LA Fire Chief Warned In 2023 Of Lack Of Wildland Fire Defense; Had To Make Do W. Teenage Volunteers 2 Days Each Week

Two years before wildfires incinerated swaths of Los Angeles, the city’s Fire Chief Kristin M. Crowley identified “one significant area of weakness” in her department’s ability to contain wildfires. L.A. had no specialized wildland unit to respond to daily brush fires and scrape vegetation, dig ditches and do the other labor to ensure blazes did not spread or rekindle, she wrote on Jan. 5, 2023, asking for $7 million to assemble its own squad.

In a memo that has not been previously reported, she told city fire commissioners that L.A. relied almost entirely on overburdened “hand crews” from other jurisdictions to bring such muscle to its brush fire emergencies. Hand crews, the most elite of which are sometimes called “hotshots,” fight wildfires with chain saws, axes and shovels, setting containment lines and then sticking around to meticulously monitor smoldering fires, feeling by hand for heat and digging out live spots to make sure fires don’t relight. The city staffed its own team — made up of unpaid, mostly teenage volunteers — only on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school. Crowley warned the commission that there would inevitably come a day when L.A. would need the important grunt work of a “hand crew” and one would not be available, which could “mean the difference in containment or out of control spread.”

Yet as fire swept down from the Santa Monica mountains last week, L.A. still had no professional unit ready to aid in the initial attack, according to a Washington Post review of dozens of city and county records, hours of radio transmissions and L.A. fire commission transcripts, as well as interviews with more than a dozen firefighters and city officials. More than three years after the fire department’s first request, the city had only recently advertised openings for at least two dozen openings on a team whose launch was delayed because of bureaucracy and competing budget priorities.

This gap in L.A.’s firefighting arsenal provides a new window into how the metropolis failed to reckon with the threat posed by wildfires intensified by climate change. It is unclear whether those additional units would have altered the course of the conflagrations, or have better put out a small blaze now under investigation for possibly reigniting and sparking the Palisades Fire. But had the proposed plans come to fruition, the city would have had two full-time hand crews with more than 50 additional firefighters trained to battle wildfires by now.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/18/2023-memo-la-fire-chief-warned-significant-gap-wildfire-defense/