Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley Wednesday defended pre-deployment decisions made by the agency prior to last week’s devastating windstorm that fanned the deadly Palisades Fire, saying resources were pre-positioned at a level beyond what would normally be deployed in a Santa Ana wind event, while also maintaining adequate staffing across the city.
“We deployed resources in very, very calculated ways throughout the city,” Crowley said Wednesday morning. ” … We’re very system and process-oriented, for the right reasons. We follow a system. We did that. We pre-deployed the necessary resources (after the wind forecasts) … not knowing where a fire might break out in the city.”
Her comments followed a report in the Los Angeles Times contending that department officials chose not to assign about 1,000 available firefighters and dozens of water-carrying engines for emergency deployment before the Palisades Fire erupted Jan. 7.
Citing interviews and internal LAFD records, The Times reported that officials chose not to order firefighters to remain on duty for a second shift as the winds were building that day, staffing only five of more than 40 engines available for deployment to battle wildfires. Those extra engines and firefighters were called into duty after the fire started raging, according to The Times.
The paper reported that no additional engines had been placed in the Palisades area, but nine engines were pre-positioned in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood, while additional engines were moved the morning of Jan. 7 to the northeast Los Angeles area.
Crowley insisted Wednesday that the department “pre-deployed the resources on top of what we would normally do.”
Once the fire erupted, she said, crews “went to work.”
“We immediately then utilized all available on-duty, special-duty people that aren’t normally in the field,” she said. “They surged. They went and staffed every other available resource at that time.”
She stressed that the department pre-positioned resources with no ability to predict where a fire might break out in the city, and while ensuring that resources remained available to respond to calls across the city during the wind event. Crowley told The Times the department received roughly 3,000 calls the day of the fire — double the normal daily amount — at stations across the city as the wind created havoc across the area.
“The plan that they put together, I stand behind, because we have to manage everybody in the city,” she told The Times.
Former LAPD Battalion Chief Rick Crawford told The Times he believes most of the 40 available engines could have been pre-deployed in fire zones while still maintaining adequate coverage for other parts of the city. He also said keeping firefighters on duty beyond their ending shifts the morning of the fire would have added about 1,000 firefighters in the field to quickly attack the fire. He acknowledged that commanders are sometimes hesitant to make such a move due to the associated cost of overtime pay.
Speaking to reporters Wednesday morning, Crowley took exception to the insinuation that the city put financial concerns over safety concerns in its planning for the windstorm, insisting, “We did everything we could.”
She conceded that the “there’s always lessons learned” from every major incident, and she is always thinking of “how we could do better in the future.”
She also pointed to the almost unprecedented nature of the erratic winds that blasted the area last Tuesday.
LAFD Deputy Chief Richard Fields, who was in charge of the staffing decisions prior to the wind event, told The Times the pre-deployment was “appropriate for immediate response.”
“It’s very easy to Monday-morning quarterback and sit on the couch and tell us what we should have done now that the thing has happened,” he told the paper. “What we did was based on many years of experience and also trying to be responsible for the rest of the city at any given time of that day.”