The LAFD’s report on the Palisades fire was watered down while it was being prepared, records show

For months after the Palisades fire, many who had lost their homes eagerly awaited the report of the Los Angeles Fire Department, which was expected to give a clear report on how to handle the disaster.

The first draft was finished in August, maybe earlier.

Then began the removal and other changes – behind closed doors – that amounted to an attempt to undermine the failure of the leadership of the city and the LAFD in preparing for and fighting the January 7 fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes, records obtained by The Times show.

In one incident, LAFD officials removed language saying that the decision to not fully hire personnel and redeploy existing personnel and engines ahead of the extreme wind forecast was “inconsistent” with the department’s policy and procedures on red flag days.

Instead, the final report said the number of engine companies released before the fire “exceeded the standard LAFD deployment matrix.”

Another deleted passage from the report said some workers waited for more than an hour to be assigned on the day of the fire. The section on “failures” was renamed “key challenges,” and the item that said staff and leaders violated national guidelines to prevent firefighter deaths and injuries was scratched.

Other changes in the report, which was overseen by then-Fire Chief Ronnie Villanueva, appear intended to soften its impact and burnish the Fire Department’s reputation. Two drafts contain notes written in the margins, including a proposal to change the image on the cover page — which showed palm trees burning against an orange sky — to “good ones,” such as “firefighters in the foreground,” the note said. The cover of the final report shows the LAFD logo.

The Times obtained seven copies of the report through the Public Records Act. Only three of those drafts are dated: Two versions are dated Aug. 25, and there are drafts from Oct. 6, two days before the LAFD released its final report to the public.

There are no names attached to the programs. It is not clear whether the words were in the original documents and were removed from the plans provided to The Times.

The removal and review are likely to deepen concerns about the LAFD’s ability to admit its mistakes before and during a fire — and avoid repeating them in the future. Already, Palisades fire victims have expressed frustration over unanswered questions and conflicting information about the LAFD’s preparations after the dangerous weather forecast, including how fire officials handled a small New Year’s Day fire, called the Lachman fire, that reignited in the Palisades fire six days later.

Another draft described an on-duty LAFD captain who called Fire Station 23 in the Palisades on Jan. 7 reporting that the “Lachman fire has started again,” indicating the captain’s belief that the Palisades fire was caused by an earlier outbreak.

The reference was removed from one draft, then returned to the public version, which contained only a brief mention of the previous fire. Some say the failure of the after-action report to properly assess the Lachman fire’s governance was designed to shield LAFD leadership and the administration of Mayor Karen Bass from criticism and accountability.

A few weeks after the report was issued, the Times reported that the chief of staff had ordered firefighters to close their hoses and leave the blaze on Jan. 2, although they complained that the ground is still smoking and the rocks are still hot until now. Another trooper assigned to the LAFD’s disaster management unit knew about the complaints for months, but the department withheld that information from an after-action report.

After The Times’ report, Bass called on Villanueva to “thoroughly investigate” the LAFD’s mistakes in putting out the Lachman fire, which authorities say was deliberately stalled.

“A full understanding of the response to the Lachman fire is critical to an accurate account of what happened during the January wildfires,” Bass wrote.

Fire Chief Jaime Moore, who started the job last month, has been tasked with authorizing an independent investigation requested by Bass.

The LAFD did not respond to The Times’ detailed questions about the revised draft, including questions about why material on governance was removed, then restored. Villanueva did not respond to a request for comment.

Spokesman Bass said his office does not want these plans to be changed but only asked the LAFD to confirm the truth of things such as the weather and how the department’s budget contributed to the tragedy.

“The report was written and edited by the Fire Department,” said department spokeswoman Clara Karger in an email. “We did not draw red lines, review every page or review the entire draft of the report. We did not discuss the Lachman Fire because it was not part of the report.”

Genethia Hudley Hayes, president of the Board of Fire Commissioners, told The Times that she reviewed a paper copy of the “working document” about a week before the final report was made public. He said he expressed concern to Villanueva and the city attorney’s office about whether the “findings” may have been or will be changed. He also said he consulted with an independent attorney about his “responsibilities” as LAFD commissioner, although that conversation was “not related to the after-action report.”

Hudley Hayes said he saw only minor differences between the final report and the draft he reviewed. For example, he said, “mistakes” were changed to “challenges,” and the names of firefighters were removed.

“I was fine with it,” she said. “All the things I read in the final report did not deter anything in any way, as far as I was concerned.”

He also insisted that the review of what went wrong during the Lachman fire was not part of the after-action report, a view not shared by former LAFD officials interviewed by The Times.

“The after-action report was supposed to go back to Dec. 31,” said former LAFD Chief Rick Crawford, who retired from the agency last year and is now the emergency and disaster coordinator at the US Capitol. “There are huge gaps in this after-action report.”

Former LAFD Asst. Chief Patrick Butler, who is now the chief of the Redondo Beach Fire Department, agreed that the Lachman fire should have been mentioned in the report and said the removal was “a deliberate attempt to hide the truth and hide the facts.”

He said the removal of reference to the LAFD’s violation of Standard Firefighting Orders and Watchouts is a “serious issue” because it was “written in the blood” of firefighters killed on the job. Without citing national guidelines, the final report said the unusual nature of the Palisades fire “at times caused officials and firefighters to think and act beyond normal safety rules.”

The final after-action report does not say that the person who called authorities to report seeing smoke in the area on Jan. 3. The LAFD has given us conflicting information about how they responded to that call.

Villanueva told The Times in October that firefighters returned to the burned area and “frozen” overtime, meaning they used their hands to feel the heat and dig for hot spots. But records show they cleared the call within 34 minutes.

Fire officials did not respond to The Times’ questions about the discrepancy. In an emailed statement this week, LAFD said crews used remote cameras, circled the burned area and used a 20-foot ladder to access the enclosure but saw no smoke or fire.

“After a thorough investigation, this incident was found to be accidental,” said the statement.

The most significant changes in the various iterations of the after-action report involved LAFD deployment decisions prior to the fire, as wind warnings became more severe.

In a series of reports earlier this year, The Times learned that top LAFD officials decided not to use dozens of engines that could have been deployed in the Palisades and other areas flagged as high-risk, as they had done in the past.

One draft contained a paragraph in the “failure” category about what the LAFD could have done: “If the Department had adequately expanded all available resources as it has done in previous years to prepare for a weather event, the Department would have been required to furlough members of all existing positions not filled by voluntary overtime, which would have allowed all remaining resources to be recruited, available and pre-installed.” The draft says that this decision was an attempt to “account for finances” which is against the policy and procedures of the department.

That language was absent from the final report, which said the LAFD is “responsible financially for properly preparing for predicted weather and fire behavior following the LAFD predeployment matrix.”

Although it has since been removed, the published report presents scathing remarks about the LAFD’s performance during the Palisades fire, pointing to a disorganized response, communications failures and chiefs who did not understand their roles. The report found that senior management lacked basic knowledge of wildland firefighting techniques, including “basic suppression techniques.”

A paperwork error meant that only a third of government-funded resources available to prioritize high-risk areas were used, the report said. And when the fire broke out on the morning of Jan. 7, the first shipment called for only seven engine companies, when weather conditions required 27.

There was confusion among the firefighters about which radio station to use. The report said three LA County engines showed up within the first hour, requested work and were not answered. Four other LAFD engines waited 20 minutes without being assigned a job.

Early in the morning, the stage area – where the engines were coming in – was engulfed in flames.

The report made 42 recommendations, ranging from establishing better communication channels to more training. In a televised interview this month, Moore said the LAFD accepted about three-quarters of them.