HIDE THE DECLINE: Two Months Before Deadly Blazes, LA Fire Chief Said She Needed More Firefighters—Then Karen Bass’s Admin Scrubbed the Memo.
Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass’s administration pulled Crowley’s memo from its website.
Crowley wrote to the city’s fire commissioners—a five-person board appointed by Bass—on Nov. 18 and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department’s size, she said, hadn’t increased in decades despite significant population growth.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” wrote Crowley, who also complained that a spike in emergency calls and a shortage of fire stations had led to longer response times. In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department’s firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard. The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.
In contrast:
LA Mayor’s race, 2022. The guy I voted for. https://t.co/W3UVIg00Mm
— Amy Alkon (@amyalkon) January 13, 2025
Bari Weiss’s Free Press has an article that went up yesterday originally titled “Stop Blaming Politicians. L.A. was Built to Burn.” By the evening the first sentence in the title was quietly deleted. And on one level, the second sentence in its title is understandable — Joan Didion was writing about the Orwellian-levels of doublethink of the people who lived in the fire zones of Los Angeles in the late 1960s. On the one hand, they knew that a catastrophic fire was always a possibility, and yet many simultaneously had plenty of ‘60s-era “California Dreamin,’” “Good Day Sunshine” levels of optimism. But there’s no doubt that over the past twenty years or so, a combination of incompetence and hopeless far left radical environmentalism have made last week’s disastrous fires a far more likely — and deadly — occurrence.