warm and fuzzy to think that on your worst day, someone’s going to throw you over their shoulder and carry you out,” but that’s not what firefighters really do, Andrade said.

The brute strength needed to battle a wildfire has little bearing in an era when the overwhelming majority of calls are for emergency medical services, she said.

“Yes, you have to be physically strong, and yes, every single woman firefighter went through the same academy,” Andrade said. “Women are very strong. It’s an old-school argument to maintain the status quo.”

Los Angeles County Fire Department Chief Anthony Marrone has been spared the intense public scrutiny Crowley is under, she and others note.

Crowley has typically sidestepped questions about sexism or bullying in her own rise through the ranks, saying she had an intrinsic sense of how to deal with men who hassled her on the job. In trying times, she said, she drew strength from her mother, who raised three children alone after Crowley’s father died.

“That to me really set that course, watching my mother go through that,” she told Fernandez in 2022. “To have that strength, and the ability to push through, that really left a huge mark on me.”

She also draws on her years as student athlete — first at an all-girls high school in her home town of Green Bay, Wis., and later playing basketball and soccer at the all-women St. Mary’s College in Indiana.

“Being an athlete, I’m not gonna give up — you’re not gonna break me,” Crowley said.

Her rise in the macho Fire Station 11 may have shielded her from some of the department’s sexism, several people who know her said. Despite her short stature — Crowley is roughly average height for a woman — she and Bullock have long been celebrated for their toughness, having famously saved part of Bullock’s mother’s neighborhood from the 2018 Woolsey fire armed only with garden hoses and the spare fire gear in their car.

“She was just one of those people, like, ‘I want to be like her when I grow up,’” Enslin said.

She and others watched the mother of three with pride and hope as she ascended the ranks in the country’s third-largest fire department.

“When she got to fire chief I was in awe,” said Lt. Tina Guiler of Miami-Dade Fire Rescue and CEO of Triple F, a national women’s affinity group. “She was kind of like my hero.”

Like other female firefighters interviewed by The Times, Enslin and Guiler know Crowley through the network of professional groups, training programs and girls fire camps that women in the service have built up to sustain their ranks and cultivate future firefighters.

Crowley was an active, dedicated mentor, the women said. She pushed young acolytes to envision a career in the department and helped career firefighters develop gender-specific skills, such as using their legs to pull the fire hose instead of relying on upper body strength, as men do.

Critics have sought to portray these groups and their efforts as an outgrowth of the push for diversity, equity and inclusion — or DEI, as it is often shortened — that has swept U.S. institutions in the last five years.

The diversification of the LAFD and other departments followed consent decrees that began in the 1970s and ‘80s.

“The women’s group was part of that whole generation,” said Assistant Deputy Chief Julie Mau of the San Francisco Fire Department, who previously headed the United Fire Service Women of San Francisco. “Through the years we’ve become one of the biggest and most active, because we use training as a way to help develop membership.”

Crowley filled out some of her top leadership positions with the same women she had worked alongside in Los Angeles Women in the Fire Service — including Deputy Chief Kristine Larson, a longtime critic of the department who came under fire this week after an old clip of her appearing to scold victims resurfaced on right-wing social media.

Crowley has also elevated younger, historically marginalized deputies to replace older veterans amid churn in her top ranks. A recent lawsuit described her second in command, Deputy Chief Orin Saunders, as an “African American, gay male.”

Critics say those moves have distracted from the core mission of the department: fighting fires.

Her supporters say those critiques are a fig leaf for the sexism they’ve endured their entire careers.

“DEI — it’s part of what she cares about, but it’s not the main thing she cares about,” Guiler said. “I’m tired of people saying women can’t do this job.”

Times staff writer David Zahniser contributed to this report.