Two Months Before Deadly Blazes, LA Fire Chief Said She Needed More Firefighters—Then Karen...

Los Angeles fire chief Kristin Crowley warned city officials in November that her department had about half as many firefighters as it needed. When deadly wildfires struck the city two months later, Mayor Karen Bass's administration pulled Crowley's memo from its website. Crowley wrote to the city's fire commissioners—a five-person board appointed by Bass—on Nov. 18 and asked them to transmit the message to Bass and the city council. The fire department's size, she said, hadn't increased in decades despite significant population growth.

"In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s," wrote Crowley, who also complained that a spike in emergency calls and a shortage of fire stations had led to longer response times. In 2022, Crowley said, 61 percent of the department's firefighters failed to meet the 4-minute first response time, a national firefighting standard. The National Fire Protection Association, meanwhile, recommends that cities like Los Angeles employ some 1.51 to 1.81 firefighters per 1,000 residents. But Los Angeles, Crowley wrote, only staffs 0.91 firefighters per 1,000 people.