On his second day as chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Jaime Moore criticized what he called media efforts to \u201csmear\u201d firefighters who responded to the worst wildfire in city history. <\/p>\n
Moore\u2019s comments on Tuesday appeared to be in reference to a Times report that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area of the Jan. 1 Lachman fire, which days later reignited into the deadly Palisades fire, even though they had complained that the ground was still smoldering. <\/p>\n
The Times reviewed text messages between firefighters and a third party, sent in the weeks and months after the Palisades fire, indicating that crews had expressed concerns that the Lachman fire would reignite if left unprotected.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe audacity for people to make comments and say that there\u2019s text messages out there that says that we did not put the fire out, that we did not extinguish the fire,\u201d he told the Board of Fire Commissioners. \u201cYet I have yet to see any of those text messages.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moore\u2019s statements represented a dramatic shift from his comments last week, when he told the L.A. City Council\u2019s public safety committee \u2014 two days before the full council approved his appointment as chief \u2014 that the reports had generated an \u201cunderstandable mistrust\u201d of the fire department.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe most alarming thing to me is \u2026 our members were not listened to, or they were not heard,\u201d he said last Wednesday. <\/p>\n
In response to Mayor Karen Bass\u2019 request that he investigate the department\u2019s missteps during the Lachman fire, Moore had called for an outside organization to conduct the probe. <\/p>\n
On Tuesday, he said he would review the LAFD\u2019s response to the Lachman fire, though he did not specify who would conduct the investigation. <\/p>\n
\u201cI will do as Mayor Bass asked, and I will look into the Lachman fire, and we will look at how that was handled, and we will learn from it, and we\u2019ll be better from it,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
In one text message reviewed by The Times, a firefighter who was at the Lachman scene Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief in charge had been told it was a \u201cbad idea\u201d to leave because of visible signs of smoldering terrain. <\/p>\n
A second firefighter was told that tree stumps were still hot at the location when the crew packed up and left, according to the texts. And another firefighter said in more recent texts that crew members were upset when directed to leave the scene, but that they could not ignore orders.<\/p>\n
The firefighters\u2019 accounts line up with a video recorded by a hiker<\/a> above Skull Rock Trailhead late in the morning on Jan. 2 \u2014 almost 36 hours after the Lachman fire started \u2014 that shows smoke rising from the dirt. \u201cIt\u2019s still smoldering,\u201d the hiker says from behind the camera.<\/p>\n At least one battalion chief assigned to the LAFD\u2019s risk management section knew about the complaints<\/a> for months, The Times found. But the department did not include that finding, or any detailed examination of the reignition, in its after-action report<\/a> on the Jan. 7 Palisades fire \u2014 or otherwise make the information public \u2014 despite victims demanding answers for months about how the blaze started and whether more could have been done to prevent it.<\/p>\n Moore, a 30-year LAFD veteran<\/a>, told the City Council on Friday that one of his top priorities is raising morale in a department that has come under heavy criticism for its handling of the Palisades fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes.<\/p>\n In January, The Times reported that LAFD officials decided not to pre-deploy any engines<\/a> or firefighters to the Palisades \u2014 as they had done in the past \u2014 despite being warned that some of the most dangerous winds<\/a> in recent years were headed for the region.<\/p>\n The LAFD after-action report released last month described fire officials\u2019 chaotic response, which was plagued by major staffing and communication issues, as the massive blaze overwhelmed them.<\/p>\n After Bass ousted Fire Chief Kristin Crowley over her handling of the Palisades fire, the department was led by interim Chief Ronnie Villanueva until Moore took over on Monday.<\/p>\n Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, which provides civilian oversight for the fire department, said at Tuesday\u2019s meeting that she had not seen the text messages quoted in The Times. Because she hadn\u2019t seen them, she said, the messages have \u201cno bearing on the work of the fire commission.\u201d<\/p>\n She also said that the commission supported the fire department\u2019s after-action report, noting that that the report was not about the rekindling of the Lachman fire, but about the first 72 hours of the department\u2019s response to the Palisades fire.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has nothing to do and should not have had anything to do with the Lachman fire, because that is not what we asked for,\u201d Hudley Hayes said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On his second day as chief of the Los Angeles Fire Department, Jaime Moore criticized what he called…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[24058,12032,8142,11057,4330,17705,7217,48,52,51,7216,8440,47,50,49,3906,1839,17283,26786,36216,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-59492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-after-action-report","9":"tag-chief","10":"tag-comment","11":"tag-fire-department","12":"tag-firefighter","13":"tag-jaime-moore","14":"tag-jan","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-la-headlines","17":"tag-la-news","18":"tag-lachman-fire","19":"tag-lafd","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","22":"tag-los-angeles-news","23":"tag-month","24":"tag-palisades-fire","25":"tag-response","26":"tag-text-message","27":"tag-times-report","28":"tag-tuesday"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59492","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=59492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}