Oct. 14, 2025 6 AM PT <\/p>\n
To the editor: When disaster strikes, our instinct is to assign blame \u2014 and in Pacific Palisades, that blame has landed on City Hall (\u201cIn fire-scorched Palisades, a library and rec center become linchpins of fury with City Hall,\u201d<\/a> Oct. 11). But searing mockery of our mayor doesn\u2019t help. She didn\u2019t cause the fire \u2014 though she will lead the recovery.<\/p>\n Months later, Palisadians are still in shock and looking for answers. Many are also looking up and rebuilding. The mayor\u2019s executive orders directing city departments to act with speed and coordination are good and welcome steps. The consultants she\u2019s engaged are fulfilling the work assigned to them. All of this must be matched with measurable relief, visible to a community thirsty for results.<\/p>\n Our community is motivated and united to rebuild. What we need are elected leaders and agencies directed by them to match our urgency and work with us to focus resources that drive real progress for recovery.<\/p>\n The wheels of City Hall are turning \u2014 so are ours. Let\u2019s do this, together.<\/p>\n Maryam Zar, Pacific Palisades ..<\/p>\n To the editor: We lost our home in the Woolsey fire in November 2018. Now, one month short of seven years later, our government hasn\u2019t learned the lesson \u2014 or lessons (\u201cAfter Palisades fire hydrants went dry, LAFD faced costly delays in getting more water,\u201d<\/a> Oct. 11).<\/p>\n On that Friday, Nov. 8, many of us saw our homes burn while not insubstantial elements of the fire department stood at the ready half a mile away, awaiting orders from their superiors in the chain of command to enter the fray.<\/p>\n So, a breakdown in clear, coherent, consistent leadership. Because of this, so many lost their homes and all their possessions that day.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going to get into that popular buzz word, \u201caccountability.\u201d But effective governance requires that we learn from our mistakes. The Palisades\/Eaton fires, 6\u00bd years later, would appear to indicate otherwise.<\/p>\n So we have here an opportunity to learn from our mistakes, to ensure such leadership failures don\u2019t occur again. In this, we should be concentrating on the fix, not the failures.<\/p>\n Jeff Denker, Malibu<\/p>\n ..<\/p>\n To the editor: Kristin Crowley was absolutely correct in her assertion that, in the article\u2019s words, \u201cmore [budget and resources] would not have made a difference against such a ferocious, wind-fueled fire\u201d (\u201cAfter Palisades fire failures, L.A. promises to beef up staffing during high-risk fire weather,\u201d<\/a> Oct. 8). Casting light on all that happened in those crucial days is certainly welcome. However, there is one ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from the entire experience: The centralized response to threats of major fires at the urban-rural interface cannot provide us with any assurance of success in the future. The history of failure has been too consistent, going all the way back to the 1961 Bel Air fire.<\/p>\n We simply must move toward a distributed, civil-defense type of response that spreads the burden of protection of life and property broadly across the population at risk. Evacuation should not be our default response, but rather defense-in-place, with the aid of a prepared core of our citizenry. The same holds for post-earthquake and post-flood situations.<\/p>\n The payoff of this strategy is apparent from the individual stories that have been covered by the Los Angeles Times. But at the level of the individual, the strategy is high-risk. It becomes low risk by way of making this our default approach, so that it is planned for and actively implemented. We succeed by cooperation.<\/p>\n This may be a big reach in our atomized culture, and it would be massively resisted by the public agencies, but it would be a thrust toward a more communitarian future that we very much need.<\/p>\n Siegfried Othmer, Woodland Hills<\/p>\n ..<\/p>\n To the editor: If Ronnie Villanueva, the interim fire chief, has never heard of a holdover fire, we need a new chief ASAP (\u201cA \u2018reignition\u2019 led to the Palisades fire, a finding sure to enrage thousands of victims,\u201d<\/a> Oct. 9). Further, why has the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power been allowed to keep her job when the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty during the fire<\/a>?<\/p>\n Jill Smith, Pacific Palisades<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oct. 14, 2025 6 AM PT To the editor: When disaster strikes, our instinct is to assign blame…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[4754,4752,2072,4755,4756,3802,4758,405,1073,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,4757,2612,534,4753,65],"class_list":["post-3908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-centralized-response","tag-city-hall","tag-editor","tag-executive-order","tag-failure","tag-fire","tag-fire-scorched-palisades","tag-government","tag-home","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-more-water","tag-oct","tag-pacific-palisades","tag-palisades-fire-hydrant","tag-risk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
This writer is the founder of the Palisades Recovery Coalition.<\/p>\n