It goes beyond the unearthed promises of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who has been caught in intense criticism regarding the still-raging fires in the county. It’s been a hellacious week, with multiple fires burning and inflicting damages that will likely make this the costliest wildfire in US history. Bass was in Ghana when the fires broke out. She also said she’d never travel abroad, which has placed her in awful optics, but it gets worse. Months ago, Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley drafted a memo about the lack of personnel and how she needed more manpower. The LAFD was grossly undermanned, and the mayor’s office appears to have scrubbed it.
LA Mayor Karen Bass said that if she became a mayor, she wouldn't travel abroad. "That pledge has been spectacularly broken.... Bass has traveled out of the country at city expense at least four other times in recent months before the Ghana visit..." pic.twitter.com/Ovpt7DlU4k
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) January 13, 2025
The memo was sent in November, with Chief Crowley adding the numerous areas where training benchmarks were deficient. The city needed more men, but Chief Crowley is also at fault for seemingly prioritizing woke DEI nonsense. She seems to have a grasp of the troubles plaguing her department. How about filling the ranks with firefighters instead of bean-counting according to the diversity checklist? In this field, no one cares if the firefighter who saves one’s home is gay and black. Residents want people who will fight fires, no matter who they may be (via Washington Free Beacon):
BOMBSHELL: “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… pic.twitter.com/FDhfhVvRtZ
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) January 13, 2025
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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.
Two months later, historic wildfires erupted across the Los Angeles area. Since last week, 37,000 acres and more than 12,000 structures have burned, 16 people have died, and more than 150,000 are under evacuation orders.
As the catastrophe unfolded, Crowley's memo disappeared from a city website. The New York Times referenced the memo in a Thursday piece but did not link to it. The memo was available online at this link as recently as Friday. By Saturday night, however, the memo was replaced with a message stating, "404! We are sorry, but the page you requested was not found." A Google search preview includes Crowley's quote on the inadequate "size of the LAFD."
Why this got suffocated with a pillow is self-explanatory. Instead of dealing with this, Bass prepared for her trip to Ghana.
What an absolute mess. So, yes, residents have a right to eviscerate the political leadership in the state. Donald J. Trump has every right to bash California politicians. And what the hell was that little special session to Trump-proof the state? Los Angeles County is burning, but this session was to soothe the Trump-deranged tendencies of the nation’s most dense, detached, and idiotic lawmakers when it should have been devoted to the wildfires. It could become not just the costliest wildfire but the worst natural disaster in American history, and the crackerjack brain trust in Sacramento thinks they should waste time on how to fight Trump. No one is going to care, folks. They’ve lost their homes. There’s going to be a red wedding of sorts soon.
L.A. MAYOR IS ALL SMILES: "Angelenos! We're still going through it!" pic.twitter.com/TRZFc4378y
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 12, 2025
Southern California is still on fire and this is what the state's Democrats are focused on. pic.twitter.com/stnPWODTzW
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) January 13, 2025
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