Reporters in Washington, D.C. these days constantly find their requests for information to federal government agencies about policy changes — or about anything at all — met not with just a “No comment” reply but with silence. Ghosting. Crickets.
Officials and comms aides in Los Angeles City Hall and the city of Los Angeles Fire Department, post-Palisades fire, are increasingly taking a page from the presidential administration’s playbook and simply clamming up when asked questions about how the fire started and how it was fought.
The early January windstorm-whipped blaze was a catastrophe of almost unprecedented proportions that killed 12 people and burned over 23,000 acres of some of the finest real estate in all the world, destroying over 6,800 structures.
Almost three months on, the people have questions, and the press is asking them. But Mayor Karen Bass and her administration and the LAFD have little to nothing to say to the populace devastated by the Palisades fire. That’s wrong, and Angelenos need to demand answers.
As Alene Tchekmedyian and Paul Pringle have been reporting in the Los Angeles Times, Bass and the Fire Department “have maintained an extraordinary secrecy about the city’s preparations for and response to the inferno … the LAFD has denied dozens of public records requests from journalists and others related to its handling of the fire, including 911 calls, dispatch logs and internal communications about preparations for the extreme winds.”
The mayor and her reps won’t answer even the most basic questions posed to them, including whether her administration approved plans to protect the always fire-vulnerable neighborhood in the days before the Palisades fire as massive Santa Ana winds were predicted, and even are silent when asked which LAFD units were first on the scene to fight the fire.
Why this incomprehensible silence to questions residents are asking? The department and City Hall cite exemptions to the state’s public records act when internal investigations are ongoing. They are wrong. Almost every written communication within government is a public record. L.A. officials need to start telling L.A. residents what happened Jan, 7.
