A Los Angeles firefighter said in sworn testimony that he sounded the alarm about the inadequate mop-up of the Lachman fire — and was blown off by a captain — days before the embers reignited into the deadly Palisades fire.
The firefighter, Scott Pike, testified last month in a lawsuit brought by Palisades fire victims against the city and the state.
Pike said there were about five areas that were still smoking.
“I didn’t even want to use my gloved hand because it was hot, so I just kicked it with my boot to kind of expose it,” he testified. “There was like red hot like coals that was still smoldering, and I even heard crackling.”
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Pike’s dramatic retelling, which city attorneys initially blocked from release along with transcripts of deposition testimony from 11 other firefighters, corroborates previous reporting by The Times that a battalion chief ordered crews to pack up their hoses and leave, despite signs that the earlier fire was not completely extinguished.
“That’s how I approached him, is like, ‘Hey, Cap … We have hot spots in general. We have some ash pits,’” Pike said of the captain on the scene. “That’s an alert to double check the whole area and maybe we need to switch our tactics.”
Pike testified that it was not his job “to overstep and tell him what to do. He earned that rank.”
Other firefighters, too, seemed eager to “just get this hose picked up,” Pike said.
“It kind of sits heavy with me that nobody listened to me,” he said.
LAFD commanders have insisted that the flames were completely out and barely mentioned the earlier fire in an after-action report designed to examine mistakes and prevent them from happening again.
Pike said in his testimony that he was never interviewed for the after-action report.
After the firefighters testified over the course of three weeks, city attorneys invoked a general protective order that any party in the litigation can designate testimony as confidential for up to 30 days. A city attorney previously told The Times that this allows them to review the testimony and determine which parts, if any, should stay confidential.
In his deposition testimony, Poke indicated that as crews were rolling up their hoses last Jan. 2, the day after the Lachman fire, he warned a captain and two firefighters that the ground was smoldering in the burn area.
He said he didn’t get buy-in from his colleagues or the captain after voicing his concerns. “So then I just kind of went back to, like, all right, I guess I’ll keep picking up hose,” he said.
“I saw something, I said something, and to my best ability I felt like we could have done more,” he testified.
Five days later, the Lachman fire reignited into the inferno that destroyed much of Pacific Palisades and killed 12 people.
In the lawsuit, Palisades residents allege that the state government, which owns Topanga State Park, failed in the week between the two fires to inspect the burn scar after firefighters left and make sure a “dangerous condition” did not exist on its property.
The LAFD was responsible for putting out the fire, but plaintiffs’ attorneys argue that the state should have done more to monitor the burn scar and ensure the area was safe.
Several California State Parks representatives also testified in the case. Their testimony and text messages show that their initial concern was whether the fire was on park land and whether firefighting efforts and equipment would harm federally endangered plants and artifacts.
The Times report about crews being ordered to leave the earlier fire, published Oct. 30, described text messages from firefighters indicating that at the scene of the Lachman fire last Jan. 2, the ground was still smoldering and rocks were hot to the touch.
In one text message, a firefighter who was at the scene wrote that the battalion chief had been told it was a “bad idea” to leave because of the visible signs of smoking terrain, which crews feared could start a new fire if left unprotected.
“And the rest is history,” the firefighter wrote.
A second firefighter was told that tree stumps were still hot when the crew packed up and left, according to the texts. And a third firefighter said last month that crew members were upset when told to pack up and leave but that they could not ignore orders, according to the texts. The third firefighter also wrote that he and his colleagues knew immediately that the Palisades fire was a rekindle of the Jan. 1 blaze.
LAFD officials were emphatic early on that the Lachman fire, which federal prosecutors believe was deliberately set, was fully extinguished.
“We won’t leave a fire that has any hot spots,” Kristin Crowley, the fire chief at the time, said at a community meeting Jan. 16.
“That fire was dead out,” Chief Deputy Joe Everett said at the same meeting, adding that he was out of town but communicating with the incident commander. “If it is determined that was the cause, it would be a phenomenon.”
The Lachman fire broke out shortly after midnight on New Years Day. A few hours later, at 4:46 a.m., the LAFD announced that the blaze was fully contained at eight acres.
Top fire commanders soon made plans to finish mopping up the scene and to leave with their equipment, according to another set of text messages obtained by The Times through a state Public Records Act request.
“I imagine it might take all day to get that hose off the hill,” LAFD Chief Deputy Phillip Fligiel said in a group chat early the morning of Jan. 1. “Make sure that plan is coordinated.”
At 1:35 p.m. on Jan. 2, Battalion Chief Mario Garcia — who firefighters said had received the observations about the smoldering ground and hot rocks, according to the private text messages The Times reviewed — texted Fligiel and Everett: “All hose and equipment has been picked up.”
Five days after that, on the morning of Jan. 7, an LAFD captain called Fire Station 23 to say that the Lachman fire had started up again.
In June, LAFD Battalion Chief Nick Ferrari had told a high-ranking fire official who works for a different agency in the L.A. region that LAFD officials knew about the firefighters’ complaints at the Lachman fire scene, The Times also reported.
After the Oct. 30 Times report, Bass directed Fire Chief Jaime Moore, who started the job in November, to commission an independent investigation into the LAFD’s handling of the Lachman fire.
In an interview last month, Moore said he opened an internal investigation into the Lachman fire through the LAFD’s Professional Standards Division, which probes complaints against department members. He said he requested the Fire Safety Research Institute, which is reviewing last January’s wildfires at the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom, to include the Lachman fire as part of its analysis, and the institute agreed. Moore also pointed to the L.A. City Council’s move to hire an outside firm to examine the Lachman and Palisades fires.
Even with the internal investigation underway, Moore said he spoke with the battalion chief who was on duty during the Lachman fire mop-up.
“He swears to me that nobody ever told him verbally or through a text message that there was any hot spots,” Moore said.
