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First, we learned that over half of the Los Angeles Fire Department’s firetrucks are sitting in a parking lot awaiting repairs, and not available to help fight the deadly wildfires that have ravaged the city.
Now, another report reveals that the Los Angeles Fire Department at first didn’t even use a fraction of the firetrucks they DID have available.
From the New York Post: Los Angeles fire bosses deployed just fraction of its firefighters and trucks to the deadly Palisades Fire until it was already out of control — sending just five of the 40 available fire engines and holding back 1,000 firefighters, according to a damning new report.
The critical decisions — blasted by experts and ex-fire chiefs as a spate of “missteps” — were made even as extreme warnings were coming in about life-threatening winds that turned the blaze into the most destructive in Los Angeles history.
“You would have had a better chance to get a better result if you deployed those engines,” former LAFD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford told the Los Angeles Times.
“You give yourself the best chance to minimize how big the fire could get. … If you do that, you have the ability to say, ‘I threw everything at it at the outset.’”
“That didn’t happen here,” he continued, adding the choices were part of a “domino effect of missteps” by officials.
Prior to the fires breaking out, the department had positioned nine fire engines in Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, but no additional engines in the Pacific Palisades, the report reveals.
According to internal records from the LA Fire Department, officials within the department held off on ordering hundreds of available fire crews to remain on duty for a second shift last Tuesday, and no extra fire trucks were prepared for the Palisades region, despite being available.
L.A. fire officials could have put engines in Palisades before the fire broke out. They didn’t https://t.co/zYS9FWALIL
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) January 15, 2025
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