Alright conspiracy theorists, I'm getting ready to award you another point.
Because ... can incompetence really explain this away?
You've got Joe Firefighter out here texting his bosses, wondering why they don't just put out a small blaze. And then that small blaze leads to the re-ignition of the Palisades fire.
Firefighters mopping up a small brush fire that authorities say reignited as the Palisades fire five days later were ordered to leave the original burn scene even though they complained the ground was still smoldering and rocks remained hot to the touch, according to firefighter text messages reviewed by The Times.
To the firefighters' surprise, their battalion chief ordered them to roll up their hoses and pull out of the area on Jan. 2 — the day after the 8-acre blaze was declared contained — rather than stay and make sure there were no hidden embers that could spark a new fire, the text messages said.
This is not good.
Again .... this could be incompetence. But they were warned over and over.
In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene on Jan. 2 wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a "bad idea" to leave the burn scar unprotected because of the visible signs of smoldering terrain. "And the rest is history," the firefighter wrote in recent weeks ...
The LAFD declined to comment on the text messages but has said officials believed the fire was fully extinguished.
This month, interim LAFD Chief Ronnie Villanueva said in a statement that the Palisades inferno was not due to 'failed suppression' of the Lachman blaze. Instead, he said, it was the result of an 'undetectable holdover fire' that lived deep within the roots.
In the text messages, firefighters complained that commanders failed to make certain that the mop-up was finished.
Sounds like someone needs to be out of a job. And soon.
A different firefighter said this month that crew members were upset when told to pack up and leave, but that they could not ignore orders, according to the texts. The firefighter also wrote that he and his colleagues knew immediately that the Jan. 7 fire was a rekindle of the Jan. 1 blaze.
Will anyone be held accountable?
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