Mayor Karen Bass “terminated” Fire Chief Kristin Crowley. Also sharing blame for the January 7 Palisades Fire is DWP’s Janisse Quinones and Marqueece Harris-Dawson, not pictured.
The Los Angeles City Council, today, February 4, denied an appeal from former Fire Chief Kristin Crowley to be reinstated.
The council voted 13-2 to sustain Crowley’s termination after she gave a nearly 11-minute speech defending her actions during the fire, which killed 12 people, destroyed about 6,837 structures – 5,419 residences, leaving much of the Palisades community homeless.
Crowley was fired on February 21 by Bass, for her failure to deploy 1,000 firefighters on January 7, the day of the fire, and for her alleged refusal to prepare an after-action report.
During her appearance before the Council, Crowley said the refusal to provide an after-action report was false because “”I recommended simply to collaborate with Gov. (Gavin) Newsom’s already selected and funded agency, the Fire Safety Research Institute or FSRI, because they are already conducting an independent analysis of the wind storm and fire events in the Los Angeles and Ventura counties,” Crowley said.
About the 1,000 firefighters, Crowley repeated what the United Firefighters of L.A. City Local 112 had said that there were not enough vehicles for crews. Another 100 engines, trucks and ambulances sat “broken down” in LAFD maintenance yards.
Crowley repeated what she had told news crews earlier of the lack of funding for the department from the City. Since 2010, the department has seen a 55% increase in overall calls for fire and emergency services with fewer firefighters.
She said the City has not made long-term investments in the LAFD, has made budget cuts that led to increased response times, that there has been a decline in available fire engines, trucks and ambulances and deleted civilian support staff.
Councilmember Traci Park said that there were unanswered questions about the January 7 response and reminded her colleagues that no investigations had been completed. She was joined by Monica Rodriguez in asking to reinstate Crowley.
“We are outraged at the termination of Fire Chief Crowley,” UFLAC President Freddie Escobar said last week. “In our opinion, Crowley is being made a scapegoat and she’s being terminated for telling the truth.”
(Editor’s note: After viewing some of the text messages released yesterday, looking at the timeline, hearing from readers and viewing their numerous time-stamped photos and videos, it appears Crowley, Bass, DWP’s Janisse Quinones and Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson are equally culpable and share the blame for upsetting – and destroying so many lives. All should be “fired.”
Or maybe we should just make them go to the disaster center repeatedly to learn it is not easy—no matter what they tell us with their smiling faces. There are frequent and repeated stops/calls to FEMA, the Red Cross, L.A. County, document replacement (birth certificates, social security cards, marriage licenses passports), insurance, SBA, applying for grants to try and rebuild. My heart goes out to families with small children that have had to stay in five or six hotels, constantly moving with their family, while mom and dad work through the bureaucratic mess of paperwork, while still holding down a job. So, Mayor, just keep congratulating yourself on how fast this recovery is moving, like you did on Tuesday night—and then ask yourself, why is this recovery necessary? Because no one was a leader, including you. The four of you let a town burn.)
The Three Stooges. But Traci Park is correct, we don’t need political theatre. We need a full investigation by an outside party to determine responsibility for this massive failure. However. the lack of managing the water supply may have been the biggest issue of all. That should concern anyone living in the City of L.A ,, not just those in wildfire-adjacent areas.
Consider this idiom:
For Want of a Nail
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
We have moved 8 times so far, in two months, with two small children and a dog in tow, while our kids go to school in a temporary space. Between the rental situation (severe price gouging), the lack of progress by the City with the cleanup and the seeming lack of will of our fellow constituents to throw these bureaucrats out of office, we are ready to throw in the towel and relocate elsewhere permanently. The idea that our own Councilmember is actually defending the gross negligence of Crowley? Is she completely tone deaf? In what universe can someone do their job so poorly and get away with it? If things were so dire at LAFD, why wasn’t she holding daily press conferences to alert the public of the imminent threat to their safety?
RESIGN KAREN BASS
RESIGN JANISSE QUINONES
Both of you ruined countless lives,
Where is your moral compass?
The Mayor, the City Council, and the County Board of Supervisors should all be recalled…but this is LA.
I’d say purge the entire fire department. There wasn’t a single fire truck manning the fire line on Sunset and half an hour later on Chautauqua. I was there. Had there been three rigs there they might have stopped the fire right there. Had there been ten they certainly most certainly would have. 100% certainty . That hill above Chautauqua was catching all the embers and could have been watered down in minutes which would have ended things. Where were they? Down on the beach, sipping coffee and building that giant press conference stage for the ridiculous all night 20 member press briefing about the fire they didn’t show up to.