Palisades

In some ways, it was just another campaign coffee: Los Angeles mayoral candidate Austin Beutner in a roomful of voters talking about his career and life accomplishments.

But this was no ordinary meet-and-greet. Beutner was standing inside a partially rebuilt house — with no doors, no windows and no drywall — in an area leveled by the Palisades fire. In the living room, about a dozen people spoke about what they had been through, from the frantic evacuation to the sight of smoldering ruins to the battle to get rebuilding permits.

Allison Holdorff Polhill, who owns the home, introduced Beutner — a former L.A. school superintendent — as the civic leader she would turn to first in a crisis.

“We were in the worst disaster that L.A. has ever experienced,” she told the group. “And we needed a leader that has experience with disasters and emergencies.”

The catastrophic Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead, has redefined the L.A. mayor’s race, expanding the field of candidates and creating a political minefield for Karen Bass as she seeks a second four-year term.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass speaks at a City Hall ceremony where flags are lowered to half-staff to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton fires.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

When the fire broke out on Jan. 7, 2025, Bass drew criticism for being in Ghana on a diplomatic mission. Once she returned, she was at odds with her fire chief and unsteady in her public appearances.

More recently, she has faced scrutiny over her handling of the recovery, as well as fire officials’ watering down of an after-action report that was supposed to identify mistakes in the firefighting effort.

The Times found that LAFD officials failed to fully pre-deploy engines to the Palisades amid forecasts of dangerously high winds and that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the scene of a Jan. 1 blaze, even though it wasn’t fully extinguished. That fire rekindled a week later to become the Palisades fire.

Fernando Guerra, a political science professor at Loyola Marymount University, said he expects the disaster will be the No. 1 issue in the June 2 mayoral primary, resonating with voters well beyond Pacific Palisades.

To wage a competitive campaign, each of Bass’ challengers will need to make the fire and its aftermath “a reflection of what’s wrong with city government,” he said.

“It really does reflect on the readiness of the city, the responsiveness of the city, how is government working at the most basic level,” said Guerra, who also runs the Center for the Study of Los Angeles.

So far, Bass’ major challengers are embracing that strategy.

Beutner, who ran the L.A. Unified School District early in the pandemic, has accused Bass of failing to take responsibility for the city’s failures before and after the fire. On Monday, appearing with fire victims in Pacific Palisades, he called on the mayor to form a citizens commission to examine what went wrong.

Rae Huang, a community organizer who is challenging the mayor from the left, has expressed disappointment in what she called Bass’ “finger-pointing” — a reference to the mayor’s criticism, and ouster, of Fire Chief Kristin Crowley last year.

Then there’s reality TV star Spencer Pratt, an outspoken Bass critic, who launched a campaign rooted in his fury over the city’s handling of the fire — and the loss of his family’s home in the flames.

“I’ve waited a whole year for someone to step up and challenge Karen Bass, but I saw no fighters,” Pratt said in a social media post Wednesday. “Guess I’m gonna have to do this myself.”

Reality TV star Spencer Pratt, second from right, announced on Wedneday that he is running for mayor. He is suing the city over its handling of the Palisades fire, which destroyed his home in Pacific Palisades.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Still unclear is whether two formidable public figures will jump in — L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath and real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to Bass in 2022. On Wednesday, Caruso said he will decide in the next couple of weeks whether he will run for mayor or governor.

Asked whether he might stay out of both races, Caruso responded: “I think that option is pretty much off the table now.”

As the city marked the one-year anniversary of the fires this week, Bass mostly kept a low profile, addressing the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club over the weekend and joining a private vigil at the Self-Realization Fellowship Lake Shrine.

While Pratt and hundreds of demonstrators were staging a “They Let Us Burn” rally in the Palisades, Bass stood solemnly outside City Hall as police officers lowered flags to half-staff. Bass spoke about grief and loss, but also the fact that more than 400 homes are being rebuilt.

“You see signs of hope everywhere,” she told the crowd.

Bass’ political team has taken a tougher approach, accusing her most outspoken critics — including Pratt, who is releasing a book later this month — of exploiting the disaster for political or even financial gain.

“For the first time ever we saw a major wildfire politicized by MAGA leaders and monetized by social influencers making tens of thousands of dollars per month and hawking books on the backs of a devastated community,” Bass campaign strategist Doug Herman said in a statement.

For much of the past year, Bass has faced criticism over the Fire Department’s deployment decisions and its failure to put out the Jan. 1 fire. She also has taken hits over the recovery, with residents saying she has not delivered on promises to waive permit fees for rebuilding homes lost in the fire.

Now, the focus has turned to a new and unsettling question: Did the city undermine its own effort to assess the Fire Department’s mistakes?

The Times reported last month that LAFD officials made changes to the after-action report that were so significant that its author, Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, declined to endorse it.

“The fact that [Cook] is not willing to sponsor, or support, or endorse the report says a hell of a lot about the fact that there is no trust and clear leadership,” Huang said.

Bass told The Times on Wednesday that she did not work with the Fire Department on changes to the report, nor did the agency consult her about any changes.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath speaks at a rally in support of the county’s emergency rent relief program to help households who have lost income because of federal immigration enforcement.

(Al Seib / For The Times)

Horvath, who is running for a second four-year term as county supervisor, has also ripped the city over the report, saying wildfire victims feel “gaslit” — and deserve answers.

The supervisor, whose sprawling district includes the Palisades burn area, said she has been hearing from people asking her to run for mayor. She said she would prefer to continue in county office. But she voiced concern about the city’s future — not just its handling of the wildfire, but also the budget, the homelessness crisis and the delivery of basic services.

“I think people are hungry for a different kind of leadership,” she told The Times.

Pacific Palisades has not been a political stronghold for Bass. Although she won her 2022 race against Caruso by a 10-point margin, she trailed him by double digits in the Palisades.

Like many people across the region, the major mayoral candidates were directly impacted by the January fires or have family who lost homes — or both.

Beutner’s home was severely damaged in the Palisades fire, forcing him to live elsewhere for the past year. His mother-in-law’s home, also in the Palisades, was completely destroyed.

Bass has spoken repeatedly about her brother, whose Malibu home was destroyed in the Palisades fire. Huang’s 53-year-old cousin lost her Altadena home in the Eaton fire. Pratt, who is suing the city over the Palisades fire, said on social media that the flames consumed not just his home but also one owned by his parents.

Caruso, still a candidate-in-waiting, managed to save Palisades Village, the shopping center he opened in 2018, in part by securing his own private firefighting crew. But the inferno nevertheless destroyed the homes of his son and daughter, who are 26 and 29.

Real estate developer Rick Caruso on Wednesday unveils an installation in Pacific Palisades with three beams of light to mark the one-year anniversary of the fires.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

On the night the fire broke out, Caruso voiced his fury on live television about empty fire hydrants and the overall lack of water to douse the flames. Since then, he has offered a steady stream of criticism about the rebuilding process, including the mayor’s decision not to select a replacement for Steve Soboroff, who served 90 days as her recovery czar.

Caruso has spoken favorably in recent weeks about a few aspects of the recovery, including the reopening of classrooms and the quick removal of fire debris. He credited L.A. Unified and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, respectively, for those accomplishments — not the city.

“Frankly, the bright spots are under the leadership of other people,” he told The Times.

Beutner has been equally blunt. At last month’s campaign coffee, he said the city needs to convene a citizen panel similar to the Christopher Commission, which was formed weeks after the 1991 police beating of Rodney King. The panel assessed the LAPD’s handling of discipline, misconduct complaints, excessive force by officers and other issues.

“If you have a tragedy, you have public hearings, you have leaders who are empaneled with the money they need to ask tough questions of everybody — the mayor, her staff, the acting mayor, police, fire” and the Department of Water and Power, Beutner told the group. “What did you do, and what would you have done differently?”

Clara Karger, a spokesperson for Bass, said the city is already participating in a state investigation, which is being overseen by the Fire Safety Research Institute, into the Palisades and Eaton fires.

On top of that, she said, the fire department is commissioning an independent investigation into its response to the Jan. 1 fire that reignited into the Palisades fire. That blaze, known as the Lachman fire, was mentioned only briefly in the department’s after-action report.

“Mayor Bass wants all the information to ensure accountability and to continue implementing needed reforms, many of which are already underway from LAFD,” Karger said.

Spencer Pratt, a reality television star who lost his home in the Palisades fire and then emerged as a sharp critic of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and Gov. Gavin Newsom, announced Wednesday that he will run for mayor.

The former star of “The Hills” has spent much of the last year firing off social media posts blaming the mayor and governor for the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and burned more than 6,800 homes.

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Pratt made his announcement at the “They Let Us Burn” event in Pacific Palisades on the one-year anniversary of the fire.

“We’re going to expose the system. We’re going into every dark corner of L.A. politics and disinfecting the city with our light,” he said to a crowd of hundreds, many of whom cheered.

Former L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass, has also attacked the mayor’s performance on the fire, saying she has not accepted responsibility for the city’s failures.

Community organizer Rae Huang, who is running from Bass’ left, has offered her own critique, saying the mayor has engaged in too much finger-pointing.

Still unclear is whether real estate developer Rick Caruso — another outspoken critic of Bass on the fire — will launch a second mayoral bid. Bass defeated him in 2022 by a comfortable margin.

L.A. County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents the areas that burned in the Palisades fire and who has also criticized the city’s response to the fire, said Monday night that she is still considering her own run for L.A. mayor.

Speaking with CNN’s Elex Michaelson, Horvath said she is “listening to a lot of the people who are encouraging me to get into this race, people who are looking for a different kind of leadership.”

“You know, there are a lot of people who are asking me about running for mayor,” Horvath said. “And I think it’s because they see that we are setting up in the county a different structure of accountability, and that’s long overdue for the region.”

The Palisades fire has become a serious political liability for Bass as the mayoral race gains momentum. She was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the fire ignited.

Since then, she has faced criticism over a series of issues surrounding the city’s emergency response, including LAFD deployment, the fact that the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty, and the Fire Department’s failure to put out a New Year’s Day fire that eventually rekindled into the Palisades fire.

Bass, for her part, said Tuesday that she is using the full extent of her mayoral powers to “restore the Palisades community and return families home as quickly and safely as possible.”

Bass’ campaign team did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Pratt’s announcement. But earlier this week, they took direct aim at Pratt and other critics, accusing them of using the disaster for their personal benefit.

“For the first time ever we saw a major wildfire politicized by MAGA leaders and monetized by social influencers making tens of thousands of dollars per month and hawking books on the backs of a devastated community,” said Bass campaign spokesperson Doug Herman. “While some may choose to divide people and tear down the progress that’s being made, Mayor Bass will continue to work to unite people and focus on doing everything that she can to get everyone in the Palisades back in homes, business re-opened, and beloved community spaces up and running again so that the Palisades can once again thrive.

Pratt and his wife, reality television personality Heidi Montag, sued the city in January after their Palisades house burned down, arguing that the Santa Ynez reservoir should not have been offline and empty when the fire erupted.

As recently as Tuesday, Pratt posted on X saying he was “shocked that 7% of Angelenos have ‘a great deal of confidence’ in their city and state government.”

“Have they looked around?” he wrote.

In the past, Pratt has also hinted at a run for governor. On his website, he still advertises “Spencer for Governor” shirts for $20, at a more than a 50% discount.

Pratt became famous in the aughts for his role on “The Hills,” where he was known as Montag’s boyfriend-turned-husband. He has also appeared on “Celebrity Big Brother” and “The Hills: New Beginnings.”

Months after the devastating Palisades fire, the head of the Los Angeles Fire Commission inquired about the Fire Department’s long-awaited after-action report.

Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva said that a “working draft” had been sent to Mayor Karen Bass’ office, Genethia Hudley Hayes told The Times on Tuesday.

In the conversation, which took place in mid-August or later, Villanueva said that the mayor’s office had asked for “refinements,” but he did not say what they were, according to Hudley Hayes.

Hudley Hayes, who was appointed by Bass in June 2023 to serve on the five-member commission that provides civilian oversight of the LAFD, said that in her long career in civic roles, she had learned that words like “refinements” could mean troubling changes to a government report, made for the purpose of hiding facts.

Earlier Tuesday, Fire Chief Jaime Moore, responding to the findings of a Times investigation, acknowledged that the after-action report had been edited to soften criticism of the LAFD leadership’s handling of the Palisades fire.

The Times had previously reported that Hudley Hayes was concerned enough about possible edits that she sought advice from a deputy city attorney.

But Hudley Hayes’ remarks Tuesday were her first public statements that her concerns stemmed from what she understood to be the mayor’s office’s possible intent to influence the report, which was supposed to lay out what went wrong in fighting the Palisades fire and how to prevent the mistakes from happening again.

Hudley Hayes said that after reviewing an early draft of the after-action report, as well as the final document released by the LAFD on Oct. 8, she was satisfied that “material findings” were not altered.

But her account raises questions about the mayor’s role in revisions to the report that, as Moore conceded Tuesday, downplayed the city’s failures in preparing for and responding to the fire, which killed 12 people and leveled much of the Palisades and surrounding areas.

On Tuesday, Bass’ office did not immediately explain what the refinements were. A spokesperson previously said that the office did not demand changes to the drafts and only asked the LAFD to confirm the accuracy of items such as how the weather and the department’s budget factored into the disaster.

“The report was written and edited by the Fire Department,” the spokesperson, Clara Karger, said in an email last month. “We did not red-line, review every page or review every draft of the report.”

The Times obtained and analyzed seven drafts of the report and identified deletions and revisions. The most significant changes in the various iterations of the report involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire.

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.”

Moore, who replaced Villanueva in November, admitted that the report was watered down to shield top brass from scrutiny.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore said at a Fire Commission meeting Tuesday. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief.”

The LAFD did not respond to a query about who ordered the changes to the report. Villanueva also did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment.

Hudley Hayes said she reached out to Villanueva around Aug. 21, when The Times published a story quoting a colleague on the Fire Commission, Sharon Delugach, expressing a desire to see the after-action report.

“It occurred to me then that she was correct. We hadn’t seen one — it was taking a long time,” Hudley Hayes said. “That’s the point I called interim Chief Villanueva.”

Meanwhile, the author of the report, Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, had emailed a PDF of his report to Villanueva in early August, asking the chief to select a couple of people to provide edits so he could make the changes in his Word document.

The following week, Cook emailed the chief his final draft.

“Thank you for all your hard work,” Villanueva responded. “I’ll let you know how we’re going to move forward.”

Over the next two months, the report went through a series of edits — behind closed doors and without Cook’s involvement, as The Times disclosed last month.

On Oct. 8, the same day the report was released, Cook emailed Villanueva, declining to endorse the public version because of changes that altered his findings and made the report “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

“Having reviewed the revised version submitted by your office, I must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form,” Cook wrote in the email obtained by The Times. “The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented.”

A July email thread reviewed by The Times shows that the LAFD formed a “crisis management workgroup” to deal with concerns about how the after-action report would be received.

“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Assistant Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight other people.

“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”

Hudley Hayes, who previously served on the L.A. Unified school board, said she did not think “there was any critical material removed” from the final report.

She said she noticed only small differences, such as “mistakes” being changed to “challenges,” and the removal of firefighters’ names.

She added that she does not know who ordered the changes disclosed by The Times — and despite her oversight role, is “not particularly” interested in finding out.

“Our job is to take the report that we have in front of us. Our job is to make sure those recommendations that came to us from a public report are taken care of,” she said. “You’re asking me political questions.”

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

Los Angeles Fire Chief Jaime Moore admitted Tuesday that his department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire was watered down to shield top brass from scrutiny.

Moore’s admission comes more than two weeks after The Times found that the report was edited to downplay the failures of city and Los Angeles Fire Department leaders in preparing for and fighting the Jan. 7, 2025, fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.

“It is now clear that multiple drafts were edited to soften language and reduce explicit criticism of department leadership in that final report,” Moore said Tuesday during remarks before the city’s Board of Fire Commissioners. “This editing occurred prior to my appointment as fire chief. And I can assure you that nothing of this sort will ever again happen while I am fire chief.”

Moore, who was appointed fire chief in November, did not say who was responsible for the changes to the report.

The report’s author, LAFD Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, declined to endorse it because of substantial deletions that altered his findings. Cook said in an Oct. 8 email to then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva and other LAFD officials that the edited version was “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

Mayor Karen Bass’ office has said that the LAFD wrote and edited the report, and that the mayor did not demand changes.

On Tuesday, Clara Karger, a spokesperson for Bass said: “Mayor Bass fully respects and supports what the Chief said today, and she looks forward to seeing his leadership make the change that is needed within the department. Chief Moore is a courageous leader with strong integrity who continues to show his deep commitment to the people of Los Angeles and to the brave firefighters who serve our city every day.”

Villanueva did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Moore’s remarks, on the eve of the first anniversary of the Palisades fire, were the strongest admission yet of missteps by LAFD leaders. They amounted to an about-face for a chief who in November critiqued the media following a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the area of a New Year’s Day fire even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering. That fire, the Lachman fire, later reignited into the Palisades fire.

“This is about learning and not assigning blame,” said Fire Commissioner Sharon Delugach, who praised the chief for his comments.

The most significant changes, The Times found in its analysis of seven drafts of the report, involved top LAFD officials’ decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy available firefighters ahead of the ferocious winds.

An initial draft said the decision “did not align” with policy, while the final version said the number of companies pre-deployed “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”

A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

Another passage that was deleted said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment on Jan. 7, 2025.

The department made other changes that seemed intended to make the report seem less negative. In one draft, there was a suggestion to change the cover image from a photo of palm trees on fire to a more “positive” image, such as “firefighters on the frontline.” The final report displays the LAFD seal on its cover.

A July email thread reviewed by The Times shows concern over how the after-action report would be received, with the LAFD forming a “crisis management workgroup.”

“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Assistant Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight other people.

“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”

Maryam Zar, a Palisades resident who runs the Palisades Recovery Coalition, said that “when news came out that this report had been doctored to save face, it didn’t take much for [Palisades residents] to believe that was true.”

It was easy for Moore to admit the faults of previous LAFD administrations, she said.

“He’s not going to take any heat. It wasn’t him,” she said. “He’s not the fire chief who really should have stood up and said, ‘I didn’t do what I should have.’”

The after-action report has been widely criticized for failing to examine the New Year’s Day fire that later reignited into the Palisades fire. Bass has ordered the LAFD to commission an independent investigation into its missteps in putting out the earlier fire.

On Tuesday, Moore said the city failed to adequately ensure that the New Year’s Day fire was fully snuffed out.

He said that LAFD officials “genuinely believed the fire was fully extinguished.”

“That was based on the information, conditions, and procedures in place at that moment. That belief guided the operational decision-making that was made,” he said. “However, the outcome has made it incredibly clear that our mop-up and verification process needed to be stronger.”

“We have to own that, and I do,” he added.

If journalism is the first draft of history, TV news is a rough, improbable sketch. As last year’s wildfires multiplied, still 0% contained, field reporters — tasked with articulating the unintelligible on camera — grieved alongside Los Angeles in real time.

“What are you supposed to say when the entire community you were born and raised in is wiped off the map, literally burning to the ground before your eyes?” Jacob Soboroff writes in “Firestorm,” out in early January ahead of the Palisades and Eaton fires’ first anniversary. “I couldn’t come up with much.”

Viewers saw that struggle Jan. 8, 2025. Soboroff, then an NBC News national correspondent, briefly broke the fourth wall while trying to describe the destruction of his former hometown, the Pacific Palisades.

“Firestorm,” the first book about the Great Los Angeles Fires of 2025, pulls readers inside Soboroff’s reporter’s notebook and the nearly two relentless weeks he spent covering the Palisades and subsequent Eaton wildfire. “Fire, it turns out, can be a remarkable time machine,” he writes, “a curious form of teleportation into the past and future all at once.”

The book argues the future long predicted arrived the morning of Jan. 7. The costliest wildfire event in American history, so far, was compounded by cascading failures and real-time disinformation, ushering in what Soboroff calls America’s New Age of Disaster: “Every aspect of my childhood flashed before my eyes, and, while I’m not sure I understood it as I stared into the camera…I saw my children’s future, too, or at least some version of it.”

In late December, Soboroff returned to the Palisades Recreation Center for the first time since it burned. Tennis balls popped from the courts down the bluff. Kids shrieked around the playground’s ersatz police cars, ambulance and fire trucks — part of a $30-million public-private rebuild backed by City Hall, billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso and Lakers coach JJ Redick, among others.

The sun peeks through the morning marine layer as Soboroff stops at a plaque on the sole standing structure, a New Deal-era basketball gym. His parents’ names are etched at the top; below them, family, friends, neighbors. It’s practically a family tree in metal, commemorating the one-man fundraising efforts of his father, the business developer Steve Soboroff, to repair the local play area. It was also the elder Soboroff’s entry point into civic life, the start of a career that later included 10 years as an LAPD police commissioner, a mayoral bid and a 90-day stint as L.A.’s’ fire recovery czar.

“All because my dad hit his head at this park,” Soboroff says with a smirk, recalling the incident that set off his father’s community safety efforts.

He checks the old office where he borrowed basketballs as a kid. “What’s happening? Are people still coming to the park?” he asks a Recreation and Parks employee, slipping into man-on-the-street mode.

On a drive down memory lane (Sunset Boulevard), Soboroff jokes he could close his eyes and trace the street by feel alone. Past rows of yard signs — “KAREN BASS RESIGN NOW” — and tattered American flags, grass and rose bushes push through the wreckage. Pompeii by the Pacific.

Jacob Soboroff.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

At the corner where he once ran a lemonade stand, Soboroff FaceTimed his mother on national television to show her what remained of the home he was born in. Before the fires, he had never quite turned the microphone on himself.

During the worst of it, with no one else around but the roar of the firestorm, “I had to hold it up to myself,” he says. “That was a different assignment than I’ve ever had to do.”

Soboroff is a boyish 42, with a mop of dark curls and round specs, equally comfortable in the field and at the anchor desk. J-school was never the plan. But he got a taste for scoops as an advance man to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. MTV News once seemed like the dream, but he always much preferred the loose, happy talk of public television’s Huell Howser. MSNBC took notice of his post-grad YouTube and HuffPost spots and hired him in 2015.

Ten years later, he was tiring of breaking news assignments and stashed away his “TV News cosplay gear” to ring in 2025. But when he saw the winds fanning the flames in the Palisades from NBC’s bureau at Universal Studios, he fished out a yellow Nomex fire jacket and hopped in a three-ton white Jeep with his camera crew.

The opening chapters of “Firestorm” read like a sci-fi thriller. All-caps warnings ricochet between agencies. Smoke columns appear. High-wind advisories escalate. Soboroff slingshots the reader from the Palisades fire station to the National Weather Service office, a presidential hotel room, toppled power lines in Altadena, helitankers above leveled streets and Governor Newsom’s emergency operations center.

Between live shots with producer Bianca Seward and cameramen Jean Bernard Rutagarama and Alan Rice, Soboroff fields frantic calls from both loved ones and the unexpected contacts, desperate for eyes on the ground. One is from Katie Miller, a former White House aide who cut contact after the reporter published “Separated,” his 2020 book on the Trump family separation policy. Miller, wife of Trump advisor Stephen Miller, asks him to check on her in-laws’ home. “You’re the only one I can see who is there,” she writes. Soboroff confirms the house is gone. “Palisades is stronger than politics in my book,” he replies. For a moment, old divisions vanish. It doesn’t last.

Jacob Soboroff at McNally Avenue and East Mariposa Street in Altadena.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

He returns home to Frogtown, changes out of smoke-soaked clothes and grabs a few hours’ sleep before heading back out. “Yet another body blow from the pounding relentlessness of the back-to-back-to-back-to-back fires,” he writes. Fellow native Palisadian and MS Now colleague Katy Tur flies in to tour the “neighborhood of our youth incinerated.”

After the fires, Soboroff moved straight into covering the immigration enforcement raids across Los Angeles. He struggled to connect with others, though. Maybe a little depressed. The book didn’t crystallize until April, after a conversation with Jonathan White, a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, who is now running for congress.

Fire, White tells him, has become the fastest-growing threat in America and, for many communities, the most immediate. Soboroff began tracking down people he’d met during the blaze — firefighters, scientists, residents, federal officials — and churned out pages on weekends. He kept the book tightly scoped, Jan. 7–24, ending with President Trump’s visit to the Palisades with Gov. Newsom. He saved the investigative journalism and political finger-pointing for other writers.

“For me, it’s a much more personal book,” Soboroff says. “It’s about experiencing what I came to understand as the fire of the future. It’s about people as much as politics.”

Looking back — and learning from the fire — became a form of release, he said, as much for him as for the city. “What happened here is a lesson for everybody all across the country.”

Rudi, an L.A. native, is a freelance art and culture writer. She’s at work on her debut novel about a stuttering student journalist.

It might be time to write a folk song about the demise of City Section basketball using the music of Peter, Paul and Mary and the new title, “Where Have All the Players Gone?”

The talent level clearly has hit rock bottom only a year after Alijah Arenas was a McDonald’s All-American at Chatsworth High and Tajh Ariza led Westchester to the City Section Open Division title. Because their parents went to City Section schools, Arenas and Ariza stuck it out. Then Arenas graduated early to join USC and Ariza left for St. John Bosco, then prep school.

Westchester is where Ed Azzam won 15 City titles in 42 seasons until his retirement in 2021. Crenshaw is where Willie West won 16 City titles and eight state titles. Taft is where Derrick Taylor won four City titles and coached future NBA players Jordan Farmar, Larry Drew II and AJ Johnson. Fairfax is where Harvey Kitani coached for 35 years, won four City titles and two state titles and earned most of his nearly 1,000 victories. He was followed by Steve Baik and Reggie Morris Jr., each of whom won City championships before leaving.

None of the City schools once considered among the best in Southern California are even close to resembling their glory days, and they aren’t alone. The City Section has lost most of its talent, and it was truly Hall of Fame talent: Marques Johnson and John Williams at Crenshaw; Gail Goodrich at Sun Valley Poly; Willie Naulls at San Pedro; Dwayne Polee at Manual Arts; Gilbert Arenas at Grant; Trevor Ariza at Westchester; Chris Mills at Fairfax. There were decades of success.

There’s no one person to blame. You can’t even place the downfall solely on the Los Angeles Unified School District, whose high schools compete in the City Section.

But LAUSD has done nothing to reverse the trend and didn’t help matters by opening so many new schools in such rapid fashion that longtime legacy schools lost their luster amid declining student enrollment. Things became even more disruptive by the rise of charter schools and private schools taking away top athletes. Adding to that, the loss of veteran coaches frustrated by bureaucracy issues and rules that force programs to secure permits and pay to use their own gyms in the offseason helped further the exodus.

Westchester is 2-8 this season and an example of where City Section basketball stands. Two top players from last season — Gary Ferguson and Jordan Ballard — are now at St. Bernard. Westchester doesn’t even have a roster posted on MaxPreps. King/Drew won its first City Open Division title in 2024 under coach Lloyd Webster. This season Webster sent his senior son, Josahn, to Rolling Hills Prep to play for Kitani. King/Drew is 4-10.

Charter schools Birmingham, Palisades and Granada Hills have separated themselves in virtually all City Section sports including basketball. They have no enrollment boundaries as long as there’s a seat for a student. Palisades lost so many students after the wildfire last year that transfers have been big additions for its teams this school year. Online courses are being offered to help students enroll and compete in sports at charter schools.

The old powers from the inner city — Crenshaw, Dorsey, Jefferson, Locke and Fremont — experienced big changes in demographics. Many coaches are walk-ons and not teachers. The legacy schools have to compete with charter schools View Park Prep, Triumph, Animo Watts, Animo Robinson, WISH Academy and USC-MAE. When young players are discovered and developed, rarely will they stay when one of the private schools or AAU coaches searching for talent spots them in the offseason.

So what’s left? Not much.

Palisades, Washington Prep and Cleveland look like the three top teams this season. All three added transfers to help buck the downward trend. And yet their records are 3-10, 8-8 and 7-6, respectively, against mostly Southern Section teams.

Maybe this can be a fluke one-year plunge to the bottom and the climb back up can begin, aided by coaches who recognize their job is to teach lessons in basketball, life and college preparation. Parents need a reason to send their kids to a City Section school. It’s up to LAUSD and principals to help change the trajectory by finding coaches with integrity, passion and willingness to embrace the underdog role.

There are plenty in the system doing their best. It’s time to start hearing and answering their pleas for help.

When it’s Harvey Kitani versus David Rebibo in a high school basketball coaching matchup, you know it’s going to be a defensive grind. They demand defensive production, so Rolling Hills Prep and Harvard-Westlake went at it for 32 minutes on Saturday night at St. Francis.

It took four consecutive free throws by Joe Sterling in the final 21 seconds for Harvard-Westlake (17-2) to hold on for a 50-46 victory. About the only mistake Rolling Hills Prep (13-5) made was choosing to foul Sterling, well known as a clutch free-throw shooter. But the Huskies had no choice after a three by Aaron Heinze got them to within 48-46 with 2.6 seconds left.

Sterling finished with 16 points. Pierce Thompson had 14 points and Dominique Bentho added 11 points and 12 rebounds. Nick Welch Jr. had a big game for Rolling Hills Prep with 21 points on eight-for-14 shooting. Carter Fulton added 10 points.

Santa Margarita 72, Fairfax 41: The Eagles (19-2) opened a 21-2 lead after the first quarter and cruised to victory at St. Francis. Brayden Kyman scored 21 points, Kaiden Bailey had 17 and Drew Anderson had 15.

St. Pius X-St. Matthias 67, JSerra 62: Kayleb Kearse finished with 27 points in the victory. Jaden Bailes had 30 points for JSerra.

Sierra Canyon 77, Phoenix St. Mary’s 45: The Trailblazers (13-1) tuned up for the start of Mission League play with a rout in Arizona. Brandon McCoy scored 18 points and Brannon Martinsen had 17.

Chaminade 70, Palos Verdes 44: Temi Olafisoye had 17 points for the 18-1 Eagles.

Thousand Oaks 53, Oak Park 46: The Lancers won their 16th consecutive game to stay unbeaten. Gabriel Chin had 14 points.

Sherman Oaks Notre Dame 67, Layton Christian (Utah) 64: NaVorro Bowman led the Knights (13-4) with 24 points. Josiah Nance added 16 points.

Bishop Montgomery 71, Palisades 68: Austin Kirksey had 24 points and Tarron Williams scored 22 points to help Bishop Montgomery improve to 15-2. Freshman Phillip Reed scored 24 points for Palisades.

Crespi 60, Modesto Christian 49: The Celts improved to 13-6.

St. John Bosco 62, Chandler (Ariz.) Basha 54: Christian Collins scored 31 points and Max Ellis had 22 for the Braves in a win in Arizona.

Mayfair 69, Cypress 56: Josiah Johnson’s 27 points helped Mayfair improve to 8-5.

Inglewood 98, Pasadena 97: Jason Crowe Jr. made the game-winning shot in overtime and finished with 51 points for Inglewood.

Girls basketball

Harvard-Westlake 51, Phoenix Desert Vista 39: Freshman Lucia Khamenia finished with 24 points for Harvard-Westlake.

Brentwood 59, Cardinal Newman 53: The Eagles improved to 9-4. Kelsey Sugar scored 24 points.

Saugus 57, Birmingham 52: Kayla Tanijiri had 16 points for Birmingham (13-3).

Pacific Palisades had been burning for less than two hours when word raced through the ranks of the Los Angeles Fire Department that the agency’s leaders had failed to pre-deploy any extra engines and crews to the area, despite warnings of life-threatening winds.

In the days after the fire broke out, and as thousands of homes and business continued to go up in flames, then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley said little about the lack of pre-deployment, which was first disclosed by The Times, instead blaming those high winds, along with a shortage of working engines and money, for her agency’s failure to quickly knock down the blaze.

Crowley’s comments did not stand up to scrutiny. To several former LAFD chief officers as well as to people who lost everything in the disaster, her focus on equipment and City Hall finances marked the beginning of an ongoing campaign of secrecy and deflection by the department — all designed to avoid taking full responsibility for what went wrong in the preparations for and response to the Jan. 7 fire, which killed 12 people and leveled much of the Palisades and surrounding areas.

“I don’t think they’ve acknowledged that they’ve made mistakes yet, and that’s really a problem,” said Sue Pascoe, editor of the local publication Circling the News, who lost her home of 30 years. “They’re still trying to cover up … It’s not the regular firefighters. It’s coming from higher up.”

With the first anniversary of the fire a week away, questions about missteps in the firefight remained largely unanswered by the LAFD and Mayor Karen Bass. Among them: Why were crews ordered to leave the still-smoldering scar of an earlier blaze that would reignite into the Palisades inferno? Why did the LAFD alter its after-action report on the fire in a way that appeared intended to shield it from criticism?

The city also has yet to release the mayor’s communications about the after-action report. The Times requested the communications last month, and the report — which was meant to pinpoint failures and enumerate lessons learned, to avoid repeating mistakes — was issued in early October. Nor has the city fulfilled a records request from The Times about the whereabouts of fire engines in the Palisades when the first 911 call came in. It took the first crews about 20 minutes to reach the scene, by which time the fierce winds were driving the flames toward homes.

A Bass spokesperson has said that the mayor did not demand changes to the after-action report, noting that she pushed for its creation and that it was written and edited by the LAFD.

“This administration is only interested in the full truth about what happened before, during, and after the fire,” the spokesperson, Clara Karger, said earlier this month.

The LAFD has stopped granting interviews or answering questions from The Times about the matter, vaguely citing federal court proceedings. David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said that the federal prosecution of a man accused of starting the earlier blaze does not preclude the department from discussing its actions surrounding both fires.

In a December television interview, Fire Chief Jaime Moore acknowledged that some residents don’t trust his agency and said his mandate from Bass was to “help guide and rebuild the Los Angeles Fire Department to the credibility that we’ve always had.”

The Lachman fire

Shortly after midnight on New Year’s Day, a man watched flames spread in the distant hills and called 911.

“Very top of Lachman, is where we are,” he told the dispatcher. “It’s pretty small but it’s still at the very top and it’s growing.”

“Help is on the way,” the dispatcher said.

A few hours later, at 4:46 a.m., the LAFD announced that the blaze, which later became known as the Lachman fire, was fully contained at eight acres.

Top fire commanders soon made plans to finish mopping up the scene and to leave with their equipment, according to text messages obtained by The Times through a state Public Records Act request.

“I imagine it might take all day to get that hose off the hill,” LAFD Chief Deputy Phillip Fligiel said in a group chat. “Make sure that plan is coordinated.”

Firefighters who returned the next day complained to Battalion Chief Mario Garcia that the ground was still smoldering and rocks still felt hot to the touch, according to private text messages from three firefighters to a third party that were reviewed by The Times. But Garcia ordered them to roll up their hoses and leave.

At 1:35 p.m., Garcia texted Fligiel and Chief Deputy Joseph Everett: “All hose and equipment has been picked up.”

Five days after that, on the morning of Jan. 7, an LAFD captain called Fire Station 23 with an urgent message: The Lachman fire had started up again.

LAFD officials were emphatic early on that the Lachman fire was fully extinguished. But both inside and outside the department, many were certain it had rekindled.

“We won’t leave a fire that has any hot spots,” Crowley said at a community meeting in mid-January.

“That fire was dead out,” Everett said at the same meeting, adding that he was out of town but communicating with the incident commander. “If it is determined that was the cause, it would be a phenomenon.”

The department kept under wraps the complaints of the firefighters who were ordered to leave the burn site. The Times disclosed them in a story in late October. In June, LAFD Battalion Chief Nick Ferrari had told a high-ranking fire official who works for a different agency in the L.A. region that LAFD officials knew about the firefighters’ complaints, The Times also reported.

Bass has directed Moore, an LAFD veteran who took charge of the department in November, to commission an “independent” investigation of the Lachman fire mop-up. The after-action report contained only a brief mention of the earlier fire.

No pre-deployment

The afternoon before hazardous weather is expected, LAFD officials are typically briefed by the National Weather Service, using that information to decide where to position firefighters and engines the following morning.

The weather service had been sounding the alarm about critical fire weather for days. “HEADS UP!!!” NWS Los Angeles posted on X the morning of Jan. 6. “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE” windstorm was coming.

It hadn’t rained much in months, and wind gusts were expected to reach 80 mph. The so-called burning index — a measure of the wildfire threat — was off the charts. Anything beyond 162 is considered “extreme,” and the figure for that Tuesday was 268.

In the past, the LAFD readied for powerful windstorms by pre-deploying large numbers of engines and crews to the areas most at risk for wildfires and, in some cases, requiring a previous shift of hundreds of firefighters to stay for a second shift — incurring large overtime costs — to ensure there were enough personnel positioned to attack a major blaze.

None of that happened in the Palisades, with its hilly terrain covered in bone-dry brush, even though the weather service had flagged it as one of the regions at “extreme risk.”

Without pre-deployment, just 18 firefighters are typically on duty in the Palisades.

LAFD commanders decided to staff only five of the more than 40 engines available to supplement the regular firefighting force citywide. Because they didn’t hold over the outgoing shift, they staffed the extra engines with firefighters who volunteered for the job — only enough to operate three of the five engines.

On Jan. 6, officials decided to pre-deploy just nine engines to high-risk areas, adding eight more the following morning. None of them were sent to the Palisades.

The Times learned from sources of the decision to forgo a pre-deployment operation in the Palisades. LAFD officials were mum about the inadequate staffing until after The Times obtained internal records from a source in January that described the department’s pre-deployment roll-out.

The officials then defended their actions in interviews. Bass cited the LAFD’s failure to hold over the previous shift of firefighters as a reason she removed Crowley as chief less than two months after the fire.

The after-action report

In March, a working group was formed inside the LAFD to prepare the Palisades fire after-action report. A fire captain who was recommended for the group sought to make sure its members would have the freedom to follow the facts wherever they led, according to internal emails the city released in response to a records request by an unidentified party.

“I am concerned about interference from outside entities that may attempt to influence the direction our report takes,” Capt. Harold Kim wrote to Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, who was leading the review. “I would like to ensure that the report that we painstakingly generate be published as is, to as reasonable an extent as possible.”

He worried about revisions, saying that once LAFD labor unions and others “are done with many publications, they become unrecognizable to the authors.”

Cook, who had been involved with review teams for more than a decade and written numerous reports, replied: “I can assure you that I have never allowed for any of our documents to be altered in any way by the organization.”

Other emails suggest that Kim ultimately remained in the group.

As the report got closer to completion, LAFD officials, worried about how it would be received, privately formed a second group for “crisis management” — a decision that surfaced through internal emails released through another records request by an unidentified party.

“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Asst. Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight others, including interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva.

“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”

Cook emailed a PDF of his report to Villanueva in early August, asking the chief to select a couple of people to provide edits so he could make the changes in his Word document.

The following week, Cook emailed the chief his final draft.

“Thank you for all your hard work,” Villanueva responded. “I’ll let you know how we’re going to move forward.”

Over the next two months, the report went through a series of edits — behind closed doors and without Cook’s involvement. The revised report was released publicly on Oct. 8.

That same day, Cook emailed Villanueva, declining to endorse the public version because of changes that altered his findings and made the report “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

“Having reviewed the revised version submitted by your office, I must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form,” Cook wrote in the email obtained by The Times. “The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented.”

Cook’s version highlighted the failure to recall the outgoing shift and fully pre-deploy as a major mistake, noting that it was an attempt to be “fiscally responsible” that went against the department’s policy and procedures.

The department’s final report stated that the pre-deployment measures for the Palisades and other fire-prone locations went “above and beyond” the LAFD’s standard practice. The Times analyzed seven drafts of the report obtained through a records request and disclosed the significant deletions and revisions.

Cook’s email withdrawing his endorsement of the report was not included in the city’s response to one of the records requests filed by an unknown party in October. Nearly 180 of Cook’s emails were posted on the city’s records portal on Dec. 9, but the one that expressed his concerns about the report was missing. That email was posted on the portal, which allows the public to view documents provided in response to records requests, after The Times asked about it.

The LAFD did not respond to a query about why the email was not released with Cook’s other emails. Karger, the Bass spokesperson, said the link to the document was broken and the city fixed it after learning the email wasn’t posted correctly. The Times has inquired about how and why the link didn’t work.

Former LAFD Asst. Chief Patrick Butler, who worked for the agency for 32 years and now heads the Redondo Beach Fire Department, said the city’s silence on such inquiries is tantamount to deceiving the public.

“When deception is normalized within a public agency,” he said, “it also normalizes operational failure and puts people at risk.”

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

The author of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire declined to endorse it because of substantial deletions that altered his findings, calling the edited version “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”

Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook emailed then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva and other LAFD officials with the subject line “Palisades AARR Non-Endorsement,” about an hour after the highly anticipated report was made public Oct. 8.

“Having reviewed the revised version submitted by your office, I must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form,” Cook wrote in the email obtained by The Times. “The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented.”

Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook complained to former interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva about deletions and revisions in the Palisades fire after-action report.

(L.A. City Mayor’s Office)

He continued, “While I fully understand the need to address potential liability concerns and to modify certain sections in consultation with the City Attorney to mitigate litigation risks, the current version appears highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards. I strongly urge you to reconsider publishing the report as it stands.”

In the email, Cook also raised concerns that the LAFD’s final report would be at odds with a report on the January wildfires commissioned by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office, which has yet to be released.

“I am concerned that substantial disparities may exist between the two reports,” Cook wrote.

Izzy Gardon, a spokesperson for Newsom, said in a statement Tuesday, “The Governor commissioned an independent review by the world’s leading fire safety experts to ensure the public receives a complete, accurate, and unvarnished accounting of the events leading up to the Palisades fire and how responding agencies carried out their response.”

Cook — who emails show provided a final draft of the after-action report to Villanueva in August — has declined to comment. Attempts to reach Villanueva were unsuccessful.

The LAFD has refused to answer questions from The Times about the deletions and revisions. Mayor Karen Bass’ office said the LAFD wrote and edited the report, and that the mayor did not demand changes.

On Sunday, The Times reported that Cook was upset about the changes to the report. The previous day, The Times had disclosed the watering down of the after-action report after analyzing seven drafts obtained through a public records request. The most significant changes involved the LAFD’s failure to order firefighters to stay on duty for an additional shift and to fully pre-deploy engines in high-risk areas before the Jan. 7 fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire. It’s unclear who exactly directed the revisions.

Cook’s Oct. 8 email laying out his concerns in stark language adds to the growing evidence that city and LAFD officials attempted to burnish the LAFD’s image in a report that should have been an honest assessment of the department’s failings in preparing for and fighting the fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. The goal of such a report is to prevent similar mistakes.

Cook’s email reached Bass’ office in mid-November, according to Bass spokesperson Clara Karger.

Karger said last week that “the Mayor has inquired with Chief Moore about the concerns,” referring to Jaime Moore, who became LAFD chief last month.

The Times submitted a public records request last month for all of the mayor’s emails about the after-action report, a request that the city has not yet fulfilled. Bass’ office provided Cook’s email to The Times on Tuesday.

The city had withheld Cook’s email from its response to a separate records request filed by an unknown party in October. Almost 180 of Cook’s emails were posted on the city’s records portal on Dec. 9, but the one that expressed his concerns about the report was missing. That email was only posted on the portal Tuesday, after The Times asked about it.

The LAFD did not respond to a Times query about why the email was not released with Cook’s other emails. Bass’s office also did not respond to a query about Cook’s concerns and the fact that they were withheld from the public.

Gene Cameron, who lived in the Palisades for 50 years before his home burned down in the Jan. 7 fire, was disturbed by the LAFD’s revisions, which he said amounted to a cover up.

“I appreciate his bravery to stand up against these unprofessional immoral edits,” he said of Cook, adding that the point of the report is not to assign blame, but to prevent future mistakes. “It’s just to establish a set of rules, procedures and guidelines so that this doesn’t happen again.”

City Councilmember Traci Park, whose district includes the Palisades, said in a statement Tuesday that the city can’t fix systemic failures or rebuild public trust without full transparency.

“I’ve said from the beginning that LAFD should not be investigating itself. After a disaster of this magnitude, the public deserves a full, unfiltered accounting of what went wrong and why — and my independent after-action report will provide exactly that,” she said, referring to a report she requested that the City Council approved and funded earlier this year, though it hasn’t been completed.

Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment. She previously told The Times that she heard rumors that the author of the report was unhappy, but that she did not look into the matter.

A July email thread reviewed by The Times shows concern over how the after-action report would be received, with the LAFD forming a “crisis management workgroup.”

“The primary goal of this workgroup is to collaboratively manage communications for any critical public relations issue that may arise. The immediate and most pressing crisis is the Palisades After Action Report,” LAFD Asst. Chief Kairi Brown wrote in an email to eight other people.

“With significant interest from media, politicians, and the community, it is crucial that we present a unified response to anticipated questions and concerns,” Brown wrote. “By doing so, we can ensure our messaging is clear and consistent, allowing us to create our own narrative rather than reactive responses.”

Cook was not included on that email thread. It’s unclear how much of a role, if any, that group had on the revisions.

The after-action report has been widely criticized for failing to examine a New Year’s Day fire that later reignited into the Palisades fire. Bass has ordered the LAFD to commission an independent investigation into its missteps in putting out the earlier fire.

One edit to the after-action report involved language stating that the decision to not 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.

The final report did not include that language, saying instead that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”

A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

Another passage that was deleted said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire.

Two drafts contain notes typed in the margins with suggestions that seemed intended to soften the report’s effect and make the Fire Department look good. One note proposed replacing the image on the cover page — which showed palm trees on fire against an orange sky — with a “positive” one, such as “firefighters on the frontline.” The final report’s cover displays the LAFD seal.

The final version listed only 42 items in the section on recommendations and lessons learned, while the first version reviewed by The Times listed 74.

The author of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report on the Palisades fire was upset about changes made to the report, without his involvement, that downplayed the failures of city and LAFD leaders in preparing for and fighting the disastrous Jan. 7 fire, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The author’s complaints reached Mayor Karen Bass’ office in mid-November, after the LAFD had publicly released the report, said Clara Karger, a spokesperson for Bass.

“The Mayor has inquired with Chief Moore about the concerns,” Karger said last week, referring to LAFD Chief Jaime Moore.

The sources, who requested anonymity to protect their relationships with the LAFD and city officials, said the report by Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook was intended to be a final draft. Cook declined to comment.

The Times posted an article Saturday that analyzed seven drafts of the after-action report, obtained through a public records request. The most significant changes involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire.

In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision to not 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.”

The deletions and revisions have drawn criticism from some who questioned the LAFD’s ability to acknowledge its mistakes before and during the blaze — and to avoid repeating them in the future.

In the months since the fire, residents who lost their homes have expressed outrage over unanswered questions and contradictory information about how top LAFD officials prepared for the dangerous weather forecast and how they handled a smaller New Year’s Day blaze, called the Lachman fire, which rekindled into the massive Palisades fire six days later.

On Saturday, after the report by The Times was published online, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez issued a statement about the toning down of the after-action report.

“Today’s reporting makes clear that accountability is optional when after-action reports are conducted in-house with oversight by political appointees,” Rodriguez said. “If these reports are purposefully watered down to cover up failures, it leaves Angelenos, firefighters, and city officials without a full understanding of what happened and what needs to change. After-action reports must be independent to ensure honest assessments in order to avoid repeating disastrous errors and to protect our communities in the future.”

Former interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, who oversaw the completion of the report before it was made public in October, did not respond to requests for comment.

Karger, the Bass spokesperson, said this month that the report “was written and edited by the Fire Department.” Bass’ office did not demand changes to the drafts and asked the LAFD to confirm only the accuracy of items such as how the weather and the department’s budget factored into the disaster, Karger said in an email.

The LAFD has refused to answer questions about the revisions and Cook’s concerns, citing an ongoing federal court case. Federal prosecutors have charged a former Palisades resident with setting the Lachman fire.

David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition, said it’s “disingenuous” of LAFD officials to cite the investigation as a reason they can’t respond to The Times’ inquiries.

“There’s nothing about the existence of a federal investigation that prohibits them from commenting,” Loy said. “They just choose not to comment.”

Three of the seven drafts of the after-action report obtained by The Times are marked with dates: Two versions are dated Aug. 25, and there is a draft from Oct. 6, two days before the LAFD released the final report to the public.

Some drafts of the after-action report described an on-duty LAFD captain calling Fire Station 23 in the Palisades on Jan. 7 to report that “the Lachman fire started up again,” indicating the captain’s belief that the Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of the earlier blaze.

The reference was deleted in one draft, then restored in the public version, which contains only a brief mention of the Lachman fire. Some have said that the after-action report’s failure to thoroughly examine the Lachman fire reignition was designed to shield LAFD leadership and the Bass administration from criticism and accountability.

Weeks after the report’s release, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. Another battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section knew about the complaints for months, but the department kept that information out of the after-action report.

After The Times’ report, Bass asked Villanueva to “thoroughly investigate” the LAFD’s missteps in putting out the Lachman fire.

Moore, an LAFD veteran who became chief last month, has been tasked with commissioning the independent investigation that Bass requested.

Several key items were wholly deleted from the after-action report. The final version listed only 42 items in the section on recommendations and lessons learned, while the first version reviewed by The Times listed 74.

A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

Another passage that was deleted said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire.

Two drafts contain notes typed in the margins with suggestions that seemed intended to soften the report’s effect and burnish the Fire Department’s image. One note proposed replacing the image on the cover page — which showed palm trees on fire against an orange sky — with a “positive” one, such as “firefighters on the frontline.” The final report’s cover displays the LAFD seal.

In addition to the mayor’s office, Cook’s concerns made their way to the president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, which provides civilian oversight for the LAFD. Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the board, told The Times that she heard rumors that the author of the report was unhappy, but that she did not seriously look into the matter.

“If I had to worry about every rumor that comes out of LAFD, I would spend my entire day, Monday through Friday, chasing down rumors,” she said.

She said she raised concerns with Villanueva and the city attorney’s office over the possibility that “material findings” were or would be changed.

“I did not feel like they were lying about anything,” she said. “I didn’t feel like they were trying to cover up anything.”

Pringle is a former Times staff writer.

For months after the Palisades fire, many who had lost their homes eagerly awaited the Los Angeles Fire Department’s after-action report, which was expected to provide a frank evaluation of the agency’s handling of the disaster.

A first draft was completed by August, possibly earlier.

And then the deletions and other changes began — behind closed doors — in what amounted to an effort to downplay the failures of city and LAFD leadership in preparing for and fighting the Jan. 7 fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes, records obtained by The Times show.

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.”

Another deleted passage in the report said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire. A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

Other changes in the report, which was overseen by then-interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, seemed similarly intended to soften its impact and burnish the Fire Department’s image. Two drafts contain notes written in the margins, including a suggestion to replace the image on the cover page — which showed palm trees on fire against an orange sky — with a “positive” one, such as “firefighters on the frontline,” the note said. The final report’s cover displays the LAFD seal.

The Times obtained seven drafts of the report through the state Public Records Act. Only three of those drafts are marked with dates: Two versions are dated Aug. 25, and there is a draft from Oct. 6, two days before the LAFD released the final report to the public.

No names are attached to the edits. It is unclear if names were in the original documents and had been removed in the drafts given to The Times.

The deletions and revisions are likely to deepen concerns over the LAFD’s ability to acknowledge its mistakes before and during the blaze — and to avoid repeating them in the future. Already, Palisades fire victims have expressed outrage over unanswered questions and contradictory information about the LAFD’s preparations after the dangerous weather forecast, including how fire officials handled a smaller New Year’s Day blaze, called the Lachman fire, that rekindled into the massive Palisades fire six days later.

Some drafts described an on-duty LAFD captain calling Fire Station 23 in the Palisades on Jan. 7 to report that “the Lachman fire started up again,” indicating the captain’s belief that the Palisades fire was caused by a reignition of the earlier blaze.

The reference was deleted in one draft, then restored in the public version, which otherwise contains only a brief mention of the previous fire. Some have said that the after-action report’s failure to thoroughly examine the Lachman fire reignition was designed to shield LAFD leadership and Mayor Karen Bass’ administration from criticism and accountability.

Weeks after the report’s release, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. Another battalion chief assigned to the LAFD’s risk management section knew about the complaints for months, but the department kept that information out of the after-action report.

After The Times report, Bass asked Villanueva to “thoroughly investigate” the LAFD’s missteps in putting out the Lachman fire, which federal authorities say was intentionally set.

“A full understanding of the Lachman fire response is essential to an accurate accounting of what occurred during the January wildfires,” Bass wrote.

Fire Chief Jaime Moore, who started in the job last month, has been tasked with commissioning the independent investigation that Bass requested.

The LAFD did not answer detailed questions from The Times about the altered drafts, including queries about why the material about the reignition was removed, then brought back. Villanueva did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Bass said her office did not demand changes to the drafts and only asked the LAFD to confirm the accuracy of items such as how the weather and the department’s budget factored into the disaster.

“The report was written and edited by the Fire Department,” the spokesperson, Clara Karger, said in an email. “We did not red-line, review every page or review every draft of the report. We did not discuss the Lachman Fire because it was not part of the report.”

Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, told The Times that she reviewed a paper copy of a “working document” about a week before the final report was made public. She said she raised concerns with Villanueva and the city attorney’s office over the possibility that “material findings” were or would be changed. She also said she consulted a private attorney about her “obligations” as a commissioner overseeing the LAFD’s operations, though that conversation “had nothing to do with the after-action” report.

Hudley Hayes said she noticed only small differences between the final report and the draft she reviewed. For example, she said, “mistakes” had been changed to “challenges,” and names of firefighters had been removed.

“I was completely OK with it,” she said. “All the things I read in the final report did not in any way obfuscate anything, as far as I’m concerned.”

She reiterated her position that an examination of missteps during the Lachman fire did not belong in the after-action report, a view not shared by former LAFD chief officers interviewed by The Times.

“The after-action report should have gone back all the way to Dec. 31,” said former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now emergency and crisis management coordinator for the U.S. Capitol. “There are major gaps in this after-action report.”

Former LAFD Asst. Chief Patrick Butler, who is now chief of the Redondo Beach Fire Department, agreed that the Lachman fire should have been addressed in the report and said the deletions were “a deliberate effort to hide the truth and cover up the facts.”

He said the removal of the reference to the LAFD’s violations of the national Standard Firefighting Orders and Watchouts was a “serious issue” because they were “written in the blood” of firefighters killed in the line of duty. Without citing the national guidelines, the final report said that the Palisades fire’s extraordinary nature “occasionally caused officers and firefighters to think and operate beyond standard safety protocols.”

The final after-action report does not mention that a person called authorities to report seeing smoke in the area on Jan. 3. The LAFD has since provided conflicting information about how it responded to that call.

Villanueva told The Times in October that firefighters returned to the burn area and “cold-trailed” an additional time, meaning they used their hands to feel for heat and dug out hot spots. But records showed they cleared the call within 34 minutes.

Fire officials did not answer questions from The Times about the discrepancy. In an emailed statement this week, the LAFD said crews had used remote cameras, walked around the burn site and used a 20-foot extension ladder to access a fenced-off area but did not see any smoke or fire.

“After an extensive investigation, the incident was determined to be a false alarm,” the statement said.

The most significant changes in the various iterations of the after-action report involved the LAFD’s deployment decisions before the fire, as the wind warnings became increasingly dire.

In a series of reports earlier this year, The Times found that top LAFD officials decided not to staff dozens of available engines that could have been pre-deployed to the Palisades and other areas flagged as high risk, as it had done in the past.

One draft contained a passage in the “failures” section on what the LAFD could have done: “If the Department had adequately augmented all available resources as done in years past in preparation for the weather event, the Department would have been required to recall members for all available positions unfilled by voluntary overtime, which would have allowed for all remaining resources to be staffed and available for augmentation, pre-deployment, and pre-positioning.” The draft said the decision was an attempt to be “fiscally responsible” that went against the department’s policy and procedures.

That language was absent in the final report, which said that the LAFD “balanced fiscal responsibility with proper preparation for predicted weather and fire behavior by following the LAFD predeployment matrix.”

Even with the deletions, the published report delivered a harsh critique of the LAFD’s performance during the Palisades fire, pointing to a disorganized response, failures in communication and chiefs who didn’t understand their roles. The report found that top commanders lacked a fundamental knowledge of wildland firefighting tactics, including “basic suppression techniques.”

A paperwork error resulted in the use of only a third of the state-funded resources that were available for pre-positioning in high-risk areas, the report said. And when the fire broke out on the morning of Jan. 7, the initial dispatch called for only seven engine companies, when the weather conditions required 27.

There was confusion among firefighters over which radio channel to use. The report said that three L.A. County engines showed up within the first hour, requesting an assignment and receiving no reply. Four other LAFD engines waited 20 minutes without an assignment.

In the early afternoon, the staging area — where engines were checking in — was overrun by fire.

The report made 42 recommendations, ranging from establishing better communication channels to more training. In a television interview this month, Moore said the LAFD has adopted about three-quarters of them.

The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire.

The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.

Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip.

Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said.

She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred.

“They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.

The mayor’s informal remarks, which lasted around four minutes, came at the tail end of a 66-minute video added to “The Fifth Column’s” YouTube channel last month. In recent weeks, it was replaced by a shorter, 62-minute version — one that omits her more freewheeling final thoughts.

The exact date of the interview was not immediately clear. The video premiered on Nov. 25, according to the podcast’s YouTube channel.

Welch declined to say whether Bass asked for the end of the video to be cut. He had no comment on why the final four minutes can’t be found on the YouTube version of the podcast.

“We’re not going to be talking about any of that right now,” he told The Times before hanging up.

Bass’ team confirmed that her office asked for the final minutes of the video to be removed. “The interview had clearly ended and they acknowledged that when they took it down,” the mayor’s team said Tuesday in an email.

In the longer video, Bass also talked about being blamed for the handling of the Eaton fire in Altadena, which is in unincorporated Los Angeles County, outside of L.A. city limits. Altadena is represented by L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, not Bass.

“No one goes after the Board of Supervisors,” Bass said on the original 66-minute video. “I’m responsible for everything.”

Bass, in an interview with The Times, said she made those remarks after the podcast was over, during what she called a “casual conversation” — a situation she called “unfortunate.” Nevertheless, she stood by her take, saying she has made similar pronouncements about the emergency response “numerous times.”

In the case of the city, Bass said, the fire department failed to pre-deploy to the Palisades and require firefighters to stay for an extra shift, as The Times first reported in January. In Altadena, she said, residents did not receive timely notices to evacuate.

“The city and the county did a lot of things that we would look back at and say was very unfortunate,” she told The Times.

Bass was out of the country on a diplomatic mission to Ghana when the Palisades fire first broke out on Jan. 7. When she returned, she was unsteady in her handling of questions surrounding the emergency response.

Both the response and the rebuilding effort since the fire have created an opening for Bass’ rivals. Real estate developer Rick Caruso, who lost to her in 2022, is now weighing another run for mayor — and has been a harsh critic of her performance.

Former L.A. schools superintendent Austin Beutner, who is running against Bass in the June 2 primary election, called the mayor’s use of the word “botched” a “stunning admission of failure on behalf of the mayor” on “the biggest crisis Los Angeles has faced in a generation.”

“She’s admitting that she failed her constituents,” Beutner said.

Bass isn’t the first L.A. elected official to use the word “botched” in connection with the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead. Last month, during a meeting on the effort to rebuild in the Palisades, City Councilmember Monica Rodriguez said that Bass’ office had mishandled the recovery, at least in the first few months.

“Let’s be honest,” she told one of the mayor’s staffers. “You guys have to be the first to acknowledge that your office has botched the first few months of this recovery.”

Bass has defended her handling of that work, pointing to an accelerated debris removal process and her own emergency orders cutting red tape for rebuilding projects. The recovery, she told Welch, is moving faster than many other major wildfires, including the 2023 Lahaina fire in Hawaii.

“It’s important to state the facts, especially because in this environment … there’s a number of people out there who have been very, very deliberate in spreading misinformation,” she said.

Bass, who formally launched her reelection campaign over the weekend, has been giving interviews to a growing list of nontraditional outlets. She recently fielded questions on “Naked Lunch with Phil Rosenthal + David Wild.” She also went on “Big Boy’s Off Air Leadership Series” to discuss the Palisades fire and several other issues.

On “Big Boy’s Off Air,” Bass said she was in conflict with then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the fire. When she ousted Crowley in February, she cited the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the fierce winds. She also accused Crowley of refusing to participate in an after-action report on the fire.

Bass told Big Boy, the host of the program, that firefighters “were sent home and they shouldn’t have been.”

She also called the revelation that the Jan. 1 Lachman fire reignited days later, causing the Palisades fire, “shocking.” The Times has reported that an LAFD battalion chief ordered firefighters to leave the burn area, despite signs that the fire wasn’t fully extinguished.

Bass said that had she known of the danger facing the region in early January, she wouldn’t have gone to Long Beach, let alone Ghana.

Asked where blame should be assigned, Bass said: “At the end of the day, I’m the mayor, OK? But I am not a firefighter.”

On “The Fifth Column,” Bass spent much of the hour discussing the effect of federal immigration raids on Los Angeles and the effort to rewrite the City Charter to improve the city’s overall governmental structure. She also described the “overwhelming trauma” experienced by fire victims in the Palisades and elsewhere.

“To lose your home, it’s not just the structure. You lost everything inside there. You lost your memories,” she said. “You lost your sense of community, your sense of belonging. You know, it’s overwhelming grief and it’s collective grief, because then you have thousands of people that are experiencing this too.”

In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.

“Right,” Bass responded.

Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”

“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”

The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”

As the Palisades fire raged, then-Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley went on a television blitz, calling out city leadership for systematically underfunding her agency.

The LAFD, she said, didn’t have enough firefighters, based at enough fire stations, to quench the wind-driven flames that were tearing through the hills.

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

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

A Jan. 9 aerial view of neighborhoods destroyed by the Palisades fire.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

But the LAFD’s hyper-focus on money obscures its leaders’ failures in managing the resources they had, beginning with a decision to leave the scene of a New Year’s Day fire despite signs it hadn’t been fully extinguished.

Days later, that fire reignited into the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. Despite forecasts of catastrophically high winds, LAFD officials didn’t pre-deploy engines in the area or increase manpower by ordering a previous shift of firefighters to stay on duty.

As the flames spread, the firefighting response was disorganized and chaotic, with the LAFD’s own after-action report describing major failures by high-ranking commanders in communication, staffing and basic wildland firefighting knowledge.

City leaders have highlighted changes they have made since the fire, including appointing 30-year LAFD veteran Jaime Moore as chief and drafting new protocols for staffing on high hazard weather 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 review of how the Palisades fire started.

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

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

“The Fire Department has been way more aggressive, has done pre-deployment, has been very visible, alerts going out early, trying to be very, very aggressive,” she said.

But Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, said that the LAFD is still unprepared and that there hasn’t been enough time to make the necessary changes. She cited the LAFD’s technology, which she said is about two decades behind.

“I am not confident there would be a different result” if a similar disaster strikes, 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 essential changes have been made, such as requiring firefighters to stay for an additional shift during red flag warnings, Park said. But she said that too many fire engines are out of service, there are not enough mechanics, and most important, questions about the origin 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 roll up their hoses and leave the burn area on Jan. 2, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch. 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.

The LAFD’s after-action report, released in October, only briefly mentioned the Lachman fire. Critics have flagged this as a crucial lapse in the report, which prevents 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.

Mayor Karen Bass, right, and then-Fire Chief Kristin Crowley speak during a news conference in January. Bass ousted Crowley less than two months after the Palisades fire.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Bass had ousted Crowley less than two months after the Palisades fire, citing the LAFD’s failure to properly deploy resources ahead of the winds and potentially have a chance to extinguish the fire before it exploded out of control, an issue that was exposed by a series of reports in The Times.

Bass also countered Crowley’s financial complaints, saying that the budget did not affect the department’s ability to fight the fire. The LAFD’s 2024-25 budget had actually increased 7% from the previous year, due in part to generous firefighter raises.

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

He said that without transparency and accountability, “the fallback is always going to be what it has been: We need more of everything — more people, more money, more fire trucks, more fire stations.”

A modern fire agency needs the flexibility to surge its staff during a disaster, he said, while also addressing day-to-day needs. Most 911 calls are for medical problems, he said, yet the LAFD functions more or less the same as it did decades ago, when structure fires were more common.

He said a panel of outside experts should have been given access to the LAFD’s records to offer 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 didn’t happen is a disgrace.”

How much the department transforms after the Palisades disaster will depend, in large part, on its new chief. Moore, who joined the LAFD in 1995 and most recently was 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 around L.A., firefighters told Bass that they wanted an insider for the job, which she said factored into her decision.

“Given that the Fire Department was under such scrutiny, such a difficult time, morale is in the toilet, infighting that’s going on, the last thing in the world they needed, in my opinion, was somebody from the outside,” Bass told The Times.

Moore had signaled before his appointment was confirmed last month that he was troubled by the LAFD’s missteps with the Lachman fire and was going to bring in an outside organization to investigate.

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

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

The report drew the conclusion that top LAFD commanders had startlingly little knowledge about combating wildfires, including “basic suppression techniques.” It suggested that all LAFD members undergo training on key skills such as structure defense and how to draw water from swimming pools when hydrants don’t work.

In an interview with ABC7, Moore said that the LAFD has adopted about three-quarters of the recommendations and is considering creating a division specializing in wildland fires.

Members of Crew 4, the department’s new full-time wildland hand crew, practice cutting fire lines near Green Verdugo Fire Road in Sunland.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Since the Palisades fire, the LAFD has hired a 26-member wildland hand crew that uses chainsaws and other tools to chop paths through brush to stop a fire from spreading. When they aren’t battling fires, they do brush clearance throughout the city.

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

Travis Humpherys is the Crew 4 superintendent.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

But they have already “made a dramatic impact” with brush clearance and fighting wildfires, including a 20-acre fire 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 hand crew, as well as nearly 200 additional firefighter recruits and helitanker services to attack fires from the air. That amount could be pared down during the months-long city budgeting process, as the City Council and the 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 dependency 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’s 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 desperately need more firefighters and paramedics, more trucks, engines, and ambulances and more wildfire resources and neighborhood fire stations.”

E. Randol Schoenberg, whose family lost four homes in the fire, including his in Malibu — along with documents that belonged to his grandfather, the composer Arnold Schoenberg — said he would be happy to pay more taxes for more services.

But Schoenberg, an attorney who is representing Palisades fire victims in a lawsuit against the city and the state, said he expects the LAFD to honestly examine its mistakes.

“If they don’t really grapple with the issues of 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.