The Los Angeles Times Misses the Forest Fire Scandal for the Trees
The real story is not ‘climate change.’
Most good news editors, whether they admit it or not, believe themselves Michelangelo’s heirs — men and women who chisel off the unnecessary bits of a reporter’s copy in order to reveal the angel within. Sadly, the Los Angeles Times often seems bereft of these judicious hacks.
Take, for instance, a story this past week that seems to promise an examination of the causes of January’s catastrophic wildfires in the west Los Angeles community of Pacific Palisades. Beneath the headline, “‘A personal embarrassment’: Why fire agencies keep failing to put out blazes that later turn disastrous,” the Times offers at least three possible explanations for the rapid spread of the fires. But the real story — the angel, that is — is a story about something else entirely. It’s the story of a political cover-up. And while that story is in there, too, it remains trapped to this day in more than 1,500 words.
Because “climate change” is the Times’ Mad Libs answer to every blank requiring a noun, the reporters work heroically to claim that climate change played a key role in the wildfire catastrophe. It did not. They make the related claim that, because of climate change, all previous firefighting procedures must be updated. That’s also untrue. They assert that Los Angeles firefighters struggled because they were denied access to advanced technology. They were not.
The truth buried in this pig’s breakfast of a tale is evidence provided by the reporters themselves and scattered throughout this very story: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass is part of an effort to cover up the fact that fires spread because of incompetent leadership at city hall.
You’ll say that story isn’t one the Times set out to tell. But it’s equally true that the Times story is meaningless — old news — except for the story the newspaper left in bits and pieces, like clues in a kids’ game of treasure hunt.
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To understand that untold tale, let’s start with facts almost everybody knows: A federal grand jury has indicted Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, on charges that he started what’s called the Lachman fire on January 1. Los Angeles Fire Department crews quickly extinguished the fire. Then, defying logic and standard operating procedure, their battalion chiefs ordered them to leave the scene. Text messages reported by the Times in October show that the firefighters at Lachman objected because they sensed the fire was still smoldering just beneath topsoil over which dun-colored brush had spread in profusion. That assessment proved correct. Seasonal Santa Ana winds erupted a week later, on January 7, coaxing the fire into its full fury.
Those well-established facts debunk the phony setup in the Times headline: “fire agencies” don’t “keep failing to put out blazes that later turn disastrous.” Wildfires keep happening because fire is a historic feature of the American West. Santa Ana winds have been blowing hot and dry through Southern California for millions of years. But — and this is critical — they are often made more or less dangerous by government policy. And generations of Los Angeles political leaders allowed the city’s expansion into canyons and foothills cloaked in combustible manzanita, sage, and scrub oak.
For years, the people in those homes were required (and a sophisticated insurance industry incentivized them) to reduce fire hazards — cleaning “fuel” from around their property, for instance. More recently, however, state and local officials have imposed regulations that make it difficult to clear brush or manage forests through grazing, timber harvesting, and prescribed burns. Indeed, the Pacific Palisades was turned into a tinderbox by conservationists: In 2019, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power workers began wildfire‑mitigation work in the area, replacing wooden poles and widening access roads. But the crews also bulldozed Braunton’s milk‑vetch plants, prompting conservationists to bring a suit to halt the project; the utility was later fined $1.9 million and required to restore the habitat, as regulators argued that destroying the fragile species would threaten local biodiversity.
The result of such California policies is historically dense forests and sprawling shrublands in which more plants compete for light and for always-limited water. Bark beetles sometimes turn the weakened trees into kindling. Lightning, arsonists, pyromaniacs, indifferent campers, kids with fireworks, heat-seeking homeless people, and the failures of equipment owned by minutely regulated utility companies generally do the rest.
But that story? Already reported. The cover-up? That story is buried in the Times story.
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The Times reporters tell us that in October, “Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass directed then-Los Angeles Fire Department Interim Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva to launch an investigation” into the origins of the fire. Bass appointed Villanueva to replace Kristin Crowley, the woman Bass appointed to run the department and then promptly fired when Crowley declared that her department’s response to the fires — including the fatal decision to pull crews off the Lachman fire — was dictated by Bass’s budget cuts.
(It’s worth noting, because it reveals Bass’s slavish attitude toward powerful government unions, that Crowley’s claim was problematic. It’s true, as Crowley declared, that weeks before the Lachman and Palisades fires, Bass cut millions from the city’s $800 million firefighting budget. But that was too little and too recent to have had any effect on the department’s response in the first week of January. And indicating that Bass values the firefighters’ union’s political contributions far more than the actual work they’re supposed to do, Bass countered Crowley by pointing out that the mayor gave the firefighters’ union a win in the form of higher pay. That made firefighting more expensive but not more effective.)
The Times story doesn’t tell us that Villanueva was an odd choice to lead an investigation into the fire’s origins on January 1 — even though it provides a clue that Bass likely understood that. He was a guarantee that the angel of truth would never be liberated: Villanueva “has previously said that LAFD took all the necessary steps” to fully extinguish the Lachman fire. “We did everything that we could do,” Villanueva had already said.
That’s hardly the sort of neutral observer you’d want running point on an investigation. But if you think Villanueva is compromised, the Times offers hope for real answers — and then promptly, perhaps unknowingly, dashes it. Six hundred words later, the reporters note that “LAFD’s newly confirmed fire chief, Jaime Moore” — Bass’s permanent appointment to replace Villanueva, who had replaced Crowley — “said he planned to commission an outside investigation into missteps during the mop-up of the Lachman fire.”
“Outside investigation” sounds promising — until the Times observes that, like Crowley and Villanueva, Moore himself is compromised. He has “been critical of what he called media efforts to ‘smear’ firefighters — a position,” the Times notes, “that some said raises questions about whether fire victims will get answers about what more could have been done to prevent the blaze.”
Between Villanueva’s rise and speedy departure but after Moore’s appointment, the Times spotlights what city hall may not want those fire victims to linger over: The LAFD simply failed to follow its own policy regarding “rekindles,” fires that appear to be extinguished but are in fact smoldering and potent enough to blaze up again. That insight comes from “Ed Nordskog, a retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s arson investigator.” He tells the Times “that in the handful of rekindles he experienced during his career, he found that fire leadership was reluctant to accept it as a cause.”
“It’s a personal embarrassment and possible career ending for a battalion chief or captain to have a rekindle,” Nordskog told the Times. “I encountered six to eight rekindles during my career and each time the local battalion chiefs showed up to try and convince the investigators it was arson.”
That is the centerpiece of a story about a city hall cover-up. But it’s not the climax.
Near the end of its windy tale, the Times drops another cookie crumb, evidence that the cover-up runs from LA’s iconic city hall to the governor’s mansion in Sacramento. A November LAFD report “described shortcomings of the department’s response to the Palisades fire, along with recommendations for improvement.” But that report, the Times notes, contained only a few mentions of the Lachman fire.
That’s also true of a report commissioned by Governor Gavin Newsom roughly a month after the Palisades and Eaton fires killed 31 people and destroyed 16,000 structures across Los Angeles County. Newsom’s report, the Times observes, “will not analyze the Lachman fire response.”
It would be weirdly ironic if the Times were in fact running cover for a cover-up. An intrepid reporter might observe that the Times has run cover for Bass for years. In the paper’s endorsement of her 2022 mayoral campaign, the Times waved off concerns that she had no executive experience — her résumé featured only community activism and stints in the state assembly and Congress — and applauded her “holistic vision.” Never mind the dull, expert-led government work that was the genesis of the progressive movement. Look instead, the Times wrote, to the summer of 2020 when, as a member of Congress, “Bass helped write the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which was an important effort to address decades of racial inequity in policing, despite” — despite! — “the federal government having little authority over local police agencies.”
That story — how a feckless politician rose to prominence in the nation’s second-largest city and then worked assiduously to avoid blame for the Palisades fire? That would be a story. But it would also be (how did the Times put it?) a very “personal embarrassment.”
Will Swaim is president of the California Policy Center and co-host with David Bahnsen of National Review’s “Radio Free California” podcast.
This article originally appeared in National Review.