The setting looked almost cozy: Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and a podcast host seated inside her home in two comfy chairs, talking about President Trump, ICE raids, public schools and the Palisades fire. The recording session inside the library at Getty House, the official mayor’s residence, lasted an hour. Once it ended, the two shook hands and the room broke into applause.
Then, the mayor kept talking — and let it rip. Bass gave a blunt assessment of the emergency response to the Palisades and Eaton fires. “Both sides botched it,” she said. She didn’t offer specifics on the Palisades. But on the Eaton fire, she pointed to the lack of evacuation alerts in west Altadena, where all but one of the 19 deaths occurred. “They didn’t tell people they were on fire,” she said to Matt Welch, host of “The Fifth Column” podcast.
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In the final four minutes, Welch told Bass that he viewed the Palisades fire as inevitable, given the ferocious strength of the Santa Ana winds that day. “As someone who grew up here, that fire was going to happen,” he said.
“Right,” Bass responded.
Welch continued: “If it’s 100 mile an hour winds and it’s dry, someone’s going to sneeze and there’s going to be a fire.”
“But if you look at the response in Palisades and the county,” Bass replied, “neither side —”
The mayor paused for a moment. “Both sides botched it.”
Nearly a year after a mammoth wildfire tore through Pacific Palisades, leveling 7,000 structures and leaving many displaced, some residents watched as the mayor of Los Angeles hailed a “major milestone” in the effort to recover.
A new home had been built, the first since the firestorms that killed at least 12 people in the Pacific Palisades and 19 people in Altadena, and the Los Angeles department of building and safety had issued a certificate saying it had passed inspection and was ready for people to move in…But that milestone quickly proved more complicated amid reports the house, built by Thomas James Homes, wasn’t meant to welcome a family. It’s a four-bedroom, 4,000 sq ft model home, but it’s not, as some residents lamented, a true fire rebuild.
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Critics say the distinction between a house planned to be rebuilt by a developer before the fire is an important demarcation between one that is being rebuilt to replace a resident’s home.The group Pali Builds, which tracks rebuilding efforts and seeks to aid residents in navigating that process, said while the mayor was boasting about the number of active construction sites, the number of true rebuilds is what really matters. “We want to give people hope. We want to show signs of life, progress, and momentum,” the group wrote in a blog post. “But we also need to be truthful about where the City is still falling short – especially on the logistics needed to rebuild quickly and intelligently …