Freddie Escobar, the president of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles County (UFLAC), told Breitbart News on Monday that the Palisades Fire was the latest example of the City of Los Angeles being neglected by its leaders.
“I’ve been on the board [of the Los Angeles Fire Department] for 17 years, and for years now, for decades, the LAFD has been neglected by its leaders,” he said. “They have not addressed a woefully understaffed fire department. We need 62 new stations; 100 more firefighters and medics, more engines, trucks, medics. We are woefully understaffed.”
Escobar said the disaster itself was the result of extreme winds and “the man upstairs.” But the sheer scale of the fire — some 24,000 acres burned by the Palisades Fire alone, plus an additional 14,000 acres burned by the Eaton Fire on the eastern side of the city — was the result of a lack of resources, especially personnel, in the hours before the fire.
“Prevented? I don’t know,” he said. “But more could have helped. … If we had the resources that we’ve been asking for, that we need, in a city that’s been neglected by its leaders for decades.”
The scale of the fire has affected the department itself: three firefighters lost their own homes while fighting the Eaton Fire. Moreover, the disaster was compounded by the absence of Mayor Karen Bass, who left to attend a presidential inauguration Ghana despite knowing that extremely high winds, with the potential for spreading fires, were coming.
Firefighters have, privately, been scathing in their condemnation of city leadership, with one telling Breitbart News that firefighters were not “pre-deployed” to handle the Palisades Fire before last Tuesday’s extreme winds because of a lack of personnel resources.
Escobar agreed, saying that L.A. Fire Chief Kristin Crowley had made an “operating funds decision” not to pre-deploy.
“You have to pay overtime,” he explained, noting that the department was reluctant to do so. Indeed, in Bass’s much-criticized budget, which cut expenditures on the fire department by $17.5 million, slashed the overtime budget by over $19 million.
The decision was made on January 6, the day before the fire, “not to staff every single resource which would give you additional manpower with the field on red flag [high wind] days,” Escobar said. He noted that, in contrast, “today, tomorrow, we’ve staffed 42 additional engines [and] all of our pumps” in anticipation of the return of the strong Santa Ana winds through Wednesday.
Escobar also faulted the Department of Water and Power for failing to maintain enough water to fight the fires. He read aloud from messages he had received from firefighters on the line: “We had water issues the entire time. Even on the second day… dry hydrants, or hydrants with little to no pressure.” The fact that the Santa Ynez Reservoir atop Pacific Palisades was nearly empty — and had been so since 2022, through two wet winters — was a factor, he said.
He acknowledged that the system of fire hydrants was “not meant for” a wildfire of the scale of the Palisades Fire, noting that the sudden demand for water caused pressure to drop at each available hydrant. Still, he said, there had to be alternative sources made available for emergencies.
Escobar noted the burden on L.A. firefighters included tens of thousands of calls every year to deal with homeless people, which he estimated at about 100 per day.
“We cannot sustain what is going on, with the calls on the homeless, with the staffing we have today,” Escobar said.
He added that the “shoestring budget” of the fire department had also hampered efforts to clear brush in urban areas, and suggested that decision-making authority on clearing brush from property had been removed from individual stations.
In future planning, he said, firefighters had to be consulted on issues such as water management and urban planning.
Asked about whether the LAFD’s policies of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) had affected the department’s ability to hire, Escobar demurred, saying that staffing problems in the department were primarily due to budgeting.
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 Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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