What if I told you that the infamous Palisades fire that burned down thousands of homes and devastated some of the most valuable real estate in the world could have been stopped if only a fire chief had authorized the use of bulldozers to stop the embers of the fire from reigniting?
— Alex Trembath (@atrembath) December 28, 2025
Would you be shocked? Or would you just think, "Well, it's California?"
Well, it's California, where government officials always choose to do exactly the wrong thing, assuming they care about their constituents.
An hour after midnight Jan. 1, as a small brush fire blazed across Topanga State Park, a California State Parks employee texted the Los Angeles Fire Department’s heavy equipment supervisor to find out if they were sending in bulldozers.
“Heck no that area is full of endangered plants,” Capt. Richard Diede replied at 9:52 a.m, five hours after LAFD declared the fire contained.
“I would be a real idiot to ever put a dozer in that area,” he wrote. “I’m so trained.”
The exchange between the state and LAFD employees is part of a batch of newly-released text messages and depositions from California State Parks staffers that offers new details of the state’s actions and interactions with firefighters in the critical days after the Lachman fire ignited and rekindled Jan. 7 into the deadly Palisades blaze.
Looking back on the events that eventually led to the destruction of thousands of homes and businesses, it's still hard to wrap your head around the malfeasance that led up to the disaster, and the machinations and malfeasance that have followed in its wake. The Mayor, socialist Karen Bass, had been warned of the danger but decided to jet off to Ghana to attend the inauguration of Ghana's president.
Water wasn't available to fight the fire because the reservoir that would have provided it was empty. The fire chief decided not to pre-position firefighting equipment despite the known danger.
And now we learn that measures to stop the fire before it reignited weren't taken because there were endangered plants in the area.
I'm pretty sure those plants are no longer there, along with the houses.
The Los Angeles Fire Department has faced criticism for not fully extinguishing the Lachman fire. In October, The Times reported that a battalion chief ordered firefighters to roll up their hoses and leave the burn area Jan. 2, even though crews warned that the ground was still smoldering. The LAFD also decided not to use thermal imaging technology to detect heat underground.
Leave aside, for the moment, the fact that these plants were not really endangered by any real measure—they were minor variations on plants that are common enough, merely specialized to thrive in this microclimate, and focus on the kind of calculus that leads a firefighting captain to prefer having to let a fire reignite and destroy the plants "naturally" along with a good chunk of the city than to face the music over using a bulldozer to prevent the tragedy.
It is insane, by any normal standard, but an inevitable result of a state so politically paralyzed by regulations, activists, and incompetent politicians without the judgment God gives a 10-year-old.
Testimony and texts from state environmental scientists show that California State Parks’ initial concern when the fire broke out was whether the fire was on park land and whether firefighting efforts and equipment would harm federally endangered plants and artifacts.
However, it remains unclear whether the state significantly influenced the LAFD from containing and mopping up the fire. LAFD decided early on not to use bulldozers, but has not explained why. LAFD announced it had contained the fire at 4:46 a.m. Jan. 1, less than 20 minutes after the first state parks official arrived at the command post.
California State Parks says no one from its agency interfered with fire suppression or mop up or influenced LAFD’s decision to not use bulldozers. Making sure the blaze was out, the agency said, was the responsibility of the fire department. The LAFD did not respond to questions from The Times for this story.
Immediately after the fire ignited, California State Parks staffers exchanged worried notes via text and a park ranger was dispatched to the command post. But once they determined the burn scar did not include sensitive areas, they pivoted to other concerns: asking firefighters to cover a section of a fire break they cut through unburned vegetation with freshly cut brush and urging them not to wait too long before removing hoses.
The first park ranger on the burn scar Jan. 1 testified that she saw smoldering and that wildfires can smolder for days. But state employees who visited the site later that day and after LAFD left Jan. 2 said in depositions they did not walk the perimeter of the burn scar to inspect the site.
To normal people, none of this makes any sense, but in the twisted world of bureaucracies where all the incentives point to ensuring that all the regulatory "I's" are dotted and "T's" crossed, it makes perfect sense. The chance that any one wildfire would ignite the city is fairly low, while the chance of facing consequences for using that bulldozer is nearly 100%. If using the bulldozer prevents the city-killing fire, you could never prove that it did; if you killed some endangered plant with the bulldozer, they would get you.
At every step along the way, both before and after the fire, the biggest concern of all the people involved has been ass covering, not doing what is best for the residents of Los Angeles. The city released a report on the fire that amounted to a cover-up, and officials seem to be slow-walking the recovery efforts to ensure that they can use the newly freed-up land for their own utopian purposes.
In an October 8 email, the author of a long-delayed debriefing report on the Palisades Fire, LAFD Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, refused to endorse his own report. In an email to Crowley’s replacement, Ronnie Villanueva, which was obtained by the LA Times, Cook alleged that the final product was altered and amended in ways that he found “highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”
“The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented,” Cook continued. His warnings are consistent with an LA Times investigative report from December 20 alleging that a behind-the-scenes scramble to “downplay the failures of the city and LAFD leadership” has been ongoing since the report’s first draft was concluded back in August — “possibly earlier,” the dispatch added:
In one instance, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision not to fully staff up and pre-deploy all available crews and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast “did not align” with the department’s policy and procedures during red flag days.
Instead, the final report said that the number of engine companies rolled out ahead of the fire “went above and beyond the standard LAFD pre-deployment matrix.”
Another deleted passage in the report said that some crews waited more than an hour for an assignment the day of the fire. A section on “failures” was renamed “primary challenges,” and an item saying that crews and leaders had violated national guidelines on how to avoid firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.
The final report, which Villanueva took an active role in crafting, featured handwritten notes in the margins asking to scratch illustrative images of flaming palm trees and replace them with something more “positive,” like “firefighters on the frontline.”
Cook’s October email made its way to Karen Bass’s desk in November, but the city withheld his correspondence from LA Times reporters in response to a records request. “Almost 180 of Cook’s emails were posted on the city’s records portal on Dec. 9, but the one that expressed his concerns about the report was missing,” the paper’s dispatch concludes. “That email was only posted on the portal Tuesday, after The Times asked about it.”
Yet Karen Bass remains Mayor of Los Angeles and Gavin Newsom is a leading candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States.
It is inaccurate to say that there is no accountability and no incentive to look out for citizens; it's worse than that. All the incentives run in the wrong direction. Bass may not get reelected, but she will probably wind up in a job that pays her even more than she is making now.
And Gavin Newsom? He is a golden boy. The Great White Hope for the Democrats, although they may have decided that they need a Great Minority Hope for the party. If so, Newsom will get a great sinecure and have a bright future nonetheless.
Turn your eyes to Minnesota, where Tim Walz is embroiled in the Somali welfare fraud scandals. There is a genuine question about whether he can survive until next November unscathed, but unless he is pushed out, he will be the Democratic nominee for governor and have a better than 50-50 chance of returning to office.
I am not predicting that, but Republicans have a bad track record of picking candidates, and we live in a world where Jay Jones can get elected.
California is in a disastrous state, even with all the natural and financial advantages it has. There are few places in the world more beautiful, and it's hard to think of any place else that can tap the resources of the world's most valuable companies, which are nearly captive there.
But somehow they are managing it. California is considering putting a wealth tax on its citizens that would even hit the unrealized capital gains of its famous tech founders, and you will see an exodus of wealth should it become law.
It's astonishing. And yet, it's not. As long as you wrap your head around the glaringly obvious fact that the people in charge do not care about their state, their citizens, or the future, it actually makes sense. They are a higher class version of Putin's oligarchs, living off the fat of the land.
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