Almost a full year after a fire in the Pacific Palisades burned more than 6,000 homes and killed 12 people, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) still has not released his administration’s report on the disaster, and last week, we learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department’s report was so altered by city officials that the author disowned it.
Nine months after the fire was finally contained, the LAFD finally released its after-action report. The same day the report was finally released to the public, the report’s author, Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, emailed the fire chief informing him that the version released to the public was different from what he originally submitted and that he “must respectfully decline to endorse it in its current form.”
“The document has undergone substantial modifications and contains significant deletions of information that, in some instances, alter the conclusions originally presented,” Cook wrote. “While I fully understand the need to address potential liability concerns … the current version appears highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.”
In other words, the LAFD’s actions were so incompetent during the fire that city lawyers prevented the truth from being printed lest the admission of guilt be used against the city in court. That is a cover-up. And every California governmental body, all controlled by the Democratic Party, has plenty to cover up.
Start with the state’s environmental laws, which have turned basic brush management into a bureaucratic nightmare. Decades of restrictions under the California Environmental Quality Act and related regulations have made controlled burns, mechanical thinning, and fuel breaks extraordinarily difficult in urban-wildland interface areas such as the Pacific Palisades. State agencies routinely prioritize habitat protection, litigation avoidance, and paperwork over the unglamorous but essential work of reducing fire fuel. The result is predictable: When fire inevitably comes, it burns hotter, faster, and more destructively than it otherwise would.
Then there is the City of Los Angeles, which drained Santa Ynez Reservoir, a 117-million-gallon facility built for the specific purpose of protecting the Pacific Palisades from fire, and left it empty for a year, all because of a tear in the reservoir’s cover. Adding insult to injury, the cover itself was only added in 2012, almost 50 years after the reservoir was built, due to new public health regulations, despite the fact that the uncovered reservoir never made a single person sick.
And the LAFD, led at the time by the first lesbian chief in the city’s history, also has plenty to forget. On Jan. 1, 2025, crews responded to a small brush fire in the Palisades area. Firefighters reported smoldering vegetation and hot spots that could reignite. Yet hoses were rolled up. The fire was declared contained. No bulldozers were used to cut fire lines. Days later, amid severe Santa Ana winds, the fire roared back to life and became the inferno that devastated the community.
This was not an unforeseeable act. Wind forecasts were dire. The risks were obvious. And yet LAFD leadership did not predeploy additional engines, did not surge staffing, and did not take extraordinary measures to ensure the fire was dead rather than merely quiet.
Rather than confronting these failures openly, elected Democrats have given the public a sanitized narrative instead of the truth.
SAN FRANCISCO’S EMPTY REPARATIONS PROMISES
This pattern is not unique to the fire that burned the Pacific Palisades. It is emblematic of California governance more broadly: environmental ideology elevated above human safety, basic infrastructure neglected in the name of compliance, and accountability sacrificed to political self-preservation.
One wonders just how much dishonesty and incompetence from Democratic elected officials California voters will tolerate before they start voting Republican in relevant numbers.
