Firefighters from the Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) warned that a burn scar from a January 1 fire, which ignited the Palisades Fire on January 7, was not fully extinguished — but they were told to leave.
Earlier this month, federal authorities arrested Jonathan Rinderknecht, 29, for arson, accusing him of deliberately starting the January 1 fire, known as the Lachman Fire. In calm conditions, it was extinguished.
Firefighters returned the next day to monitor the blaze, but then left. According to the federal indictment against Rinderknecht, the fire was still smoldering in the roots of plants, and reignited in high winds on January 7.
The Los Angeles Times reported that text messages among firefighting personnel revealed that they were concerned about the possibility that the fire was continuing to burn underground, but were ordered to leave:
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.
…
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.
Breitbart News reported in January that the City of Los Angeles was reluctant to assign firefighters to Pacific Palisades before the high-wind event of January 7, thanks to budget cuts by Mayor Karen Bass that made overtime pay more difficult for the city to afford. (The city spent more on homeless services than on firefighting.)
The State of California, while pre-positioning resources elsewhere, did not pre-position resources in Pacific Palisades, even though the January 1 fire was near, or on, state land.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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