Many say that the catastrophic fires ravaging Los Angeles weren’t the fault of Governor Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass. Fires are inevitable in Los Angeles, and the water ran out because no water system could withstand that many fires simultaneously, they add.
But LA firefighters themselves disagree. They say the reason they arrived too late to stop the fires from becoming catastrophic was because of severe budget cuts. The Fire Department did not pre-deploy fire engines to strategic locations, and helicopters arrived half an hour too late to put out the Palisades.
“That [Santa Ynez] reservoir being closed did not allow helicopters to drop and suck water up from five minutes away,” a new firefighter whistleblower, the third who has come forward, told me. “Instead, they had to fly 10 to 15 minutes away to go get water somewhere else.”
The problem is that the LA Fire Department is one of the most severely understaffed of America’s 10 largest cities. It has less than a single firefighter per 1,000 residents compared to Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, which have twice as many.
“ In 1960, our city population was 2.5 million, and we had 112 fire stations. In 2020, our city population was 3.9 million, and we had 106 stations,” a representative of LA’s firefighters ’ union testified last month. “That's 1.4 million more people and six fewer fire stations.”
This undermines the Department’s ability to respond to emergencies. “In 2020, the average emergency response time was seven minutes and 53 seconds, nearly double the NFPA recommendation.”
Part of the problem is that the number of homeless fires in LA doubled between 2020 and 2023 to an astonishing 38 per day. They start dangerous fires in many ways, including by breaking through the sidewalk into the city’s electrical system, which can result in explosions and death.
Still, many say, it is wrong to blame homelessness for LA’s fires. They are victims of trauma and poverty.
But the research is unequivocal. Over half of all fires that the LA Fire Department responds to are set by a homeless person. "There were two huge explosions, and when I looked out my apartment window, I saw plumes of black smoke," a resident told NBC-Los Angeles. "People are literally dying in the streets, in tents burning down around them.”
